Flip the script around and ask yourself: how can I be the best worker in my 40 hour work week? Working 40 hours is your constraint and your output is the resulting variable. Don't destroy your life for your job.
Also, make sure you're working on impactful things in an efficient manner.
In tech jobs specifically, the impact of your work is what matters, not how much work you performed. I see a lot of people working long hours on low impact work and producing less results than someone working fewer hours on high impact work.
To put it mathematically, take two workers:
Worker A is working on a project that produces X value per hour of work. He works a long 60 week and generates 60X value.
Worker B is working on a project that produces 3X value per hour worked. He works an easy 30 hour week and generates 90X value.
Worker B worked less and got more done.
As you can see, it's really important that you're working on high value projects and that you're working efficiently.
Don't spend 12 hours struggling with a problem when you could spend an hour asking for help. Don't spend 12 hours hacking around another team's bad API when you could spend an hour asking them to fix their API. If you're asked to do a project that takes 100 hours, but you can tweak the idea so it only takes 20 hours, suggest that idea. There are lots of things you can do.
I had a turning point in my career where I realized I'm mainly evaluated by occasional project check-ins (and quarterly reviews) and as long as I have a few good things to mention, then I'm appearing to do a great job. I immediately started working a lot less hard because I realized a ton of stuff I was doing didn't really matter. Ironically, I wasn't being lazy, I was aligning my work with business needs, which actually made me a more valuable employee despite that I was working less.
Comments
Flip the script around and ask yourself: how can I be the best worker in my 40 hour work week? Working 40 hours is your constraint and your output is the resulting variable. Don't destroy your life for your job.
Also, make sure you're working on impactful things in an efficient manner.
In tech jobs specifically, the impact of your work is what matters, not how much work you performed. I see a lot of people working long hours on low impact work and producing less results than someone working fewer hours on high impact work.
To put it mathematically, take two workers:
Worker A is working on a project that produces X value per hour of work. He works a long 60 week and generates 60X value.
Worker B is working on a project that produces 3X value per hour worked. He works an easy 30 hour week and generates 90X value.
Worker B worked less and got more done.
As you can see, it's really important that you're working on high value projects and that you're working efficiently.
Don't spend 12 hours struggling with a problem when you could spend an hour asking for help. Don't spend 12 hours hacking around another team's bad API when you could spend an hour asking them to fix their API. If you're asked to do a project that takes 100 hours, but you can tweak the idea so it only takes 20 hours, suggest that idea. There are lots of things you can do.
I had a turning point in my career where I realized I'm mainly evaluated by occasional project check-ins (and quarterly reviews) and as long as I have a few good things to mention, then I'm appearing to do a great job. I immediately started working a lot less hard because I realized a ton of stuff I was doing didn't really matter. Ironically, I wasn't being lazy, I was aligning my work with business needs, which actually made me a more valuable employee despite that I was working less.