Startup culture is awash with the heroisation of burning the mythical midnight oil with the 60 or 70 hour work week being a badge of honor — the road to success. Slowly, however, that trend is changing — at least among people who’ve actually done those stupid hours — and while I’m embarrassingly still working way too many hours than is any kind of good, evidence keeps indicating that I really need to stop. Not only evidence in terms of feeling unproductive at times, but actual sort of scientific evidence.

I came across one such piece of evidence today in CamMi Pham‘s post “7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science”. For the post, she has done a couple of very tangible charts (which seem to correlate well with other data I’ve found) showing the effective productivity of weeks of working 50 and 60 hours respectively. Truth be told, the numbers are scary — if the charts are to be taken at face value, the productivity gain from a 50 or 60 hour work week evaporate after only 9 and 8 weeks respectively:

I probably need to be smart and go home “early.”