I have observed that most of the people I know who fit your description: experts who work fewer hours but everything they do counts, almost always went through a period of ridiculous and obsessive long hours early in their career.

Once you've built that skill set, it makes sense to dial things back because you now know how to be effective and you also probably do tons of mental work semi consciously away from your "desk."

But it drives me crazy how people seem to think they can start out that way. In my experience that is a sure path to modest abilities, which is fine, but that's the trade off.

"almost always went through a period of ridiculous and obsessive long hours early in their career."

Maybe. But for sure they worked on something challenging and not on checking off endless lists of JIRA tickets. It's not long hours but quality of work that makes you grow. Both together is probably the winner.

> I have seen quite a few experts in their field and they didn't work long hours but everything they did counted.

Yeah, that is a much better position to be in than someone who is drowning in useless make-work all day.

But, after having reached this level of good set-up, one is now sort-of in competition with everyone else who has reached a similar good set-up. Well, even just ignoring the competition part, which is maybe a red herring, obviously you are self-gating how good you want to be by working more or fewer hours. So maybe these people decided a certain amount is "good enough" and didn't want to push past that, which is totally fine. But I am just raising the point that you can always push further if you want to.

" But I am just raising the point that you can always push further if you want to."

I have had the opportunity to work on difficult stuff for a few years and after around 35 hours per week I was pretty much shot. I still thought about it in my free time but there definitely was no point sitting in front of the screen because I wouldn't get anything done.

I'll admit there are some high performance workers (you could call them athletes) who can spend 80hrs/week working and producing but these are rare from my experience. Most people I have seen that work 80 hr weeks have a lot of downtime in between. The only difference is they spend that time in the office.

I've never met someone who could do 80 hours of focused work. Everyone I've seen who puts in a lot of hours doesn't achieve more results than if they had put in 40 hours of focused work. They feel like they're making progress, but they make many mistakes along the way and then later have to spend crazy hours making up for those mistakes, making more mistakes, etc... ad nauseum.

You can put all your energy into paddling a canoe, but if it's still tied to the dock you're going nowhere.

The whole reason I am bringing this up is because I have done 70+ hours of focused work on many occasions.

It's a more-than-linear improvement over 40 hours, because when pro-rated you have a lower density of context switches, getting-back-up-to-speed, etc, as happen in the morning or when you eat or such.

Maybe too many people have done long-term damage to their attention spans via the internet? I dunno.

At the risk of being mildly provocative ... are any of the people you know, who can't do more than 40 hours of work in a week, world-class in their field? If not, maybe there is a causal link between these two things?

I've done weeks like that myself, for a few weeks at a time. My comment was addressed at people who do 80 hours routinely. I've never met someone world class who was doing that. I have met some world class people, but they kept to a reasonable schedule.

I'm sure these 80 hour continuous productivity guru's exist. I'm just saying they are so exceedingly rare to effectively be unicorns.

Supposedly Bill Gates was like this when he was young. But I would compare these people to elite athletes. Most people can train as much as they want but will never reach that level. they may risk injury on the way though.

I have done 80 hours week productively from time to time but never for long. In startup I worked at we worked nights and weekends but a lot of it ended up being playing foosball and pool.

Oh, thanks for clearing that up, I kind of misread the parent comment then :) I'll leave my answer anyway for the sake of argument.