No one seems to have mentioned the value of the work done. Like market value or impact. The quantity of work is kind of a distraction, and focusing on it implicitly says that presentalism is ok. Which is not true.
Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
81–90 of 198 posts
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#82Does this include side projects? ie if you work 10 hours/week on a side project you shouldn't work more than 30 in your job. Maybe employers should be able to ban side projects for this reason.
Maybe if you don't want any good employees
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#83I love how things like the 40 hour work week with two days off get enshrined as some kind of natural phenomenon that has always been with us. 40 hours is an arbitrary number that came from trade unionists demanding fair hours and Robert Owen's slogan: “Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” I mean those two things: 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep have been considered to be the biological/…
Can you elaborate on what you believe to be the reasons you're able to work productively for 12 hours a day? I'd love to have that superpower.
Couldn't tell you for certain. Probably some combination of genetics and intense training, with previous periods of long sustained critical work.
Often I find I compare whatever my current situation I'm in, with previous tough situations I've dealt with, and know that if I made it through those, then my current situation is tractable.
On multiple occasions in a previous life I've worked multiple 24-36 straight hours doing intense cognitive and physically intensive work for multiple crises in Korea, Iraq and other wartime places. So that's a good benchmark to compare to.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#84TL;DR: you can get more done if you work 60 hours instead of 40 hours in a week, but the work done in that extra 20 hours might be a small fraction of what gets done in 20 hours during a 40 hour week. This is self-evidently true for many jobs. E.g., if you pick apples for 40 hours, then even if you only pick one apple per hour after that, you will still pick more apples working 50 hours than 40. We software developer…
At my previous work, we attempted to find the correlation between faulty code and the time of commit in the version control. Most bugs were written after 14:00. (And no: we didn't check-in all code at the end of the day).
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#8540 hours per week is detrimental to the health as well, especially if you don't take breaks where you exercise vigorously. I've seen research that showed a 4% reduction in lifespan for people that worked 45 hours versus 40. I'll look for it and be back with more details.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
60 hours weeks aren't sustainable, but just look at teams during crunch weeks. They sure get a lot of work done. Sometimes you've just got to put the hours and effort in to get the work done on time. Now I quit very quickly after doing stupid hours a week. But I'd like to think the work produced was fine. Not that much different to a normal week. The work was all planned in detail, there weren't any big surprises, ju…
How much of that extra work was because of the extra hours put in and how much was because people work harder when deadlines are close?
I was talking with a colleague the other day about "strategies for how to focus for 4 straight hours".
The one that works best for me is for the deadline to be 4 hours and 15 minutes away.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great insight! You can see this not only at the macro level (Google winning all of search by being marginally better than competitors), but at the micro level (top employee out of a team of 10 gets the bonus/promotion while everyone else gets nothing), and probably everywhere in between. What I wonder is: Is this really an intrinsic quality of capitalism? What causes this "winner take most" reward system emerging in…
yes i wonder about that too. i never thought of myself as someone interested in economics, but i guess thats where you'd look for answers to why some markets are weighted towards winner take all and some aren't. my guess off the top is that it has to do with how easy it is to switch between two competing products, and how economies of scale work in the industry. if there is a big economy of scale, and its easy to swi…
I think the more fundamental connection is that when goods are perfect subsitutes for each other, under perfect information you always choose the "cheaper" good (where "cheap" is defined by whatever metric you're using).
Somewhat ironically, this fact actually has connections to the concept of dual variables in constrained optimization problems, the theory of which was largely developed in the Soviet Union for use in central planning.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Semi-true; it depends how the extra 20 hours are spent for myself. I've had weeks where I program 60 hours or more and it's all spent well, and then the next week I might be a little more burnt out.. take it a little easier and then sprint again.
Which goes towards 60 hour weeks are not sustainable...
A have a couple friends who work dawn until dusk for their startup. After several months they struggled with depression and managing their work life. After a little over a year they've adjusted and it's just routine.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#89During WW2, the government wanted to increase production, so did some studies. They found that a 60 hr week boosted production for a couple weeks, but then it fell below what was produced by a 40 hr week.
The solution to a sustained increase in output was to do 60 hr weeks in bursts, not continuously.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#90I love how things like the 40 hour work week with two days off get enshrined as some kind of natural phenomenon that has always been with us. 40 hours is an arbitrary number that came from trade unionists demanding fair hours and Robert Owen's slogan: “Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” I mean those two things: 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep have been considered to be the biological/…
Can you elaborate on what you believe to be the reasons you're able to work productively for 12 hours a day? I'd love to have that superpower.
The secret according to my business professor who was an electrical engineer, a sniper in the military, and started a multimillion dollar PE firm, and sleeps <6 hours every night: eat more.