The quote also points to a paradox: adding hours can degrade performance. Fatigue narrows attention, weakens self-control, and makes work more error-prone; as mistakes accumulate, even more time is needed to repair them. This is why long stretches of overwork can feel productive while quietly reducing the quality of judgment.
Historically, this concern isn’t new. John Pencavel’s analysis of munitions output during World War I found that productivity per hour fell sharply beyond long weekly schedules, with 70-hour weeks yielding little more output than 55-hour weeks (Pencavel, 2014). The lesson fits Huffington’s claim: time is not a linear input to success. [...]
