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The Startling Convexity of Expertise | by Byrne Hobart | Medium

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There’s this meme that you shouldn’t work more than forty hours per week. Don’t believe it. It’s just laziness apologetics. If you’re reading it on Twitter or Hacker News, it doesn’t apply to your job. There are studies showing that productivity per hour drops after forty hours per week, and turns negative at higher levels — but these are studies of dangerous factory jobs, or monotonous call-center work. And I don’t doubt it. If I spent a hundred hours a week on the assembly line at a munitions factory, I’d probably end up dropping a missile on my foot or something, which would do a number on my productivity. But there aren’t that many factory jobs in the developed world that require such long hours, and even the call center jobs are moving offshore. In other words, if you have the kind of job that allows you to use your work computer to argue with people on reddit about the length of the optimal workweek, it’s likely that neither you nor your interlocutor work in the jobs being refere

The Startling Convexity of Expertise Byrne Hobart 14 min read · Jul 24, 2019 -- 1 Listen Share There’s this meme that you shouldn’t work more than forty hours per week. Don’t believe it. It’s just laziness apologetics. If you’re reading it on Twitter or Hacker News, it doesn’t apply to your job. There are studies showing that productivity per hour drops after forty hours per week, and turns negative at higher levels — but these are studies of dangerous factory jobs , or monotonous call-center work . And I don’t doubt it. If I spent a hundred hours a week on the assembly line at a munitions fac

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