Why “Work smarter and not harder” is crap advice for entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Why “Work smarter and not harder” is crap advice for entrepreneurs

anthillonline.com

13 pointsbootload8 comments

Mabe he should read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971708

Direct PDF link: http://lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf

One thing this presentation says: while working more than 40 hours a week eventually lowers your productivity, your self perceived productivity is still higher.

Now, every individual is different, and I understand that he may have a productivity peak at more than 40 hours a week. But 95?[1] 4 hours nights? That is superman.

[1]: He took the example of 19 hours a day.

How much of the constant state of emergency is unavoidable and how much is a consequence of running to the limit of capacity such that you can't anticipate non-scheduled black swan events like, um, Christmas?

The author of this post spends the first seven paragraphs telling us how busy he is. Then he uses a metaphor that compares being busy to having a large penis.

I am not making this up.

It doesn't get any better; later he complains that some of the members of his retail workforce clock off as soon as their shift ends.

It's even worse than that... he acts like he's not complaining, saying something like, "I'm glad they've found their work/life balance," but then goes on to say it's a shame that they don't want to put in an extra hour of work per day, because then they could carve out a more interesting and exciting career for themselves. As if what his employees do outside of work is a poor substitute for career development.

I think it's great that he's happy working his ass off making his business succeed. But not everyone defines their self-worth based on their job. Personally, I'm more concerned about making and maintaining connections with the people I care about. Yes, I'm working like crazy at a startup right now, but it's not my life. It's my job. It's a rewarding job helping to build a product I believe in and am passionate about, but there's so much more to the world than the office I spend most of my time in.

That article has some really shady analysis in it. An example:

Despite there being diminishing returns on my time beyond a certain point, there are still positive returns. To elaborate, if my first 10 working hours per day are worth $10 per hour to the investors, the 11th hour may be worth $9, the 12th hour $8 and so on. Still my 19th working hour would still be worth $1 to the investors. As long as I am not destructive and my work produces value, and I can function the next day back at the $10 an hour mark, there are real benefits to my company for me putting in my time.

He provides no proof for his claim that performance drops off in such a linear fashion and he can consistently work nineteen hour days while being just as productive the next day.

His perceived performance drops off in such a linear fashion. As long as we don't have a way of measuring our real performance, we are stuck with that perception.

I don't believe that his strategy is the best one, but if he does, more power to him.

Burning your life only gets you so far. It must be terrible to see other people that seem lazy to overwork you.

In my experience, the best workers I'd known were lazy bastards, from that reaper that worked only in the morning because grass was fresh(dew) and did more in one hour that all we in the entire day to the CNC machine programmer nobody knew how he made simple programs in very short time and leave that surpassed our own in the company.

His "having it big is good" argument is flawed too, I have a friend with an enormous one that had real problems with girls.

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