The most interesting thing about my best work this year is that none of it happened during the months when I was working the most. There is a pattern here that I want to think about in public.
I have been making things for sixteen years. For most of those years, I assumed that the relationship between hours worked and quality of output was, if not linear, then at least monotonically increasing. More hours, more output. More output, better output, on average. This is the assumption almost every employer rewards and almost every productivity book reinforces.
What the data actually says.
I went back through my last three years of finished work — call it 140 deliverables across client projects, personal projects, and a handful of essays — and ranked them, privately, by how proud I am of each one. Then I matched the top 20 against the work-tracking spreadsheet where I have logged my hours since 2022. What I found surprised me a little.
The top-20 list was almost perfectly inversely correlated with the weeks where I worked the most hours. Of my twenty proudest pieces of the last three years, fourteen were produced during weeks where I worked between thirty-two and forty-two hours. The other six were produced during weeks where I worked between twenty-six and thirty-two. Zero came from weeks where I worked over fifty.
The work I am proudest of has almost never been produced during the weeks I was working the hardest.
Three things I think this means.
I'm not going to claim my n=140, single-person dataset has any explanatory power beyond my own kitchen. But three patterns showed up that I think might be load-bearing for other people too.
- The best output came after rest, not before it. When I checked which weeks preceded the great-output weeks, fourteen of fourteen were preceded by what I would call a normal week. Not a vacation. Just a normal week.
- Volume of work crowds out quality of thought. The weeks I was busiest were the weeks I least wanted to think about the problem after hours, and that mattered more than I'd assumed.
- The good weeks were one-project weeks. When I had to context-switch four or five times, almost nothing memorable came out, regardless of total hours.
If I had to give one piece of advice to my younger self, it would not be "work harder." It would be "work on fewer things for longer."
What I'm doing about it now.
I have started organizing my calendar around what I am calling "one-thing weeks" — Monday-to-Friday stretches where I have agreed, in advance, with myself and any collaborators, that I will only push on one project. I am four months in and it is the single highest-leverage change I have made to my work in a decade.
I'll write about it again in a few months, when I have more data. For now: try a one-thing week. The output, in my limited dataset, is roughly the kind of work I would have produced in three weeks of fragmented focus. The catch is that you can only do this if your livelihood is structured to allow it — which is a privilege, and also, increasingly, a strategy.