This essay and most of the comments saying, "of course more work time yields more work completed" ignore the fact that there is no magic reset to full productivity Monday morning.
If you work every hour of week 1, your output of week 2 will be drastically reduced. There is therefore some optimal balance between work time and recovery time. It may be 40 hours, or 20, or 80. It probably varies between tasks and individuals and situations.
Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that spending more time working is necessarily going to be more effective.
Sometimes the best thing you can do to get the job done is to stop working on it for a while.
> Sometimes the best thing you can do to get the job done is to stop working on it for a while.
This. I like to have several side projects at once so I can switch to another one when I'm stuck on the current one.
On the downside, this procedure made me question if I can actually work as a programmer professionally, where I don't have the liberty to just leave any task assigned to me lying around for a week (or a month). It worked out nicely, though, since I found that I can get my train of thought unstuck by discussing the problem with a colleague.
If you work every hour of week 1, your output of week 2 will be drastically reduced. There is therefore some optimal balance between work time and recovery time. It may be 40 hours, or 20, or 80. It probably varies between tasks and individuals and situations.
Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that spending more time working is necessarily going to be more effective.
Sometimes the best thing you can do to get the job done is to stop working on it for a while.