Doesn't matter how much I love an activity I can hardly do it all time for more than few days.
This is stuff most people would call "work" because it does take effort, it makes me a better developer and much of it ties somewhat directly into problems I'm facing at work. But for me it's winding down after work, and recharging for the next day.
Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month.
So for the question of how many days I can do it? On average 1795.
Considering just the general area of IT, maybe 80 %? I get to do product development which is my interest, but there are also many things which I would like to be different, like purpose of product, organisational size, leadership philosophies, etc.
Now -- why do you ask?
I can work all waking hours on passion projects (including the boring grind - not just the infatuation and ideation phase) as long as it's self directed. Finding work opportunities that aren't orthogonal to long term areas of interest and don't feel like accumulating useless experience and constructing a parallel career is hard.
Ok but you're literally describing a burnout cycle. Some people would prefer to just skip that part and have a completely sustainable working pace.
I can work 16 hour days also, but I'm still dealing with a good portion of that at a seriously degraded mental state. At the end, I'll be making the dumbest mistakes, and it's questionable if that time is even useful.
Athletes do it best I think. They have their cycles of sport, training and recovery. They know their limits. They know their optimum.
I mean getting exercise is definitely good for you and in a choice between too much and too little I think you're better off overdoing it, but just constantly burning your metabolism at full steam seems to age you faster, couple that with the impact caloric deficit is supposed to have on aging and at least in my mind there's a pretty clear connection between the two.
First of all, a healthy body is very good at adaptation, i.e. if properly trained, your bones, muscles and other tissues get thicker and less prone to tearing, breakage etc.
Second, you will be surprised at how much pressure could daily activities put on your tissues, e.g. your vertabrae disks get higher pressure when you are wobbly sitting than standing even with some additional load. And in my experience people who train their body for extreme conditions have less problems in their elderly than people who never trained much at all.
And as you've noticed, most sportspeople have troubles with their serious traumas, not due to routine trainings. Plus of course this traumatization level varies from sport to sport.
In this friends case it was the NFL part that caused the damage. Not the fitness part.
I once did a boxing class. The day we did drills with with those boxing pads that require 2 hands to hold up, my head was throbbing for the rest of the day. Tried it again and same thing. Then I quit. Clearly I cannot take a serious punch.
I know several pro swimmers though and haven't heard of any serious issues there, so i guess it's from the impacts and constant running.
Me, like the good nerd, I am developed back problems instead
Please stop projecting your ideal work life onto other people.
Mental preferences are endlessly complex. It’s not ok to assume everyone has your preference and can work the same hours and way you do. It’s also not ok to project that towards some work / life balance that assumes things outside work are primary drivers in everyone’s lives.
Some people derive their main satisfaction in life from the fruit of their work. That’s ok too.
I'm a coder by trade, but I've never really spent lots of personal time coding, like most of the really good coders I know. That's just not fun for me.
On the other hand, I do sometimes spend many personal hours making spreadsheets for fun. I need to figure out how to get paid for that.
Or don't. Monetizing your leisure activity might well turn it into Just More Work that drains and stresses. Speaking for myself, I needed zero-stakes activities as a pressure relief valve when I was doing the corporate job, or I'd end up relying to chemicals to simulate that relaxation and get back to baseline. Benzos rot your brain, booze makes you fat; pottering in the ham shack does neither.
BUT HE SHOULD!
One of his first jobs was a soul crushing dev work when they had to write X random PC utilities every Y week for some monthly subscription thingy. You know what he did? He started slacking like crazy at work so he could work on game development with his bodies at home. Using company equipment he more or less stole from work.
(I think he was sued for this, and then repeated it many years later and was sued by Facebook)
So technically, he worked shorter hours. He just didn't tell his boss.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...
Most people doing what he did would get so fired so quickly... yet when everbody's favorie guy does it...
I can easily work my day job, go to the gym and give it my best, and then come back home and fire up my own project if I’m generally feeling happy.
If I’m stressed it can lead to some other mental health issues and then even my day job is effected.
I think anyone can do this if they were allowed to structure their work the way they want and work on the things they want to. Then we’d all be Carmacks in our chosen field. But we aren’t all so lucky.
But is there context switching? I can probably do 12hrs of X, but if it's 8hrs of X + 4hrs of Y, X and Y being things I enjoy and want to do very much, I don't think I'd have the wherewithal to switch to Y after 8hrs of X. 12 hrs of X: you're already in the groove, you have the context, you're working toward a goal in a continuum. 4hrs of Y, you have to spend activation energy, fiddle a bit with finding where you left off, what the problem space was, before you get in the groove. That take-off alone will sap probably an hour. You can do it, but attended with all our human foibles, are you going to mentally decide you're going to start Y, after 8hrs of X?
Another huge factor is being able to avoid external stressors which are what really drain people and cause burnout I think, having bad co-workers or manager, health issues, family issues, etc. is a killer and will impact your focus drastically. Big difference between working long hours because you are having fun versus working long hours because a boss is breathing down your neck and you'll be fired if you don't finish something in a few weeks
Carmack is also in a favorable position where he's basically always been able to choose only projects he's passionate about for work, so he can't really see the perspective of somebody being forced to work on something pointless by their boss
my take from his comment was that even when you are too mentally drained to write code or something similarly demanding, you could still do stuff like meetings, responding to emails, getting feedback from customers, planning stuff you will code when mentally fresh, etc. So the critical thing is to make sure you can focus on valuable stuff when you are at your best and try to save the other stuff for later