Careers are long. Grinding 12 hour days at the edge of your ability can only go on for so long before you burn out and want to quit the industry all together.

3-6 hours of deep work per day sounds very healthy and sustainable. I imagine the rest of the time is filled with various administrative tasks.

You can also take the time to make sure quality is high and add in quality of life improvements, rather than just getting to the point of checking all the boxes, so you can move on to the next deadline. My favorite parts of any project were the little things I thought up and added above and beyond the base requirements. I also really liked creating internal tools to optimizing how my team and I work.

I have been trying new AI tools for the company and gotten the CTO to get Cursor for the company after a lot and back and forth. I complete my tasks before time and take new tasks from others or from backlog. I write documents to explain my projects/work so it can be easily picked up. I try to automate my busy recurring tasks as well like starting the data pipeline every week to refresh company data or automating emails for another thing.

But I definitely agree with you that longevity is important but sometimes I just feel I would work at higher paced or more stressful place given I am still a few years (5) in my career.

Maybe. It’s definitely easier to grind early in the career vs later in a career.

It’s also nice having the freedom to choose your grid. When I was grinding pretty hard (60-100 hour weeks), it wasn’t driven by my boss at all. My boss actually didn’t talk to me for 2 years during most of this.

Some time after that my boss told me my team was so far ahead I could take 3 months off to backpack through Europe. I didn’t do it, but he was actively encouraging it. This was all from that self driven grind, looking for gaps and opportunities and addressing them. Not every company offers this level of autonomy, but if they do, take it.

These days all my work is driven by management. The priorities change every week… sometimes every day. It’s much higher paced, much more stressful, and it sucks. We actually get less done, because we waste so much time trying to figure out what is actually important. Be careful what you wish for.

> 3-6 hours of deep work per day sounds very healthy and sustainable

It’s not really about the number of hours.

Saying you’re bored (i.e. not challenged enough), is saying you’re unsatisfied and not thriving. That’s worth changing.