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It’s as hard as you can push people without breaking them. 5/7 = 0.7143 + 2 weeks vacation brings it down to 0.6849 + 1 week other time off gives 0.6657 Add in slacking at work and you’re probably at close to 0.5
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Quite possibly for analytical reasons (effort recovery is a sine way perhaps), the theoretical max is 50%. If you try to go over you’ll pay in other ways. Built up stress, fraying effectiveness.
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And this is already just about the 8 hour work day, so the starting line if you include sleep and daily off time for food, chores, bathing etc is really just around 33%. So 50% of that is like 17% of all time. I really don’t understand mental work recovery well at all.
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At one extreme of routine shit like processing forms it’s probably as simple as recovery from physical effort which is kinda legible. At the other extreme of creative work, it’s just an illegible 50% no matter how you take it.
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Another limit is how many days in a row you can go all out, solid 8h no slacking. For fungible unskilled labor, it’s basically forever so long as you’re eating enough. Horrible slave-driving but possible and close to what the worst off have to do even today. Used to be 14x7.
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But the more creative and thinky the work gets the shortest the streak length. At median educated information worker levels today it’s probably 5 days. More than that you’re just fooling yourself that you’re being effective.
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There are a few actual outliers who can sustain a higher duty cycle with longer streaks without losing effectiveness but most are just kidding themselves or larping “hustle”
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There are workaholic execs who do put in 14x7 days still, but I think they function by arranging environments to efficiently use their time well even when they’re basically operating with an IQ of 80.
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It’s not hard to log hard hours if 80% of the time all you’re going is sitting and intimidating people into effectiveness by your sheer presence, letting other people do the thinking/talking, and simply adding +1s to some suggestions reactions. It’s a very small shell script.
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Anytime you see an exec with a very quiet style you can be sure they’re running in this low-energy leveraged mode, just moving their klout around the room.
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I’ve gone from amused/apathetic to deep work, to actively hostile to the idea. It’s a performative part of hustle theater. Nobody using the phrase “deep work” appears to have actually done work comparable to what they claim to aspire to.
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The stuff we’re supposed to think deep work is like — soaring leaps of Great Work production by Great Men, on the order of Einstein or Mozart — actually happens via very different patterns of genetics/context/resources/work patterns/play patterns/recovery patterns.
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Ditto Waldenponding. “Social media detox,” etc etc. Yeah, just the “good cop” side of performative hustle theater. Social media addiction isn’t the problem, your solution isn’t a solution. Just an aestheticized, intellectualized version of “a bad work an blames his tools”
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This sounds harsh, but a lot of bullshit analysis and theatrical intervention into misframed non-problems is just ordinary, mediocre people refusing to question the conceit that the only thing standing between them and Greatness is some environmental factor.
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You solve problems very differently if you actually think you’re pretty ordinary and average in most ways, as opposed to thinking you’re special and merely being humble and self-deprecating.
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A solution to a problem found by someone who actually thinks they’re average and ordinary tends to look less generalizable than it is. A bunch of janky-looking life hacks that look specific to the peculiar circumstances of their life. But you can usually borrow a trick or two.
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I’m always suspicious that an exec doesn’t really have it and is just lazy if they don’t occasionally pick up the sword and show moments of brilliance.