Understanding the existence of MEDs and thinking about the risks in going over them are crucial critical thinking tools, necessary to cobble together a good life. (If you have a good life without the need for that critical thinking, then you should be thankful that you were raised in the best of families, one that ignored the culture around them and gave you everything you needed by habit. For the rest of us, we'll have to think and reflect.) In the modern world, we are for the most part blind to minimum effective doses, having much to do with the kind of de-skilling necessary to make consumerism (and our job system) work.
Show me a workaholic, and I'll show you someone jeopardizing their relationships with friends and family. What is more, a workaholic often engages in behaviors that endanger the work itself. From the book Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (pg 25):
Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.
They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.In all things, locate the minimum effective dose.
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Update.
The MED is connected to the concept of Slack, as presented on Less Wrong. This comment also helps add domain-specific rigor:
If you work with distributed systems, by which I mean any system that must pass information between multiple, tightly integrated subsystems, there is a well understood concept of maximum sustainable load and we know that number to be roughly 60% of maximum possible load for all systems.
[. . . ]
"Slack" is a decent way of putting this, but we can be pretty precise and say you need ~40% slack to optimize throughput: more and you tip into being "lazy", less and you become "overworked".
