The futile comfort of working long hours

Working long hours as a programmer can be both comforting and comfortable. After all, you have an easy solution to every problem: a few more hours at your desk, a few more hours staring at a screen in the dark. And working long hours is a natural attitude to take, since at the root of it, working long hours comes from valuing work, your craft as a programmer, and your obligations as a professional.

There is a different approach you can take. Instead of valuing work, you can value outcomes: outcomes at your job, outcomes in your life, outcomes in the world. Valuing outcomes is not comfortable. It forces you to reconsider and doubt your every step, and if you fail—and we all fail occasionally—your hard work becomes worthless.

But while valuing outcomes is uncomfortable and difficult, if you do it long enough you will find yourself—every once in the while—with the ability to grasp the moment and change the world. Just a little, in whatever corner you live in, but change it nonetheless.

The most direct way to learn this attitude is to reduce your working hours. If you had to do your work in 32 hours a week, instead of 45, or 50, or 60—what would need to change?

The experience of working fewer hours

Testing and quality

If you work long hours, you can pick some level of quality and stick to it:

• If you prioritize shipping features as quickly as possible, you can simply work longer to compensate for the buggy features you’re shipping.
• If you believe in quality above all else, you can spend the extra time to reach 100% test coverage of every little piece of code.

But if you work fewer hours, you will need to make decisions and tradeoffs, because you won’t have those extra hours. Some code will need automated tests for stability and maintainability, some code will need manual tests every time you change it, some code will be used once and thrown away. And you will need to make that choice, every single time. Which is to say, you will be forced to think about why you’re writing this code, and what it will be used for.

Planning

If you work long hours, the direction you go in matters less: if it’s the wrong direction, you can just work a few more hours when you eventually find out after you finish your task.

But if you work fewer hours, you will find yourself constantly plagued by doubt: is this the right direction? Are you doing the right thing? You may end up changing direction half-way, abandoning your work—however much it pains you—when you realize there’s a better way to your destination. You will have to spend much more time thinking and planning up front, to make sure you arrive at the right place on time.

Speaking of time, deadlines cause less worry when you work long hours. If you hit your deadline, great. If you didn’t, well, you worked long and hard, and who can blame you if you failed?

If you work fewer hours, deadlines are a constant gnawing presence, always getting closer. You will need to plan for them well in advance, always asking questions, on the lookout for unstated requirements and forgotten deliverables. And sometimes you’ll be forced to find new solutions so you can hit those deadlines in time—and, of course, sometimes you will fail to find those solutions. And then you’ll look bad, because you didn’t work on the weekend, so whose fault is it the deadline was missed?

Your value

When you work long hours, it’s easier to demonstrate how valuable you are to your boss: you were there on the weekend, after all. If you work fewer hours, well, who can say you’re really getting much done? Did you deliver anything of value? How will you prove it?

Even worse than your boss is your own self-image. When you work long hours, your self-worth is about your work: you work hard, and that at least is something to be proud of, even if the project failed. If you work fewer hours you won’t be able to feel proud of all the hours you worked. You’ll be forced to consider the results, the outcomes: if you failed to deliver, you failed.

From comfort to effectiveness

Go through all this and— you’ll become effective.

• You will think more, and find the simple solution that takes a day, where previously you would just start coding—and spend a week coding, at that.
• You will learn to build what is needed, where previously you would build what you knew.
• You will learn to prioritize, and prioritize well.

Valuing outcomes is not comfortable, but it is empowering. And good day or bad, you get to go home at a reasonable hour and do whatever you feel like. Which feels pretty damn good too.

You don’t have to take my word for it, either: it’s easy to try out. If you’re working long hours, try spending a month working 40 hours a week, no more. Once you can no longer rely on working longer hours to solve all your problems, you’ll soon find yourself approaching your work very differently.