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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-business-says-a-4-day-week-with-pay-for-5-works/
The idea sprang from research that found people are typically engaged at work for fewer than three hours a day, said Perpetual Guardian founder Andrew Barnes. He said he started to think about the pressures that employees are under -- sick kids or waiting for the plumber -- and how those stresses affect productivity and cut back on hours spent in the office.
For some of us, less stress results in better sleep, resulting in fewer mistakes and more productivity.
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Work Fewer Hours, yet be More Productive
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday July 22 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)
Managers are of course noted for significantly stupid beliefs. For instance, many really do believe slaves make better, more reliable workers than free people. And, they don't quite realize or understand that they believe in slavery, and certainly won't admit to it, not in the Land of the Free. A closely related belief is that people are by nature lazy and have to be prodded and goaded to get work done, and that they will goof off whenever the boss isn't watching. In the dynamic of carrot vs stick, they believe far more in the stick.
A century ago, getting a majority on board with the idea of the 40 hour work week was huge, and not easily done. Before that, they would have workers putting in absolutely insane hours, like 12 hours/day every day of the week, except Sunday when you only had to work 8 hours so you had time to go to church. Day of rest, you know. Management had to be shown, over and over, that productivity was so much better that overall, more work actually got done than if the workers put in significantly more hours. It's counterintuitive-- surely if productivity was only a little less, the extra hours would be more than enough to raise the overall output above that of the 40 hour/week crowd? But now it seems those findings have been forgotten, and a new generation of managers is learning that all over again.
It's the mistakes that destroy productivity. It takes only one serious mistake to waste a whole lot of hours, and mistakes happen a lot more often when workers are tired. Bad mistakes are like finding out, 3/4 of the way through your Marathon run, that you're racing down the wrong race track, took a wrong turn somewhere early.
It's then all too typical for management to whine about the need for sleep, and wish they could find workers who could do with less. Another unfair wish is for workers to stay single and never have those distractions and timesinks otherwise known as children. For the women workers, they begrudge accommodating those who become pregnant, and would rather have no women at all on the workforce than put up with that. The potty break is another interruption that the unreasonable manager hates, and they'll get all suspicious that workers are taking extended breaks for that and want to time them and even spy on them in the bathroom, for evidence that they are slacking, of course! Something else that quietly happened was the elimination of the paid lunch break. It used to be "working 9 to 5", just like the song says. Somehow that was changed to 8 to 5 with an unpaid hour break for lunch. And then, to show your dedication, it wouldn't hurt to work through your lunch hour, stay at your post and gobble down a few granola bars during a 5 minute break and calling that lunch.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pdfernhout on Sunday July 22 2018, @10:30PM
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep [goodreads.com]
"An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.