Elon Musk is wrong. Working extremely long hours doesn't make you better at your job.

Pedro_P

Our culture celebrates long work days, but they don't make us more productive.

Over a century of research on work environments has reached the same conclusion: Working more hours with more intensity doesn’t make your work better—it makes your work worse.
Deposit Photos
▼ In 1926, Henry Ford shocked industry leaders around the world when he announced a five-day workweek for his Ford employees. “Just as the eight-hour day opened our way to prosperity in America, so the five-day workweek will open our way to still greater prosperity...it is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,” Ford wrote then.
At the time, unions and workers’ advocates had been jostling for reduced working hours for decades, as part of efforts to improve working conditions. However, Ford probably wasn’t thinking about his employee’s well-being when he made the switch, says John Pencavel, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “He was more concerned, my guess, with preventing a possible unionization,” and losing any inch of control to organized labor.
To his probable surprise, Ford found, though, that knocking a day off of the work week actually improved productivity in his factories. It turned out,workers got more done in five days than they had in six.
It’s a counterintuitive result to mention today, particularly in a culture that rewards a burn-the-midnight-oil, work-until-you-drop mentality. But over a century of research on work environments has reached the same conclusion: Working more hours with more intensity doesn’t make your work better—it makes your work worse.
“The idea that shorter hours would increase output per hour is quite old, and goes back to the 19th century,” Pencavel says. It was unpopular with employers at the time—“the strength of their opposition was quite remarkable, actually,” he says. But case studiesof reduced work hours at iron works, cotton mills, and eyeglass factories all reported improved work. In 1913, psychologist Hugo Münsterberg wrotethat “It was found that everywhere, even abstracting from all other cultural and social interests, a moderate shortening of the working day did not involve loss, but brought a direct gain.”
More recent research echos those results. A 2004 reviewby the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported that employees had decreased alertness and declines in vigilance at the end of long shifts, and that lengthy work days led to deterioration in work performance. Conversely, slightly shorter hours resulted in the opposite effect. A trial of a six-hour work day among a group of elderly-care nurses in Sweden improved their efficiency, and in a Swedish Toyota center, a six-hour work day led to increased profits.
Most recently, a study published  this fallin Industrial and Labor Relations Review looked at data collected from 52,000 employees in Europe between 2010 and 2015. The authors, Hans Frankort, senior lecturer in strategy at Cass Business School in London and Argyro Avgoustaki, assistant professor of management at ESCP Europe, a business school with campuses across Europe, found that greater work effort actuallyimpededcareer progress. “There doesn’t seem to be any benefit from hard work,” Frankort says.
Hard work, as the study defined, was a measure of both the number of hours spent working and the intensity of that work (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, read the full article here: Source

soothsayer

There is always a trade off-work longer hours with ease  and you tend to have better application vs work longer , ensure you meet the deadline!