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I procrastinated myself right out of grad school. (A null result didn't help -- no epic papers to be had, so supervisor was disinterested.) Nevertheless, it's a bad habit.
In industry, constantly being in crunch mode helps, because you never have time to procrastinate.
Having "constantly being in crunch mode" as a part of ones life sounds like it would slowly choke a persons soul to death and one day it would just be "life".
It really depends on who you're working for an what industry you're in.
I'm in geoscience. When I was in near surface geophysics consulting, the industry version looks like: you're deployed in the morning to do data collection (leave your hotel). Spend the day in the bush (not really a procrastination opportunity when you're walking around with a magnetometer -- you just walk). Then you get back, dump the data to your laptop and go get dinner. In the evening, you plot the data up as a QA pass, just to make sure there are no gaps or whatever. (Some procrastinating opportunities here, but they're small.) Next day you repeat until you've covered your survey area.
Maximum 21 days in a row. You bank OT hours at 1.5x, so your 12 hour days is 8 hours salary, plus 4x1.5=6 hours banked. Weekend was 12x1.5=16 hours banked. 12x7 hours worked in a week (84 hours) means 66 hours banked.
When you get back to town, you make a report. Usually you've got a budget of about 8-16 hours to turn around the report, but they're so similar to each other than it's almost assembly line. It's not like writing a paper where it's original work. The equations exist, you just have to make the maps, and interpret them. So a day or two in the office. After that, you have 66 hours banked, so you take a week and a half off and still make your salary.
Lather rinse repeat.
I've worked in government geoscience offices and that same report that takes industry two days would take a government geologist a month. In grad school, you could get a whole M.Sc. off of that single site, stretching it out over a year or two! But you'd be expected to reinvent the wheel on all the processing and interpretation because it needs to be "novel" somehow.
In my first year after leaving grad school, I spent 7 months in the field. It was absolutely amazing. I got to travel everywhere, collect, process and report on dozens of unique targets using unique instruments. It was so much better than aimless procrastination.
But I do miss the academic community for the discussions that occurred at pubs, general inquisitiveness of people, and I loved seminars and talks and just being a knowledge sponge.
depends on who you’re working for an what industry you’re in.
Then I'm misunderstanding you - I've only ever heard the word associated with programming and in that context it's mostly negative. I've been in similar situations as you describe, where the extra worktime/load is compensated for with more time off and a higher per-hour wage. With the extra time off people don't have to be in "job-mode" all the time and over all it seems like a different, but still balanced relationship between personal and professional life.
When people talk about "crunch" I'm basically thinking work in front of the computer, eat take-away and sleep under the desk 24/7 until the project is done. Often for months at a time, with the only compensation being monetary - No time off to balance out the workload.
What you're describing seems more like jobs so "adventurous" that they don't fit inside the standard 9-5 box rather than the crunch I'm thinking of. Walking around in the woods with a magnetometer is a grand adventure compared to debugging code for 18 hrs. a day.
I do that too. But I started my own business now, later in my career, and crunch time is of my own choosing. And weirdly, I'm most effective as a coder when binge coding -- probably something about the context switching penalties.