It’s been very well scientifically established that the average human being should not work more then 55 hours a week.

Sure, you can sit in front of a desk and stare at a monitor, but the more you work after that 55 hours a week the less productive you become. When you work past that point, you need longer breaks, you easily lose focus; you just don’t get as much shit done.

Worse, often people I see who work that much tend to make catastrophic mistakes that actually tends to negate the work they did in the first 55 hours.

Case in point — when I was working at an advertising agency they have crunch every summer. At the same time, my boss (head of IT and engineering) decided he had too much on his hands so he made my coworker the managing developer to take some of his slack. My managing developer suddenly needed to be in meetings all day long, on top of his regular workload, and would catch up on his jira tickets at night.

He’d show up to work every morning late because he was up till 3 or 4 coding, looking like a hungover drunk, carrying several cans of energy drinks. In the morning he’d merge his branches into our shared development branch, and either his code was so buggy that we’d wind up spending half the day fixing it, or in some cases it completely broke our development environments so we couldn’t actually get any work done.

If you think of it in terms of math, my boss was actually working negative hours by working too hard. By taking me and my coworkers off of our tasks, he was creating exponentially more loss of productivity.

So my point is, just because you worked 130 hours, doesn’t mean you were productive all 130 of those hours. In fact, especially due to stress and the mistakes you’ll make from sleep deprivation, you’re actually probably really working 0 or maybe even negative hours.

The vileness of the ‘work hard’ ethos is compounded if you are in a leadership position. When you work too hard and are on too tight a deadline, your brain goes into survival mode. You see the world in a haze and you tend to make the wrong calls for the team. I’ve seen teams go down development rabbit holes that wasted months of time building a feature that didn’t even end up in production because an overworked and overstressed manager made a bad call he/she would have avoided if they were fresh and rested.

Despite this, many times its the individuals who work hard, not smart, who are promoted because of this latent bullshit philosophy stuck in our american business mindset. In almost every company I’ve worked for, big or small, it’s been no secret that the way to get noticed to ‘work hard.’

This mentality, and reciprocal cycle of the ‘work hard’ ethos is actually cause for more businesses to fail then it causes to succeed. Yet that doesn’t stop people from still saying those words.