Where I live (Denmark) the work week is 37 hours (so roughly 150hrs/month) and if i stretch that to even 40 I can feel the toll it takes.
Sure, when I was 25 I could work 200-300hr months, but that did eventually land me in hospital due to stress and generally being burned out.
Take care of yourself and don't work too hard. It's not worth it.
It looks to me that he's having an enormous amount of trouble focusing on work, and trying to compensate by working crazy hours. That's the vicious cycle of burnout -- eroded focus leads to more hours to get things done leads to further collapse in the ability to focus on anything.
Sitting in a desk for 40 hours (or 60 or 80), sure. Doing work spread out over that time, sure.
But none of my most productive time periods have ever coincided with the time periods I've put in the most hours. And I've yet to see someone get through a 37 or 40 hour work without spending a substantial proportion on them zoning out with non-work stuff or just being slow and lacking in concentration from time to time. Or both. The longer the work, the worse it gets.
These days, I do sometimes still put in ridiculous weeks, but they are rare, and they are often explicitly with the trade-off that I know I'll take productivity hits and where I carefully schedule naps and caffeine etc. accordingly in order to be productive when it counts and "phone it in" when I can get away with merely being physically present (e.g. when someone drags me to meetings I know there's no real reason for me to be at).
In my experience with long weeks like that, most of the time the reason for the long hours is usually 90% about politics and meeting room posturing and someone panicking than it is about actual productivity benefits. It may be worth putting up with occasionally to humour someone important enough to your income, but these days I refuse to let it be a major part of my life.
There are the rare exception where there are genuine crises that really actually need everyone to be present for long periods, but if they are frequent, something is very wrong. In 20 years, apart from dealing with alerts keeping me awake for a few hours here and there, and where I compensate by according rest afterwards, I've maybe experienced 2-3 extended periods of excessive working hours for multiple days after each other where it was actually necessary.
As I mentioned in a parent (cousin-once-removed?) comment, the RescueTime statistics capture every moment I spend in front of my computer, not just when I'm in work mode. My actual work pattern is more like
- Wake up
- Bike 2 minutes to my office
- Work for 9-10 hours
- Bike home
- Do the things that I labeled "procrastination" (mostly reading things on the Internet)
This leaves me working a pretty normal schedule. I actually find I'm able to focus very well at work, since I'm really excited about my job and have a private office that screens out most distractions.
We don't know if the data collected is from the total hours of "on-time" of the computer. This would mean that procrastination could be taking up the majority of the spare time. I'm on my computer around 10-12 hours a day studying, working, blogging and just browsing the Internet and would not be surprised if I spend around 286 hours a month at the keyboard. But it's not work all of it.
EDIT: On the frontpage he writes "By day I’m an engineer at Wave. (Also frequently by night because I really like my work.)"
Outside of very short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way. I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work I've yet to meet them.
In fact, I've had to order people to go home and sleep because they measurably increased the defect rates for our code enough to become a net drain.
In other words: I don't just see it as crazy, I see it as inefficient and a quick way to burn out without accomplishing much.
While there may be culture differences involved, the reason I think this is an issue at all is a combination of lack of capturing and reviewing metrics of productivity coupled with a lot of people being delusional about their own work capacity (see the lack of metrics bit) and others being forced to keep up or look lazy in comparison.
I way to often see people having problems getting "enough" work done while being noticeable and obviously slowed down by lack of sleep, for example, only for their response to be to work longer and slow down even more.
I think this rule-of-thumb holds true when you are doing intellectually stimulating, challenging work that requires that you be your "best self".
Unfortunately there are a lot of jobs out there, the great majority of jobs in point of fact, where marginal productivity doesn't drop off precipitously past 40 or 60 or even 80 hours. Investment banking comes to mind....
Even in a lot of manual jobs the true cost of reduced attention gets obscured in increased error rates, increased accidents (and according insurance and compensation costs) and burn outs (resulting in higher churn and increased hiring costs).
I'm sure some have numbers that prove it's better for them to push staff harder (and places with extremely high salaries like investment banking certainly can take larger productivity drops and still come out ahead than most places), but most places I've worked and most companies I've contracted for, have no clue at all even how to measure their staffs productivity, much less do it on a regular basis.
In a few jobs I for the first time (for my managers) started delivering weekly reports that did not just report what we'd done, but combined the reported time spent with average salaries by function and assigned them to products and feature requests etc.. Doing that in my experience always leads to uncomfortable conversations in the team afterwards when management realises what different decisions actually costs. (Amusingly, or depressingly, a common response to me actually asking for average salary information was confusion even when I explained that I was going to report on costs; apparently this is quite unusual for development teams in tech companies to do other than in aggregate for whole departments, which is just plain ridiculous)
Generally I take anyone claiming to be just as productive over long hours with a huge amount of salt unless they can explain exactly how they've actually measured it - usually it turns out people are "self reporting" what they think is the case because they feel busier. Often because their productivity has actually suffered, and made them busier.
"This is insane! I've never been so productive" has entered my mind many times just as I looked up, understood that this hour-long work was actually six hours and that meant it wasn't productive at all, and finally went home or to bed.
It's only funny in retrospect...
It quickly becomes very sobering reading and quickly made my todo lists drastically shorter to start with, and made me more careful about ensuring I rested enough..
Generally speaking, those who are working 70 hours a week are doing what could be considered productivity theater.
If you can work 70 hours a week with no productivity loss you have the kind of work machines/software will automate away shortly.
Robin Hanson analysed it a while back[1] and it was 60 hours for peak productivity with unknown applicability to modern workplace.
[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hr...
Most people don't work anywhere near 70 hours a week. I think even fewer of them are proud of it.
The reason you hear about it is because the few people who do it are trying to justify it.
I find my job incredibly exciting and rewarding, so I don’t find that amount of work burdensome. YMMV, of course :)