In my case, I’ve learned the hard way that your time off is the one investment guaranteed to pay off. Worse still, the risk of NOT limiting work is significantly higher than the minute chance of striking gold during extra hours you cheat yourself & your familiy from against your better judgement.

There’s an awesome passage on slowing down at work at Eknath Easwaran’s site:

“At work, as elsewhere, we need to cultivate discrimination so we can decide what is important and then proceed to do it at a moderate pace. Hurried work and work done under pressure yield no joy, and that may be why so many of us don’t even associate joy with work. We expect to find happiness after we leave for the day. But all truly creative people know that no sharp line lies between work and other activities. Work should challenge us – be difficult, if you will – but that is no reason for us not to find satisfaction in it. Quite the contrary.”

I gather that once we get good at this, we get more work of import done, not less.