If I could pick one of the things to optimize all of society around, it would be sleep. I believe that many of society's ills can be traced back to people being sleep deprived on average. Modern society both ignorantly and through sheer foolishness undervalues sleep. I understand the emotional motivation for a statement like, "you can sleep when you're dead," but I do despise this prevelant sentiment which has become a culutre.
Joke's on you, I already feel dead from not sleeping :(
I also don't identify with that statement at all. As someone who doesn't sleep enough, I'd rather quality over quantity - less hours awake but make them more enjoyable.
It is so easy to get stuck in a rut where you barely have the energy to execute your daily loop of necessities and end up making no progress towards longer term goals.
In Australia, stores are typically still open 9am-5pm which is a relic of a time when housewives dropped the kids off and went shopping. Now that many of us have jobs this should be the first and easiest thing to change. Even 10am-6pm would be a massive improvement for both the workers and customers.
In Poland, chain and franchised grocery stores were smart enough to go into two-shift mode, and are generally open from 6am to 10pm. However, most other stores - and more importantly, services sector, banks and government offices - were not. They work 8 hours a day, smack in the middle of everyone else's workday. It's no surprise so many people in their 20s-40s want to do everything on-line, because it's either that, or taking days off at work for errands (and while you can do some things on Saturdays, banks and government offices don't work over weekends).
This is IMO stupid, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the society should be run in mandatory shifts. I can't understand why the market won't fix that itself? Why leave all that money on the table? There is huge demand for services open outside regular office working hours. For instance, personally, I chose dentists by their opening hours - most of the money I spent on dental was with a place where I could come at 8pm. In pre-Internet banking era, I would've picked the bank that had branches open past 5pm, if any existed. I don't shop at places open 9-5, because I only have time earlier than that, or later than that. Etc.
> I can't understand why the market won't fix that itself?
They are more interested in making LED signs showing temperature and how to squize more money from customers. I call this "PRL" mentality, they want to get money directly, not indirectly by making themselves better for clients. They don't care about clients, because their performance is measured with money and opening for more hours will cost money in short term.
Do they need to be open for more hours? What's the point of being open during hours that nobody but unemployed and retired people can use your business? Instead open at 3pm and close at 11pm. I'd love 6am-9am & 5pm - 11pm but that's probably not practical.
Our society is so focused on productivity that we forget that the foundation for improved productivity is sleep, exercise and diet. Mind & Body, one system.
Personally being a tech worker in Silicon Valley, I’ve found the big barrier to this now to be cultural and personal. All my companies (large and small) have had incredibly relaxed policies around when to arrive, leave, remote work, time off, bereavement. Even in what have been SRE or Software Eng roles with on-call. I get the sense that if I’m doing my work, I could do whatever I want. But I still feel some pressure, some voice in the back of my head that thinks other people will look down on me or I won’t be deserving my high salary. Like anytime I have downtime I feel guilty, and I see others behave the same way.
Am I the only one who feels like a 40 hour work week is excessive? I feel like 8 hours of work in a day is eeking out diminishing returns on a persons productivity.
Secondly, if you account for "productivity" hours instead of "waking" hours. You spend more of your "productive" capable hours in your life working, by a large margin.
Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain /shrug.
I have noticed that a lot of people treat work as a social event. They spent a significant amount of their day shooting the shit. As an introvert who can't stand smalltalk, I don't. I think 40 hours or more makes sense for employees who spend half of their day chatting or surfing the internet. When I'm at work, I am working. I still do more than 40 hours, but I'm not sure if it's sustainable. I was recently asked to increase to a minimum 48 hour workweek and turned it down because I know it would upset my work life balance and not increase my output.
Like... it is. "Company" has roots in the latin word Pan or Pain, as in bread. Con Pan, literally who you break bread with, as in "we had company for the weekend".
Assuming 8 hours a day you're spending 1/3 of your work week with these people. It doesn't have to be a social bonanza every day but if you dislike making smalltalk with these people, or are actively disdainful of their chatting and web surfing then maybe you should change jobs. Cuz it sounds like you're spending a lot of time around people you straight up don't like.
