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The Compelling Case For Working Less (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from the BBC, written by Amanda Ruggeri: As we fill our days with more and more "doing," many of us are finding that non-stop activity isn't the apotheosis of productivity. It is its adversary. Researchers are learning that it doesn't just mean that the work we produce at the end of a 14-hour day is of worse quality than when we're fresh. This pattern of working also undermines our creativity and our cognition. Over time, it can make us feel physically sick -- and even, ironically, as if we have no purpose. Think of mental work as doing push-ups, says Josh Davis, author of Two Awesome Hours. Say you want to do 10,000. The most 'efficient' way would be to do them all at once without a break. We know instinctively, though, that that is impossible. Instead, if we did just a few at a time, between other activities and stretched out over weeks, hitting 10,000 would become far more feasible. "The brain is very much like a muscle in this respect," Davis writes. "Set up the wrong conditions through constant work and we can accomplish little. Set up the right conditions and there is probably little we can't do." Many of us, though, tend to think of our brains not as muscles, but as a computer: a machine capable of constant work. Not only is that untrue, but pushing ourselves to work for hours without a break can be harmful, some experts say. Ruggeri goes on to highlight the negative health effects associated with working long hours. "One meta-analysis found that long working hours increased the risk of coronary heart disease by 40% -- almost as much as smoking (50%)," she writes. "Another found that people who worked long hours had a significantly higher risk of stroke, while people who worked more than 11 hours a day were almost 2.5 times more likely to have a major depressive episode than those who worked seven to eight."
Until you get fired and replaced by an immigrant who works more for less.
We're productive enough as a society that we could probably get by on a 20 hour work week.
So what happens then? Well, it's obviously fairly sustainable to work 40 hours per week... so someone's going to get two jobs with opposing schedules so they can have a nicer house.
When they do that, someone else won't have a job opportunity and they'll lower their income expectations. The economy will slowly adjust to the practical reality that people will work 40 hours a week for a standard wage, and then 20 hours won't be enough for food and shelter any longer and everyone will have to have two jobs instead of one.
Then you're right back to where we are now.
...Europe is falling far behind the United States in productivity and wealth.
No, this is why Europe has a different definition of "wealth".
Wealth gained from unrealistic productivity goals become pointless if you ultimately end up pissing it away fixing the medical issues caused by pushing yourself too hard. Retirement goals also become pointless if you're dead before then.
Even TFS makes the detriment to health very clear, and I have zero fucking desire to hand over half a century of retirement nest egg to the Medical Industrial Complex. I guarantee that maintaining good physical and mental health will become your most valuable asset later in life.
Besides, humans better start accepting a 20-hour workweek as normal, especially as automation and AI march on to decimate human employment.
This is indeed true and backed up by studies and experiments.
The 8 hour work day is by and large a remnant of the industrialization when factories needed to be ran in 3 shifts. When you're talking about a monotonous, assembly line type of a job, 8 hours lets you get by with just 3 shifts instead of 4 which saves cost and the productivity difference in those kinds of jobs was not too noticeable.
However, when you start talking about anything that requires more than performing a simple manual task over and over again, 8 hours starts to be too much. When you combine this with the fact that the need for time-consuming manual tasks is going down as automation and AIs increase it starts to make even more sense to cut down the length of the workday.
Personally as a project manager on almost all days I can get the relevant stuff done in 6 hours or under, the main exceptions being the days when there happens to be several meetings that require travelling between locations, and even then the extra time is spent on the road instead of doing something productive. I'd happily have my work time reduced to 6 hours provided the pay stays the same. And herein lies the core problem with this situation: we know that cutting down work time will increase efficiency, but we still evaluate and pay workers based on 'time spent at workstation' so the intuition of corporations is that if worktime is cut, pay must also be cut.
In other words: the basic assumption that people are paid 'for their time' needs to be done away with in knowledge work especially and replaced with paying people for working outcomes.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The study assumes that employers want to treat their employees as human beings. In the United States, employees are inconvenient, failure-prone devices that insist on receiving a few dollars in pay for the work they do. This puts an unfair limit on the employer's ability to make money.
