I tend to be intuitively skeptical of people saying negative things about “workaholism,” “perfectionism,” etc. To first order it seems like the best way to accomplish your goals is to work really hard, and you’d expect people to come up with a lot of self-serving reasons that isn’t true.
I do think there’s an adjacent concept that I undervalued for a while which is like, tying too much of your self-worth to your work productivity can make you end up doing kind of bad things, like:
- cab driver’s fallacy
- overweighting visible and measurable output
- fear of branching out and doing things outside your normal scope
just sitting down and thinking for a while doesn’t “feel like work” but often it is Actually Good and you come up with new ideas that make the rest of your time much more effectively spent