While talking to someone who moved from India to Europe, I learned that in Europe, if the work ends at 6 pm, you can’t schedule a call at 7:30 pm — people are fiercely protective of their time.
But on the flip side, people take their time commitments seriously. E.g., after a meeting, if people are assigned some tasks, they get things done within the specified timeline — escalations are uncommon.
In India, we have a more relaxed approach to time — we have no problem doing late evening calls but we will often need reminders to get the job done.
These differences are cultural but I suspect they do show one thing — when you know that things can be done late in the evening, they WILL get done late in the evening.
Late nights and long hours are mostly cultural rather than a direct consequence of the volume of work we have to do.
When we think we have all night, we lose focus and urgency. And then, as Parkinson’s Law says — work expands to fill the time given for its completion.
– Rajan