So if an employee has a heart attack or a stroke, or suffers from depression...that's their problem. If one of them occasionally loses their shit and goes on a killing spree...it's not going to be the CEO who gets shot.
So the hours an employee works need to be whatever the employer says. If an employer wants 60 hour weeks with another 10 hours of tacked-on, uncompensated "setup time", the employees should just shut up and thank god they have jobs.
And no health care. That could raise corporate taxes, and it's better for America if the employees die off when they can't work anymore.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
...Europe is falling far behind the United States in productivity and wealth.
No, this is why Europe has a different definition of "wealth".
Wealth gained from unrealistic productivity goals become pointless if you ultimately end up pissing it away fixing the medical issues caused by pushing yourself too hard. Retirement goals also become pointless if you're dead before then.
Even TFS makes the detriment to health very clear, and I have zero fucking desire to hand over half a century of retirement nest egg to the Medical Industrial Complex. I guarantee that maintaining good physical and mental health will become your most valuable asset later in life.
Besides, humans better start accepting a 20-hour workweek as normal, especially as automation and AI march on to decimate human employment.
Absolutely. Health is real wealth. I saw a figure the other day that USA spends 3 trillion on medical problems. I dunno if that's a made up figure, but even if only a quarter of that...
I mean, I gather in UK, when the NHS was founded, it cost, in today's money, 20 billion. Now it is costing 120 billion... and basically, there is no more money, nor any sign of that rise stopping anytime soon.
And here I don't particularly care about left or right politics -- the politics of how to fund that bill is hardly relevant when the main problem is that the bill is crippling, whether public or private. Neocons can bang on about the NHS being "inefficient" and meanwhile the socially-conscious can go on about "cuts" -- but if everyone in the country is sick, who is going to look after them? Half of NHS workers are obese.
Heart disease is linked to stress. Diabetes, obesity, and dementia are becoming more linked to diet (a diet full of processed cheap carbs and seed oils for the profit of multinationals).
And we work ourselves to a miserable decrepit age. Instead of dying healthy, we drag our our remaining years at incredible expense to society.
I mean, I could go on.
Doctors are starting to say that the NHS needs to become about health, wellbeing, and prevention, rather than trying to cure the results of bad lifestyle with expensive interventions and drugs.
Cost per head healthcare in the uk is 1/4 that of US and acheives better outcomes and 100% coverage of the population. Inefficiency is what you get when you slap a layer of insurance admin and marketing on top.
The editor just wanted to use the word "apotheosis" in a sentence. :)
I've been reading western topics like this for a good 15 years now and, quite frankly, I don't believe North Americans are actually working more but rather they're occupying more of their time with work because they're working less.
For a good span of my life I had worked in IT and had to spend a good chunk of my time evaluating web logs for management and I would easily say that the majority of office workers with PCs would waste a huge chunk of time browsing Facebook, forums, baby sites, wedding sites, stock sites, local news sites, sports sites, dating sites, etc., etc. Hell, plenty of people paid their electric, gas, credit card, etc., bills at work as though they didn't have the internet at home... and the porn. I can't count the number of men that had porn stashes on their computers.
Certainly the amount of time wasn't consistent across the board and for some of these folks it was only 15 - 30 minutes a day on someone else's dime devoted to personal browsing but for many it was up to 2 hours. I'd say the average was an hour. And what else could they be doing at work? Are they conducting personal affairs over the phone?
The point I'm making has less to do with how pervasive internet slacking is in work environments that use computers but to question how many people are suffering because they're doing too little work at work?
I wonder how many people have died because you made bad decisions. If you're a doctor, then you know the research about fatigue and human error is irrefutable, and it indicates that over time, tired people make more mistakes.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Yes, we have way fewer billionaires.
Granted, we also have way fewer working poor...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.