How long working hours affect productivity

I learned the hard way that the workday can look full while the business gets emptier. In my first company I wore the long-hours badge with pride. Twelve hours at the desk felt like discipline. Fourteen felt like leadership. Then the product got slower, the support queue got louder, and good people started missing simple details. I kept thinking that more time would fix it. It did not. What actually helped was admitting that the business was absorbing hidden costs we could not see while we congratulated ourselves for staying late.

Early teams in Malaysia, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia often inherit this same myth. It is not just hustle culture or investor optics. It is the sincere fear that the company will slip if we do not guard it with our bodies. I understand that instinct. The catch is that the body guard eventually becomes the bottleneck. The day stretches. Attention thins. Decisions pile up. Everything still feels urgent, yet the work quietly degrades. That is the quiet moment when hours stop being a tool and start becoming a tax.

Here is what actually breaks. First, quality drifts in increments too small to notice in the moment. The copy is almost right. The UI is almost intuitive. The data pull is almost clean. You ship anyway because tomorrow looks even busier. Those almost decisions compound. Three weeks later a customer churns for a reason that sounds cosmetic but is actually the residue of an exhausted week. Second, decision latency grows. A tired founder cannot spot the real constraint. You hold two extra meetings because alignment feels off. The team reads that as caution and slows down. Third, escalation becomes emotional. Minor issues feel personal. You jump in to fix them yourself because it seems faster. The message you send is that ownership is negotiable. The next time, people wait for you. Output did not improve with longer hours. The surface area of your control did.

When I mentor founders in Riyadh accelerators, I see a similar pattern. The first build is fueled by adrenaline and social momentum. The second build still relies on adrenaline but now carries customer expectations. The third build needs something better than adrenaline because the failure mode changes. You are no longer competing against other teams for attention. You are competing against your own fatigue for good judgment. That inflection point rarely announces itself. It shows up as a week where you sit at your desk for thirteen hours and later realize you made only two real decisions. Everything else was motion.

The obvious rebuttal is that startups are not nine-to-five jobs and that crunch is part of the territory. I agree that seasons of push are normal. The trap is letting a season harden into a habitat. If your best work shows up only when you are squeezing the day past midnight, the system is lying to you. The signal to watch is not total hours. It is the shape of those hours. Long days that include true deep work can still be sustainable for a while. Long days that are mostly reactive are a fire alarm with the sound turned low.

The mental model that helped me rebuild was simple. I divided the day into what I call red zone hours, core hours, and maintenance hours. Red zone hours are the two to four blocks each week where you make irreversible decisions or design primitives that will control a quarter of your roadmap. Core hours are where you move the boulder on execution that compounds for customers within weeks. Maintenance hours are the necessary overhead that keeps the machine from shaking itself apart. When I tracked my time honestly, I discovered that fatigue pushed me to protect maintenance, sacrifice red zone, and pretend core was happening because I was still typing. What changed the company was flipping that priority back, then protecting it with rules that felt almost impolite.

The first rule was calendar honesty. I blocked red zone time in the morning when my judgment was clean. No Slack. No calls. No exceptions except for paying customers on fire. In Kuala Lumpur that meant aligning those blocks before noon because afternoon partner meetings would eat attention in chunks. In Singapore that meant defending mornings from the regional call spiral. In Riyadh that meant acknowledging late-night investor conversations and sliding the red zone into the window where my mind still felt precise. The rule was not about working fewer hours. It was about choosing which hours would do the heaviest lifting.

The second rule was energy accounting for the leadership team. We shared a one-line daily check-in that said whether we were green, yellow, or red, and we treated yellow as a design variable, not a confession. If two leads were yellow on the same day, we did not try to be heroic. We stripped the day to red zone decisions and moved everything else. Some days that meant shipping one critical fix and calling it. The counterintuitive result was more velocity by Friday because we did not spend midweek creating rework.

The third rule was ownership clarity. Long hours make it easy for founders to grab tasks that are not theirs. It feels generous in the moment and corrosive in the long run. We wrote a short document that mapped who owns decisions, not tasks. During long weeks this prevented the most common failure mode I see across SEA teams, which is the founder becoming the universal adaptor for every problem. The company got faster because people could make calls without psychic permission. The founder got clearer because the day no longer dissolved into helpfulness.

There is a cultural layer to this in our region. Many teams read long hours as respect. Leaving on time can feel like a lack of solidarity. I do not dismiss that. Respect matters. What I tell founders is to shift the symbol of respect from time spent together to clarity delivered together. Replace the shared late night with a weekly habit of over-communicating priorities, blockers, and tradeoffs. When everyone knows what the next irreversible step is, they do not need your shadow to feel supported. They need your decision written down so they can move.

There is also a fundraising narrative to resist. Some investors still anchor to the story of the founder who sleeps in the office. I have literally done that. It earned me a funny anecdote and a team that learned to normalize emergencies. The investors who stayed with us through hard quarters were not impressed by late lights. They were impressed by the quality of our weekly decisions and the absence of avoidable churn. If your data room shows clean cohorts and your roadmap decisions explainable in two sentences, nobody cares that you left at six on Tuesday.

If you are already deep in a long-hours spiral, do not look for a grand reset. Look for one day where you run an experiment. Choose a day this week and decide in advance which two hours are red zone. Put the single non-negotiable decision or design in that window. Tell the team that everything else can wait. Keep a short log of what actually moved the business that day. If this feels impossible, that is your signal that you are operating inside a reaction loop. The way out is carving space that proves to your own nervous system that you can still make the company move on purpose.

There is a narrow band where extended hours do help. It is usually when you are integrating a new capability that genuinely multiplies what you can deliver and you have a clear end date. A new payments rail. A compliance audit with a fixed deadline. A migration that eliminates a class of bugs permanently. Outside of those windows, more time tends to purchase illusions. You feel in control because you are present. The product looks the same to users. Inside the team, trust erodes a little because attention is frayed and promises slip.

People often ask if this is just burnout prevention dressed up as operations. I think it is the opposite. This is operations dressed up as self-respect. The point is not to be comfortable. The point is to be accurate about how your company actually converts human energy into customer value. If you want to see how long working hours affect productivity, stop measuring effort and start measuring the weekly number of decisions that survived contact with users without rework. Track the hours that produced those decisions. You will notice a pattern. Past a certain point in the day, your choice quality drops, handoffs get messy, and tomorrow inherits the cost.

What I would do differently if I were starting again is simple. I would set the rule that the week is for irreversible moves and the weekend is for rest that makes those moves better. I would hire people who care more about owning the problem than winning the optics. I would train managers to pull me out of work when my presence stops making the room smarter. I would set up rituals that protect red zone hours like we protect investor meetings. And yes, I would still have seasons of long days. I would just refuse to let a season pretend to be a strategy.

The uncomfortable truth is that discipline is not the same thing as duration. Long hours can be a tool. They become a problem when they are your only tool. If you are a founder reading this at 11 pm with five tabs open and a team waiting for your approvals, close the tabs that are not your red zone. Make the one decision that moves the company tomorrow morning. Then go home. You do not win by staying late. You win by making fewer, cleaner moves that compound. The rest is theater that your future self will have to unwind.