I would never claim that I work harder than average for people on my experiment, but I do think I work stranger hours. I’m likely to check my email first thing in the morning, rather than waiting to get to work, or before I go to bed when I come home exhausted from a Friday night party. And, if there’s something quick that needs to be done, I generally do it immediately.
What could persuade me to do work at such odd hours? Well, remember, ATLAS is a world-spanning collaboration. My collaborators may be working at any time, whether it’s day or night for me, and we have computers doing testing, simulation, and analysis for us continuously. A colleague of mine might need help before he can continue his work; one of the professors I’m working with back in Berkeley might have some time to investigate a problem I found, if only I’ll give her more information about it; the disk that stores the results for a software testing suite might be about to fill up. If I update myself at the right time and take action, my colleagues can get their work done (or help me), the software tests can proceed without problems, and so on.
I would almost never miss a dinner with friends, a hike, or a weekend trip to do work. But between those things, a quick email check and a little effort on my part can make a larger difference in the work done by the collaboration as a whole. Nothing I can do will make a big difference for the experiment, but when others do the same, it adds up.
I support strange hours for several reasons: one, nobody bothers you if you’re there Saturday afternoon, and if you’re there Saturday afternoon you can take a Wednesday afternoon off once in a while in exchange and maybe make it to the dry cleaner’s that has regular business hours or when it’s less busy. Two, for some people that’s just when they are more productive, and it’s no good making them come in between 9 and 5 if they’re going to be zombies for the first half of that. Three, you’re absolutely right about ten minutes of work not being worth the same as ten minutes of work at a different time–staying the last two hours on a Friday can allow the three people that wwere waiting for your submission to a particular report, or for one last piece of data so they can make slides for a talk, is much more important than sticking around twice as long “just so you can look like you’re there”.
No point in saving the work for Monday if you can quickly get it done on Saturday morning, I agree. Or late at night. I do the same thing.
On the other hand, it’s nice if people don’t count on me being available all the time. Sometimes I like to just disappear in my spare time.
So, in my opinion, working strange hours is all good, as long as I can more or less decide for myself. (Detector shifts are an exception. And emergencies. Like being run coordinator over Christmas…)