I've been thinking about what actually changed in that decade, and the honest answer is not the thing I would have said five years ago. It isn't the country, or the title, or the money. What changed is that I stopped believing my hours were my evidence.
The years I was attached to my Desktop or Laptop
Before I came here, I worked 9.5 hours a day. That’s what the number was. Every country has its number, and nobody in the building questions it , it’s just the shape of the day, the same way the building has four walls.
I worked in an offshore development centre. That meant something very specific: my work lived on a particular desktop, in a particular room, and I could not do it anywhere else. Not a preference. A rule. So I went there. There was a chair in the corner of our old floor and I knew that chair very well. I knew the vending machine. I knew everybody who worked after hours, because I was one of them, and after-hours is a small society, you learn people’s names quickly when there are eleven of you on a floor built for two hundred desktops.
Then I came to the US and joined one of the big Chicago banks. Now I had a laptop. That felt like enormous freedom at the time. I could connect from home once in a while. And officially, my day was eight hours instead of nine and a half.
Between the two countries, I spent something like twelve or thirteen years of my working life tied to one specific machine.
Here is the thing I only understood much later. My official hours went down from 9.5 to 8. The time I actually spent in front of that screen did not change at all. Not by a minute. There was always something to run, something to test, something that finished at eleven and had to be checked before it broke somebody’s morning. The number on timesheet moved. My life didn’t.
And I was proud of that. I want to be honest about this. I thought the nights were the proof. This is my evidence i,e, look how many hours I’m spending.
The work stream that nobody redesigned
I was listening to a podcast recently where a Perplexity CEO said Microsoft invented the knowledge worker, and I repeated that a few times to people before I bothered to look it up.
It isn’t right, and the correction turned out to be more interesting than the claim.
The eight-hour day is much older than Microsoft and much bloodier. Robert Owen was arguing for eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest in 1817. Ford put it into practice in 1914. In the United States it became law in 1938. People were beaten in the street over this long before any of it. And "knowledge worker" was Peter Drucker's phrase, from 1959.But the post was reaching for something real. That Instagram post had the wrong subject in the right sentence.
Microsoft didn’t create the eight-hour day. Microsoft filled it.
Microsoft’s mission was a computer on every desk. And once there was a machine on every desk, the eight hours that factory workers had won to protect their bodies quietly became eight hours of sitting in front of a screen. Same container. Completely different contents. Nobody redesigned the container.
That’s the part that matters to me. We are running knowledge work inside a schedule that was designed to stop people losing fingers in computer. It was a humane rule for a different kind of work, and we never revisited it.
What actually changed
I don’t sleep at the office anymore. I don’t go to the office at all, since joining my current company my basement has been my office.
That isn’t because I care less. I care more now than I did then. It’s because the work moved.
Ten years ago my value was in doing. There was a queue. I emptied the queue. If the queue was long I stayed until it wasn’t, and the relationship between hours and output was close to linear. Staying late genuinely produced more.
Now the most valuable thing I do in a week is decide what not to build.
The last few months, I spent the better part of two days on a problem without touching a keyboard. This means I used to think a lot about how to solve the problem.
I scheduled a meeting for myself, thinking that in that meeting, I would be alone so nobody could book those hours. When my coworker asked, “Hey, are you working on a different project?” I realized that I couldn’t just keep joining calls without doing the work. Doing the work, in this sense, meant that I was thinking about how to accomplish the task. I scheduled a call for that purpose, so I could focus on my thoughts. Then, I built the whole solution in one or two hours.
So basically, this is how things changed.
Now tell me what I put on the timesheet.
Because the honest accounting is this: I was thinking about it for maybe thirty-two hours across those two days, if you count the shower and the drive and 3 a.m. staring at the ceiling. I was working on it for five.
Value, not evidence
I learned the same lesson somewhere I didn’t expect it, putting together my green card petition.
I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about how to present it. And the instinct, always, is to add more evidence. One more letter. One more citation. One more exhibit in the pile.
My attorney said something that re-organized how I think about my work generally. There is always a starting point and always an end point. Start with one thing i.e. that’s your inception, you’ll build your profile on and go deep on it.
What I took from it: don’t add more evidence. Add more value to the evidence you have.
It’s the same mistake as the hours. Six years of accumulating material that says look how much is worth less than one thing that says here is why it mattered. Volume is the easiest thing to produce and the least convincing thing to read.
The trap in the whole hours conversation
We run a compliance task every month. It takes five minutes. It is logged as a task, and it appears in the report as a line item, exactly like everything else.
So how many hours do I claim for it? Five minutes? Or the twenty years of knowing what it’s for?
Nvidia’s CEO has said he’s always working, even in the shower. I understand exactly what he means, and I think it’s true, and I also think it is the single most dangerous sentence for a normal employee to adopt, because it doesn’t come with the other half.
If I claim credit for every hour my brain has chewed on a work problem, I am at a hundred hours a week and I am lying while telling the truth. I dream about work sometimes. That is not a shift.
Thinking expands to fill your entire life. Attendance doesn’t. And attendance is the only one we know how to measure, so we measure attendance and quietly imply we mean the other thing.
So I did the arithmetic
Which brings me to the person who says 64 hours.
Over five days, 64 hours is 12.8 hours a day. More than half of every waking day, every day, with no lunch. If he’s working Saturdays and Sundays too, fine but why does he need to?
I asked one of my developers how many hours he spends and when he sleeps. He works when he wants to work and he sleeps when he wants to sleep, and he told me so without embarrassment, which I respected.
I’m not saying time and money are unrelated. If you commit to five months, I expect five months. But if the result arrives in the right window, I don’t need to know which hours it was assembled in.
Here’s what I’ve concluded, and it’s uncomfortable because it points inward:
If you think you're doing more than eight hours a day, you are probably bad at delegation.What my coach actually told me
I brought this to my leadership coach expecting to talk about my team. It became a conversation about me in about fifteen minutes.
I spent those fifteen minutes listing everything I’d handed off. Reports, paperwork, the documentation nobody wants. I had a good list. I was quite pleased with it.
She listened and then asked: you’re good at something. Why aren’t you delegating that?
And that’s when it landed. Delegation is giving away the work you’re good at. Everything on my list was work I was happy to lose. That isn’t delegation, that’s discarding.
I gave her the obvious defence that the work I’m good at is the work only I do well, and handing it over means it comes back at seventy percent.
You’re not protecting the quality. You’re protecting the feeling of being necessary. Those feel identical from the inside, and only one of them is a job.
I sat with that badly for a week.
There’s a book I read, Extraordinary Impact, that gets at the practical half of it. Real delegation isn’t handing someone a set of instructions and checking whether they followed them. It’s telling them what you actually want, giving them your thinking, and then letting them bring back something you wouldn’t have built. Not five hours for you and twenty-five for them. Their work isn’t smaller because yours got shorter.
Ten years
The nights I was proud of were real. I don’t regret them and I’m not going to pretend they taught me nothing, you learn a system in your hands at 2 a.m. in a way you never learn it in a design review.
But they were evidence of commitment, and I was presenting them as evidence of value, and for a long time nobody corrected me because the whole industry makes the same substitution.
Eight hours was never a target. It was a limit, won by people who needed protection from work that could physically destroy them, and it’s still a reasonable limit because we haven’t invented a better one. Inside it, the job has changed under us, less doing, more deciding. The thinking runs longer than the hours and always will, and the right response to that is not to start billing for it.
Ten years ago my evidence was the chair in the corner and the vending machine and knowing everyone on the night floor. Now my evidence is the result.