In the Great Debates thread, Should the US Have a 40-Hr. Week/8 hr. Day?, I posted the following comment.
Well, that received a number of responses, questions, etc that got me to think about this matter because, by the standards of many people here, I am a workaholic (and by the standards of a few, I’m not.) I don’t do the above schedule on a daily basis, but 60+ hour workweeks are not uncommon, I do some work-related tasks nearly every day (including weekends), and I’m always mulling over it in my head.
However, I felt that responding in that thread would have been off-topic, as it was more of a policy-wonk discussion and not so much about relaying of the personal anecdotes. So here we are.
Bump asked the following:
I do non-work related stuff during the nights and weekends - as I mentioned, I make sure to come home every night to spend time with the family, with most of those nights I am remaining at home, though I might work when the rest of the family is asleep (usually around 9:30).
However, much of the non-work stuff that I was interested when I was younger now just seems to be a big time sink. I remember playing a game of Civ 3 when, sometime in the 19th century, I logged off like usual - however, this time I paid attention to the progress indicator telling me that I have played this one game of Civ for 38 hours… a full workweek! Ugh - I have a wife and daughter, and they’re not well served by a father who wastes too much time playing video games. And yes, that’s a judgment call, but it’s one I made about myself, so deal with it. 
Also, the nature of my job is that I need to pay constant and extra attention to it - my job is to work on developing business initiatives, including operations and financial modeling, developing workflows, org charts, gantt charts, what have you. For example, the past three months I have been working on a operations and financial model and business plan which secured millions in financing just this past week. It’s the culmination of up to 2 years worth of research, planning, and sales that I and 2 other key members spent to break into this market.
And I do this because the company is small - 13 people - and I’m responsible for every single one of them and their families. I’m responsible to Audrya, the daughter of one of the other 12 employees, who just got on health insurance for the first time in her 4 years of life. I’m responsible for Cathy, the wife of the company’s president. I’m responsible for my wife, the IT guys, the sales guys, because if I just worked 40 hours a week with the attitude “my time is my time”, there was a serious chance that the company would have failed. The work that needed to be done to get the financing would not have been done. This is a $200 million dollar opportunity, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to blow it, and if I do blow it, I’ll be double-damned if people will say it failed because JohnT didn’t spend the time needed to make it happen. I’ve had a business go under under me, and it was the worst experience of my life - I’ll be damned if it happens again.
And this is just the way I am - I was raised in a family of hard-working high achievers and I was/am expected to be just as hard-working and high achieving as them. Hell, I first started working M-F when I was four and my grandparents (who would have their grandkids over for the summer) put me to helping them work on their rental homes in Daytona Beach. By the time I was 8, I was laying sod and picking up trash at their mobile home park, and when I was 14 I helped rebuild their seawall, possibly the hardest single job I’ve ever worked - and you’re talking to somebody who’s spent 48+ hours at the office with my stepmother (on multiple occasions). 
Essentially, an ethic believing in the benefits of working long, hard, and smart (coupled with actually having to work at least long and hard) was just part of the environment I was raised within.
Lastly, and I don’t know if this is apropos of anything, but I am a person who likes making decisions, who likes the responsibility and the authority to get things done merely because I need to get them done, and has no problem taking responsibility when something goes wrong. I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew I didn’t want to be the guy who only took orders. However, if you like making decisions and actively seek jobs that allow you to make decisions, you tend not to be in jobs where you work just 40 hours a week.
