Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is full-time work bad for our brains?

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 229 posts

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#51

Post by Retric »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #46
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so sure that this is a bad thing for our brains? I find it difficult to tell what is work and what isn't (I work from home). I wonder how studies like this make that distinction. As you say, being at your workplace doesn't necesarily mean you're actually working.

Working from home is unique - many people find lines getting blurred. The bigger difference is in what your downtime is like. Working from home, you can eat or listen to music or go out of the house to the doctor's office. Take a shower, lounge about, talk to the kids or wife or friends or simply goof off. In the office, you still have to be in the office and looking like you are being productive. Maybe you have to b…

Pretending to work often ends up as long term low level stress which is surprisingly bad for you.

Stress is there to deal with physical lions; think long term sacrifice for short term survival not superpowers. The extreme version might be combat, but hyper awareness around threats can apply for much longer periods. Sure, a few hours a week is no big deal, but that's not 4-10 hours a day for decades.

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#52

Post by ethbro »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #21
mhurron wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing you don't work in a globally distributed company, nothing could get done. Maybe you should look into technologies like email that allows people to send messages that can be responded to when the person has the time.

Adding a 12-hour round-trip to any question doesn't seem like a good alternative. Isn't it a given that very few companies actually are hiring the top 0.01%? Unless you really need the absolute world best, you're probably going to do fine hiring local people who can work together closely.

I've found that adding {floor} round-trip to any questions someone could have figured out by reading the first result on a search to be excellent for the productivity of all involved.

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#53

Post by drawnwren »

stronglikedan wrote: post #28
jdc0589 wrote: post #27

My brain usually goes in to "prepare to shut-down" mode every day at about 3:30pm (having started work at ~9am). I tend to have slow mornings, and stay pretty busy/head-down for the last half of that time. The funny thing is, it doesn't really matter if I was busy working on hard technical challenges all day, or just reading articles/browsing the web; my brain shuts down the same time regardless.

This sounds like it could be a diet thing. Have you tried eating different things for lunch to see if that affects your mid-afternoon mood?

Do you have any good resources for diet things? I'm interested in this.

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#54

Post by BjoernKW »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #5

Stretching 2 hours of work into an 8-9 hour day through meetings and sneaky Reddit/hn usage is certainly bad for our brains. But this is the norm as long as managers interpret productivity as butts in seats.

As much as I agree with that I'm still at a loss as to why butts in seats management is still so dominant today.

It's almost as if everybody wakes up, reads Dilbert every morning thinking "Wow, that PHB guy certainly is a role model to aspire to."

It's not as if these patterns can't be changed:

The required technology has been available for more than a decade now.

There are tried and tested approaches for organizing work in a more productive and healthy manner than 9-5.

Still, it isn't happening at a larger scale. While the reasons might simply be risk-aversion or - on a more sinister note - a somewhat implicit understanding that our society is built around a 40 hr work week and we'd face serious upheaval if that was no longer a given, I find those reasons to be tenuous at best in the long run.

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#55

Post by superuser2 »

jrcii wrote: post #9
up_and_up wrote: post #7

This is why companies need to be "results driven" vs "face-time driven". "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included.

I always wonder what percentage of corporate America's time is spent looking busy or alt-tabbing between a spreadsheet and solitaire when the boss walks by. If you could quantify it I bet the amount of waste is staggering.

Except employers can't capture the value of eliminating that waste, because people who can actually do 40 hours of head-down intellectual work in a 40-hour workday are unicorns.

It's employees who get screwed by this - if their managers are too concerned about waste, they can't do anything like read a book or go for a walk, so they're on Facebook and Reddit, which are much less effective as breaks from focused work.

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#56

Post by bdavisx »

lj3 wrote: post #50
whack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included. Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless. If you buy into that camp, and if someone under-delivers, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not they are performing poorly. They could simply be t…

What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team? Since profit is the real measure of success, it makes sense to use that as the metric. Measuring individual contributions is problematic, no matter the system you use. Measuring based on the entire team is much easier.

That won't work for all jobs - I work in the actuarial department for a (very) large insurance company. We can't directly affect profit. You could argue for whether or not our projections are correct, but they can be affected by many things out of our control.

I'm guessing that's true for a lot of areas in a large company. What about the department that takes care of buildings or HR for example?

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#57

Post by Joof »

lj3 wrote: post #50
whack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included. Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless. If you buy into that camp, and if someone under-delivers, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not they are performing poorly. They could simply be t…

What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team? Since profit is the real measure of success, it makes sense to use that as the metric. Measuring individual contributions is problematic, no matter the system you use. Measuring based on the entire team is much easier.

Some projects aren't directly profitable, but are important and must be done. Infosec for example. Using this metric, important jobs may not get done.

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#58

Post by Moshe_Silnorin »

Kinnard wrote: post #45
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as you think this is here, trust me Korea is worse.

I've gotten this sentiment before. Does it appear to be improving at all in Korea?

If you look at the younger generation, I doubt it. Korea is a wonderful country full of extremely bright and nice people. But they're caught in an education arms race that is legitimately terrifying. Kids are schooled with incredible tenacity from 9 to 5 and then once they are finished school they attend night classes and weekend classes. I think putting a much higher weight on fluid intelligence over crystallized intelligence in the CSAT might be useful for mitigating this dynamic. However, I'm not sure what could be done do avoid the equally terrifying working hours dynamic.

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#59

Post by 127001brewer »

drawnwren wrote: post #53
stronglikedan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like it could be a diet thing. Have you tried eating different things for lunch to see if that affects your mid-afternoon mood?

Do you have any good resources for diet things? I'm interested in this.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

http://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?

#60

Post by dragonwriter »

lj3 wrote: post #50
whack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included. Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless. If you buy into that camp, and if someone under-delivers, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not they are performing poorly. They could simply be t…

What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team? Since profit is the real measure of success, it makes sense to use that as the metric. Measuring individual contributions is problematic, no matter the system you use. Measuring based on the entire team is much easier.

> What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team?

That can still be hard to accurately measure. You can measure, of course, how much revenue was attributed to sales of the product developed by the team, but how much of that is attributable to the team's work and how much is attributable to company-wide marketing and how much is due to company image developed by public experience with products developed by other teams is...not always readily obvious. (And, of course, then you have teams that aren't devoted to particular products or which provide company-wide services supporting product teams, but not directly generating revenue -- unless, of course, you organize your company so that accounting, HR, marketing, etc., are all broken up and product-team specific.)

Of course, if you measure by the entire company a lot of that uncertainty gets washed out.

Post reply on HN