This is an important message for people like us. We can easily work too hard, but we shouldn't. Not only for hippy-bullshit reasons like quality of life, but also because the data shows that we're looking at diminishing returns if we work more than 40 hours a week.
It's very telling that the US is losing technology leadership in so many areas, and instead of opening our eyes as a group and trying to improve, we're just going down the same road of putting in long hours.
I guess when you're raised in a culture that rate the number of hours you put in ahead of how much you get done and how high the quality of your work is, you end up being a butt-in-seat staffer rather than someone who just gets things done.
As far as I can tell, we aren't losing technology leadership to countries that have shorter workweeks than ours. If anything, the opposite appears to be true to me (India, China, nations from the former USSR).
it creates the culture as seen in the office space movie "in a given week, I do about 15 minutes worth of work".
Take a simple form, and a programmer in a corporate environment will tell you that it'll take them a week to finish. That same programmer, working for themselves would finish that same form in a couple of hours.
There's some evidence Americans are working fewer hours; for example figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey shows a slight decline in hours worked from 1975-2003:
Still, do you want people to be forced to work fewer hours (as in some other countries), or simply to have the option?
Because if you want to maximize your leisure time, you can make certain career and consumption choices to do so. For example, if you wanted to live with only the amenities people had in the 1970s or 1950s, you could choose to work significantly less than 40 hours a week.
Absolutely. To push some anecdotal evidence on top of the heap, my job has a Light side and a Dark side.
When the Light side is in effect, I generally work 8-9 hours a day at my day job (basically until I feel my focus start to drift, or until I'm no longer involved in discussions). I then go home and exercise + relax + cook dinner for a few hours and then launch into my personal project. Every now and then, I'm able to spend a morning or an afternoon writing scripts or elisp programs that will be productivity wins over the long run. All told, I meet most of my deadlines in this phase.
When the Dark side is in effect (around twice a year, lasting for a month each time), I'm on an insane death march for a demo that is slipping. Sometimes it's my fault, sometimes I'm put on one that's already falling behind. My work days are 12 hours, I sometimes come in on the weekends, and I'm bitter 24 hours a day. My diet, exercise, and sleep habits slip. I spend much of the next few weeks refactoring the code that I write in this phase, because when the deadline is fast approaching, it matters a little less that you use a global variable to transmit state. To use a Jeff Atwood phase, I accumulate most of my Technical Debt in this phase: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001230.html.
In the long run, I'm not getting any more done in the burnout phase, but it definitely gives me a lower quality of life and a lower quality of software.