Nah, they're actually fantastic people, and I don't begrudge them their small talk. I just don't join in, and am noting that it's a difference in time accounting. Our work is fascinating and there's a lot of bigtalk too. And actually I'm totally happy to small talk with them in a social setting, I just don't like to be at the office when I'm socializing.
Please don't. If you commit to a 48 hour workweek you're taking a loan on your future health. When that due date comes you'll pay it back with interest...
Yeah most studies I've seen shared online put us at about 4-5 hours of useful work a day. This seems to be what I settle into at home when left alone too.
It can of course go higher when you have a specific goal and you're running on adrenaline or are truly enraptured by what you are working on. But a typical 8 hour day is often packed with chitchat, meetings, administrative busywork and so on to help pad out those hours.
I did work one place that stressed to us to allocate no more than 5.5 hours of work-work a day when estimating jobs due to the above, and it seemed roughly accurate.
I agree, I have about 4 - 5 "good hours" a day. But I'm expected to deliver 6 - 6.5 billable hours a day in my job (exluding admin work). It's frustrating as I know that a billable hour before 10am and after 4pm is worth far less than a billable hour between 10am and 3pm. It's especially frustrating when I'm expected to work on something that involves a high cognitive load all day long due to tight deadlines. Account managers, project managers and sales people seem to think that all work is the same and you can work at max capacity all the time, regardless of the complexity of the task.
As a SWE, I have 20 productive hours a week, approximately. The other 20 are wasted, and I would be better off just not being at work and relaxing. Unfortunately, "that's just not how things work".
Same here, software developer. Any code added after 3pm is full of bugs and little mistakes to fix the next morning. Not worth it. Now I just slack off when I feel like it but it's not the way
Sometimes I get more done in 15mins of my personal projects before work than a day of work, due to meetings or being blocked. Companies are usually not nearly as efficient as they could be.
I think 90% of work gets done in the first four hours for me.
This is why I opt into an 8am - 4pm schedule - I can usually squeak out just a bit more productive time if I start before anyone is online or in the office.
For me, I feel like it is highly dependent upon what I’m working on at the time. Some projects are motivating and 40 hours a weeks isn’t enough—I want to work more than that. Other times I work ~40 but a lot of it is wasted by by working inefficiently (when the drive to work on the project isn’t high enough to outweigh fatigue)
I've always wondered why, with all the other emotional dispositions that people accuse pharma companies of "medicalizing" in order to sell them a drug treatment for, we've never seen any attempt to medicalize the Puritan work ethic.
Maybe it's because it'd mean that pretty much every medical doctor would themselves be technically (or not-so-technically) considered mentally-ill?
(Gosh, imagine a world where all the doctors got treatment for their floating guilt, and then suddenly woke up to their severe overwork, and so did a 180 on their previous push to the medical-bar to lower acceptance to increase wages, instead pushing to increase acceptance and lower wages in an attempt to increase the number of doctors a hospital can employ on a given budget, and therefore decrease hours worked per doctor?)
I don’t think a puritanical work ethic necessarily is unhealthy, but in your example I would consider the guilt aspect to be.
In your example puritanical work ethic + (irrational imo) guilt = you exceed your contractual requirements to deliver work to your employer.
Keep the work ethic but take the guilt out and perhaps instead you’d meet but not exceed your contractual obligations to your employer, and then organise the rest of your time around industriously working on something else that you’re personally passionate about.
The second example could be unhealthy depending on how you approached it, but I wouldn’t say that it necessarily is, and I would say that it’s a big improvement over the first example.
"Puritanical" is definitely meant to imply unhealthy, which is why it's got such a negative connotation. I think even in your example, you substitute "wasted" productivity (in the sense of going beyond contractual obligations) with other productivity, albeit towards another direction. I think that's what the parent's post is pointing out: this obsession/compulsion with filling in all time with productivity. Why can't time just be "wasted"?
It's difficult for some managers to measure the productivity of knowledge workers and unfortunately they resort to tracking the number of hours there are "butts in seats". If your organization is like this you'll see people who are at work to be seen being at work, even if they're not being productive.
Japanese salarymen are the pathological example of this but I'm sure it manifests everywhere.
Absolutely, unfortunately taylorism did follow suit into the world of knowledge workers.
