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If You Want to Earn More, Work Less

posted by on Monday January 16 2017, @07:15PM   
from the indispensible-employee dept.

mrpg writes:

When Stuart Nomimizu relocated from Birmingham, England, to Tokyo his friends and family in the UK started to worry. Not only did they rarely hear from him, but he seemed to always be at the office from early morning until very late at night. His working hours seemed so extreme, that they didn't always believe he was working as hard as he said.

To convince them, he documented one week of his life as a so-called "salaryman" in Tokyo's financial-services industry and posted it online so they could understand his new lifestyle.

The resulting video went viral on YouTube, racking up more than one million views. It depicts a hectic week in 2015 during the financial sector's busy season — from January to March — when Nomimizu clocked in 78 working hours and 35 sleeping hours between Monday and Saturday (before working another six hours that Sunday, which you don't see in the video).

[...] It got to the point where Nomimizu was putting in so many 80-hour work weeks that he fainted in his apartment one night and came-to right next to a TV stand, which he'd narrowly missed. When the rush period was finally over, he says the entire office got "horrendously sick."

While Nomimizu's excessive workload was somewhat temporary, he says "there are people working for companies in Tokyo that do that sort of workload and have that life day-in, day-out all year long." Indeed, marathon workdays are so entrenched in the culture that there's even a Japanese word, karoshi, that quite literally means "overwork death."

Source: If you want to earn more, work less

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Original Submission

• Re:...? Re:...? (Score: 5, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday January 16 2017, @11:03PM

  by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Monday January 16 2017, @11:03PM (#454585)

  I came back with lynx as TFA was unreadable* with scripts enabled:

  “We actually find that people who take more time off — 11 days or more
        — are more likely to get a raise or bonus than people who take 10 or
        fewer days,” says Katie Denis, lead researcher at Project: Time Off.

  *Running old under-clocked CPU at the moment

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+3
  Insightful=1, Informative=2, Total=3
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5

• Re:...? (Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday January 16 2017, @11:05PM

  by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Monday January 16 2017, @11:05PM (#454587)

  Further down

  While trading rest for unpaid overtime is clearly a bad deal for
        employees, it’s actually pretty lousy for employers, too. A Stanford
        University study found that employee output declines sharply after 50
        hours per week and nosedives after 56 hours to the point where someone
        who puts in 70 hours doesn’t produce anything more with those
        additional 14 hours. Similar studies have linked long hours with
        absenteeism, long-term memory loss and impaired decision-making skills.

  Parent