But it seems 5-6 hours a day is the max for a so-called ‘knowledge worker’:<\/p>\n
Bring back the 40-hour work week On the few days I have been focused on work (I haven’t liked the jobs I have held for more than a decade and have reluctantly decided that the best I can look forward to is not being miserable) and actually doing development I have found that I can fly along for just about 5 or 6 hours and all the sudden it is like a switch has been thrown and I am done for the day. Sometimes I can do some thinking or planning and very occasionally some high level design work, but my ability to effectively respond to the information supplied by the debugger or my program output has basically reached zero. Having been bombarded with stories of programmers going on all night ‘hack attacks’ and churning out piles of code, I have always felt rather inadequate. I have noticed, though, that, in keeping with most of my bosses comments, the product I put out on an on-going basis is quite superior to most of my peers. I have tended to notice that the more ‘inspirational’ a coding style a developer has the more likely he (it always seems to be ‘he’, though there is clearly a sex bias in the world of professional programming) is to check crap code into the repo and then go home at 3 in the morning leaving the mess for someone like me to clean up. So, perhaps my feelings of inadequacy have been misplaced all these years and I have been comparing myself with people who actually do the worst work. <\/p>\n Anyway, I have been a worker in high labor environments (assembly lines, fast food, etc.) and the exhaustion is totally different than working as a programmer. If I am working on an interesting problem (something that, sadly, rarely happens) I actually get energy from the work (even if I am past my 5-6 hours of useful coding) and can take that energy and go walking or jogging or whatever. Conversely, if I am not working on anything interesting (the majority of the past decade), I am so mentally exhausted when I get home that I have to force myself to go exercise (which, fortunately, almost always improves my mood). When I did physical labor, I often was too tired to do exercise when I was done, but I don’t recall having the mental exhaustion and being unable to be interested in things. <\/p>\n As a person who has studied management extensively (why is it so common that people with absolutely no management education are routinely promoted to management positions? No one would expect to promote an unskilled janitor to senior technical lead, would they?) I was already aware of a lot of the topics in the article. Effective management is maximizing the return on your resources and if you can get more work out of fewer people working less hours, then that is exactly what you would do. Of course, with the yawning ignorance of the typical ‘manager’ seen today, it is clear why they continue to work so sub-optimally: they were hired by people who suck equally at being a manager and their promotion decisions will be made by the same ignorant louts who hired them, so there is a massive reinforcing cycle going on. There is so much room in most industries for someone who can actually manage that one could probably simply purchase any company at random, implement effective management, and see the value of the company double in a few years. Too bad our entire culture has devolved to the point that all our hard won knowledge on how to effectively manage has been lost through serial ignorance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" But it seems 5-6 hours a day is the max for a so-called ‘knowledge worker’: Bring back the 40-hour work week 150 years of research proves that long hours at work kill profits, productivity and employees http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2012\/03\/14\/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week\/singleton\/ On the few days I have been focused on work (I haven’t liked the jobs I have held … Continue reading “I always thought I was a slacker”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-psychology","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":735,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions\/735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n150 years of research proves that long hours at work kill profits, productivity and employees
\nhttp:\/\/www.salon.com\/2012\/03\/14\/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week\/singleton\/<\/a><\/p>\n