General > General Technical Chat
Elon Musk is a nice chap
tom66:
--- Quote from: james_s on December 12, 2022, 03:36:42 am ---Or because after thousands of years of society, once people starting looking at these things scientifically 40 hours turned out to be where productivity peaked. There are only so many hours in a day, life is too short to spend all of it at work. There's no prize at the end for having pissed away the most hours slaving away at a job.
--- End quote ---
"Nobody lie on their death bed wishing they spent more time in the office"
PlainName:
--- Quote ---There's no prize at the end for having pissed away the most hours slaving away at a job
--- End quote ---
The hours we work are generally not related to what we'd like to do, so that's a bit of a non sequitur.
--- Quote ---once people starting looking at these things scientifically 40 hours turned out to be where productivity peaked
--- End quote ---
Do you know of any such studies? Another possibility is that it splits the day suspiciously evenly: one third to sleep, one third to work, one third argue on the internet. (Although most people think they spend a third working but actually it's more because of commuting.)
tooki:
--- Quote from: PlainName on December 12, 2022, 11:03:43 am ---
--- Quote ---There's no prize at the end for having pissed away the most hours slaving away at a job
--- End quote ---
The hours we work are generally not related to what we'd like to do, so that's a bit of a non sequitur.
--- Quote ---once people starting looking at these things scientifically 40 hours turned out to be where productivity peaked
--- End quote ---
Do you know of any such studies? Another possibility is that it splits the day suspiciously evenly: one third to sleep, one third to work, one third argue on the internet. (Although most people think they spend a third working but actually it's more because of commuting.)
--- End quote ---
Literally just Google “ how many hours work daily for peak productivity” and you’ll find numerous studies.
Upshot is, we can only do 5-6h of peak performance. The 6th-8th hours we aren’t nearly as productive, and once it gets to 10-11h, productivity drops off a cliff.
In other words, after 6h, the output per h drops at an increasing rate, negating some of the benefits of working longer.
It also depends on the kind of work: extremely focused work (air traffic controllers, simultaneous interpreters) can only be done for about 2h without a break before focus fails and mistakes occur. Studying is similar: you can only do 2-3h of really effective studying without a break, which is why cramming for an exam for 8h is pointless: the marginal benefit of hours 4-8 are minimal. Whereas with e.g. manual labor or retail sales, later (fatigued) hours won’t be massively worse than earlier (fresh) ones, with anything where you have to really think, long days don’t make sense. It’s consuming more of the employees’ time without improving total productivity.
Kasper:
Working late is an exercise in diminishing returns. The percent increase in work becomes smaller while the percent decrease in free time becomes larger.
8 hours work and 8 hours sleep makes it seem as though we have 8 hours free time but half of that is spent on things that are somewhat necessary: commuting, cooking/eating, waking up, getting ready for work, getting ready for bed, housework, exercising, etc. We can call some of those things hobbies but their mandatory nature makes their classification as 'free time' debatable.
That leaves only about 4 hours for free time. Working just 25% more, cuts our free time on work days in half and makes it impossible to do hobbies that require more than 2 hours.
PlainName:
--- Quote ---Literally just Google “ how many hours work daily for peak productivity” and you’ll find numerous studies.
--- End quote ---
If I came up with some definitive statement about something that you took issue with, you would ream me out for suggesting you do my research for me. He raised the studies so he should point to them if they exist. He can google if he wants.
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