The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by marvin on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @05:34AM (#8426057)

This is only true if you don't value the "compulsory" part of the job: Teaching, writing grant proposals, supervising Masters-level students, supervising Ph.D students where you do not publish as first author, etc. The system is set up so that researchers don't primarily research, which is a big problem and places absurd incentives to do an unhealthy amount of work.

On the contrary, I find that in most jobs I do, there is decreasing marginal utility of my work, since I have a finite amount of energy and the quality of my work goes down as I cross the 40-hour mark. People seem to have individual differences in where this cut-off point is, but I have yet to meet someone who claims it is not there. So for me, given that I value all my work, the concept of increasing marginal utility of work is strange. It would perhaps be different in another field than plain vanilla software development consulting, would be interesting to have a discussion around this.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by _delirium on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @07:47AM (#8426388)

I think it's pretty common in tech jobs as well. A frequent setup is that you have a longer-term project that's really interesting but not deadline-pressing, so you can only work on it when you've gotten other immediate things out of the way first. There are attempts to try to explicitly make schedule space for the interesting long-term work (like Google's 20% time), but it still often ends up that you have to get a bunch of other less-interesting stuff off your plate each day or week, before you can get to the best stuff.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by mooreds on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @10:53AM (#8427173)

This is the whole 'urgent vs important' work problem (ironic that I'm posting on HN, which is neither).

Covey's time management grid describes the problem: http://www.usgs.gov/humancapital/documents/TimeManagementGri... (pdf)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by wastedhours on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @08:06AM (#8426442)

Yeah, I've got an interesting website reflow project that's on my todo list and will make a big difference, but it's not a priority I can block time out for, and the daily stream of tasks that need to be done "now" means I rarely get to it, but simply adding more hours to my work day wont actually produce the desired/best work.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by tonyedgecombe on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @02:26PM (#8428551)

You might be surprised with what you can get away with not doing from your stream of daily tasks that need to be done.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by wastedhours on Thursday October 09, 2014 @08:29AM (#8431939)

I'm pushing that to its logical extreme already ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by vec on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @11:57AM (#8427581)

Not to mention that quite a few small companies don't have the ability to hire a dedicated sysadmin, IT staff, and/or customer support rep. These tasks falls to the engineers.

Doing these tasks is almost certainly a suboptimal use of any single product engineer's job, but if they don't get done by someone the business won't be a business for long.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I W... by roye on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @07:18AM (#8426303)

I was also thinking along these lines as I read, and there have been plenty of articles posted on HN on the diminishing returns of working too long. Basically it boils down to people getting tired, and especially in creative pursuits, it helping to get away from your project and let your mind wander sometimes.

What I expected the author might say is that with many accumulated hours you become more efficient such that over time your output per hour grows, but his view seems quite different.

[ Parent | on HN ]