In some hostile work environments like banking this is everywhere. Don't leave before your manager, eat lunch at your desk, look busy and stay in the office as long as you can
> Our society is so focused on productivity that we forget that the foundation for improved productivity is sleep, exercise and diet.
I have seen more focus on getting people busy than actual productivity. The video games industry is a good example where the lack of planning and quite often personal maturity of the company leadership cause crunch time and a lack of personal well-being.
> Mind & Body, one system.
Exactly this. If , e.g., we run our planes like we run our bodies, they will just fall from the skies.
I enjoy my sleep thoroughly and I sleep 7-8 hours a day. Still, I think it’s a waste of time, and I don’t mean work productivity, but life. You sleep, wake up, and surprise, a third of the day has just gone by and you didn’t even notice.
I recognize the need to sleep, but I personally just wished we could develop a way to keep going with your day without sleeping. If that were physically possible, I’d just meditate some few hours daily instead of sleeping 7-8 hours.
If you factor in that during sleep your body is actively restoring your organs, and mind is flushing/filing the info collected during the wake hours. How many hours needed for that is an intriguing question. But hardly this time is wasted, unless your sleep is ... restless.
I recently watched an episode of "Nova" on the subject of sleep (Mysteries of Sleep), very convincing , even to some toddlers fussy about the sleep as usual :)
Think about it the other way. The optimal, very best way for
any living organism to live the most healthy and longest life possible is to only sleep and never wake up. That is the ideal state for your body and mind.
I recognize the need to eat, detoxicate and reproduce, but wish we could develop a way to keep sleeping while doing it :)
Sleep is so good for the mind and body that unlike almost any medicine, it can not only make you feel better but heal you in ways you otherwise couldn't be. It's pure elixir for humans.
It really is crazy how much some cultures (including mine) neglect it.
I love to sleep and always have, but I've been shamed for it (in the weird way that is North Americans do that sometimes) and felt like I needed to optimise my schedule or sleep less or whatever. It's all crazy. Just sleep! It's nice, it's free, soak it up.
Unless of course you can't. Man, I feel for people with insomnia.
Example of that first point, I woke up one day with extremely dry eyes to the point where it felt like I had a grain of sand in one eye. It was painful every time I blinked. I taped my eye shut to stop blinking which only helped a bit.
I asked if anything could be done other than eye drops which was about 5 seconds of relief but starting to irritate the skin around my eye due to the chemicals.
Optometrist said a full night of sleep. Nothing else will fix it. And he was right.
It's actually somewhat surprising that mire people do not experiment more with their sleep cycles.
I recently had a lot of trouble sleeping due to stress and found a solution whereby I began listening to old TV shows while I sleep with earphones in bed.
It was miraculous. But one odd side effect is that I don't really dream anymore - at least not in the same way. Since the shows are playing, it's almost like they are dreaming for me.
If the phone stops playing the shows for some reason, I'll have dreams again - and often wake up due to some annoying thoughts about work.
I haven't noticed any negative effects. Certainly there was a massive positive benefit of just being able to sleep when I couldn't before.
... but these sorts of things should be avenues of research.
I’m pretty sure dreams correlate with deep sleep and REM, and that being exposed to stimulus with dialogue like TV (ie, not things like constant fan noise, wind, ocean sounds, etc) will keep you from reaching that deep sleep.
I’d be cautious about doing what you’re doing long term. I think you’d be better off learning to let go of stressful thoughts before bed, and to make your bedroom a very calm, peaceful, non work related place where all you do is rest and relax. Watching old tv shows before bed, or while on a timer that will turn off when you’re asleep, sounds like a good way to get you relaxed, but I don’t think it’s great to have that type of stimulation continue during sleep.
I’ve done the same thing you’re describing during high stress periods with podcasts, and while it’s better than letting worries keep you up, I find myself feeling more “shallow” and less insightful/less rested if they stay on throughout the night. When I allow myself to relax and drift off without distraction, I find myself feeling much more “full” and “together” in the mornings, particularly if I take the time to go over and record my dreams.
I am still hitting deep/REM sleep - that isn't changing. If I weren't, I'd feel terrible.
