This is one I've wondered about for years. "Am I a hard (enough) worker?" Of course "enough" is the emotional content of that question, and it turns out that "enough" really has nothing to do with work performance, let alone the amount of hours your butt is in a chair. But in terms of the standard 40 hour social norm... how was I stacking up?

I measured the sum of tracked hours for each week, then binned them to count up how many of each there are. So that high bar, that mode of "workhours in a week" is 42: the count of weeks in which I worked an estimated total between 42.0 and 43.0 hours.  Turns out I did that 44 times/weeks in a little over a decade.

I can see some little mini-mountains around 16/24/32 hours that seem very likely to represent the times when I worked 2/3/4 days in a week. I highlighted a couple particular years in orange that had some of the crunchiest times. Yes, those at 60 hours were Jan 2013 in the Kraken endgame, doing +2 crunch (targeting fitting 2 extra days-worth into a week, though phrased as "+2 hours per day, plus some weekend work"). I only remember a few nights leaving the office at around 2 AM to figure out that that wasn't sustainable even short-term.

But those busy times were balanced out by plenty of other more relaxed times. I tried not to worry about clock hours too much, figuring that it would all balance out in the long run. And it looks like it did, I think. I suppose there's also the effect of having more allotted vacation time in later years, where I started taking more random days off, producing most of my smaller weeks.

Looking back once again, this all has nothing to do with my worth as a worker - or at least only as a correlate to the attitude, creativity, and drive that I brought to the work of value creation. But I'll put this social norm question to rest now, too: without any explicit timecard, the balance turned out just fine.