Working 120 hours

Have you done the math? What does it mean to work 120 hours in a week?

Well, for 5 days, that is 24 hours a day. I know of nobody who can work for 5 days straight without sleep. I just don’t think that is possible.

When I was younger, I have heard of lawyers working over 100 hours per week.

The math says that is a death march.

Let’s try 120 hours spread over 7 days. That makes 17 hours a day, with 7 hours left for sleep. No wonder DOGE brought in beds for their employees.

I still don’t think it is feasible to expend that many hours and have decent quality. The fact that DOGE has made some mistakes and have had to recall back some people that they later realized were essential. A case in point are the nuclear employees who take care and manage the nuclear supplies and hardware.

Yeah, you need those people keeping an eye on that stuff.

Or how about doctors managing the current bird flu that’s raging across the US and impacting egg prices?

Scary chart of Elon Musk sleep routine

I read an article that depicted tweets on a chart throughout the day. The chart shows that ever since he bought Twitter (currently X), he tweets at all hours of the day, with a slim period where it is assumed he’s sleeping. He has historically said that he sleeps from around 3 am to 9 pm – a 6 hours’ time period.

Here’s the chart:

But it kind of looks like that by the end of 2024, he is sleeping way less, maybe a 2-hour period around 6 am. If he is truly doing that, I expect him to kind of going crazy.

That chart came from a really interesting article titled “You Can See When Elon Musk Actually Sleeps by Analyzing His Tweets, and It’s Terrifying”.

What he once said about sleep

Now, he once was reasonable about sleep and said he really needs at least 6 hours; otherwise, he ends up doing crazy stuff that gets him in trouble.

“I’ve tried [to sleep] less, but … even though I’m awake more hours, I get less done,” Musk said. “And the brain pain level is bad if I get less than six hours [of sleep per night].”

Ashton Jackson, CNBC Make It, “Elon Musk says he’s upped his sleep to 6 hours per night—and that his old routine hurt his brain”, May 18, 2023

The article also talks about Elon’s tech peers and they all say sleep is important.

Read that here.

So, that 120 hours brag is flat out wrong. Even if the DOGE members are young boys, they are still making a lot of mistake. “Breaking things” at a country level is extremely risky. We are talking about people’s lives.

It’s one thing to break things at a company level and the company dies. The employees can then go out into the market where there are other companies that could be hiring.

But if the entire country is broken, then there is no place to go. And there may be nothing to pull the country out of its doldrums.