It has been about 6 months of doing this all night, every night. So far, I feel myself.
The key is to use old familiar programs. Things you can visualize even though you're just listening to them. It's that familiarity that allows your brain to have a sense of comfort, while not really being stimulated.
I've been overcome with sleepiness at my desk when watching video games on Twitch/YouTube with a calm narrator (no excitable screaming thanks). Something about it makes my mind wander and generating the visuals but not being in control of them seems to be an important step to falling asleep. Sounds similar to what you are doing and maybe I should try it.
I'm pretty sure there'd be a huge difference between doing this with old TV shows (familiar, no learning, basically structured background noise) and doing it with podcasts (new material, news, etc).
I used to do this exact same thing, until I got my anxiety under control. If your anxiety keeps you from sleeping every night, that's abnormal and treatment can help you, not just with sleep but with your whole day. Treatment doesn't necessarily mean drugs. I'm definitely projecting, and make your own choices obviously, but in your post I definitely see myself a year ago before I started dealing with my underlying problem.
Society demands a sleep schedule, yet the very idea of sleeping on a schedule is newly invented for industrial society.
Having done several years of experimenting on myself, I've come to the conclusion that our sleep needs vary greatly from day to day, circumstance to circumstance, and to sleep the same schedule every day is forcing one's body into a square bowl.
For example, if I am coming down with flu or cold, I may want to sleep as much as 24 hours in a day, maybe 16 if I feel a need to get things done. This allows my body to spend all its energy on mobilizing the immune system, and allows me for a quicker recovery.
If the weather is rainy or gray, I may want to sleep more.
If I'm doing something exciting, like attending a festival or conference, coding, or traveling, I may not want to sleep at all, or get by on a few several-hour naps.
Having adopted a flexible sleeping unschedule, I feel much better than I used to on the office cycle.
>Society demands a sleep schedule, yet the very idea of sleeping on a schedule is newly invented for industrial society.
Umm--- pre-industrial society everything stopped when it went dark. Humans have very poor night vision, we can't function in the dark and so basically everyone went to sleep when the sun went down.
That's not true, people used to wake up for several hours a night. There were also those up through the night tending fire and looking for predators. And darkness does not rule out sleeping during the day.
I absolutely agree. I naturally wake up at 9:30am. And go to sleep at 1:30am. That does not work for a normal 8-5 type job. I know I perform so much better with sleep.
If I was CEO, I would absolutely organized working hours around sleep.
Exactly this. Some people come in early and some people come in late. Meetings are for the middle of the day when every body is there. Mornings and evenings are good for work with minimal interruption.
Only 4 hours worth of meetings allowed per day, 11-3. Bonus side effect of limiting useless meetings and helping morning and night folks avoid heavy traffic.
Honestly, primary care doctors seem to put way too much emphasis on weight and way too little on sleep. Imagine if your doctor bugged you to go to sleep as much as they bugged you to cut down on carbs.
I think a lot of sleep problems are being resolved via CPAP devices.
I know one relative who I'm pretty certain died in her sleep because of unresolved sleep apnea.
When you stop breathing while sleeping, your body adjusts by taking you out of deep sleep towards wakefulness, while your blood pressure rises towards 300. When you finally take a breath -- if the high blood pressure didn't set off a heart attack or stroke -- your restful sleep is ruined.
Sleep anpea also causes other problems. when your throat closes and you try to breath, it's likely you will suck stomach acid out of your stomach into your throat and possibly lungs.
If you snore (not a requirement), wake up during the night with heartburn, or die of a heart attack or stroke in your sleep, you should investigate a cpap.
I have diagnosed OSA but an older unit I tried (Respironics REMstar Pro w/ humidifier) about 15 years ago, I couldn't keep from ripping the mask off. :'(
Also, my insurance is awful so they won't send me to specialist to get a proper CPAP. And I have high-blood pressure, tachycardia, depression, anxiety, and sleep like sh!t.
Anyhow before I whine anymore about personal problems, how's your day?
Sounds like you dont have children. I'm pretty sure for the whole of human history people were crammed in small houses with babies waking everyone up every few hours.
"Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed." (Arthur Schopenhauer )
