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The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

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113 points robtherobber | 6 comments | 16 May 25 09:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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PaulRobinson ◴[16 May 25 14:41 UTC] No.44006083[source]▶
I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work.

I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it.

If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.

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yodsanklai ◴[16 May 25 15:51 UTC] No.44006889[source]▶
> I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

You may be less productive after 5 hours of work, but even if your output 50% less in the next 5 hours, you'll still produce more by working more.

Employers don't care about productivity, they care about your total output. And it's not only employers, if you want to improve or pass a selective test or anything, you have to put the hours.

There may be some threshold where more work becomes detrimental, but it's definitely not 5 hours.

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1. BriggyDwiggs42 ◴[16 May 25 16:20 UTC] No.44007233[source]▶
You can in many cases run multiple shifts if you need the same hours of output.

>its definitely not five hours

Why are you so sure?

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2. yodsanklai ◴[16 May 25 16:32 UTC] No.44007357[source]▶
Because I've seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions. Students studying for selective examinations (medicine, law, maths) routinely work more than 10 hours a day. I've also seen closely very successful academics who worked a lot.

And frankly, 5 hours a day isn't that much. It's perfectly fine is some people wants work life balance, but you will do more by working more, and if you're ambitious, it's hard to avoid putting the hours at some critical moments in your life.

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3. ijk ◴[16 May 25 16:49 UTC] No.44007524[source]▶
Students are typically young, and make up for their lack of experience with the energy to work longer. Not necessarily more productively--I've certainly seen people with very counter-productive intense study habits that didn't seem to help them much.

Long, sustained hours are more of a problem; in the US we routinely overwork doctors to the point of risking deadly error--in part because the standards of long hours during residencies were developed by William Stewart Halsted, a cocaine addict who worked 100+ hours per week.

4. SketchySeaBeast ◴[16 May 25 16:59 UTC] No.44007624[source]▶
Studying for an exam is a short term, intense, focus with a defined end date. Once the exam is over it's over you get your reward, you rest, and then you're on to something new. It's not comparable to the decades long treadmill that is a career.
5. oceanplexian ◴[16 May 25 18:55 UTC] No.44008729[source]▶
Not sure why medicine has such a cult of personality around it, people in that field are glorified flowchart operators.

Doctors can pull a 10 hour shift for the same reason a call center worker can do the same thing. They aren’t doing deep knowledge work. The people actually doing the knowledge work are at research universities setting up controlled trials, running simulations, and putting out papers.

6. const_cast ◴[17 May 25 01:08 UTC] No.44011245[source]▶
> Students studying for selective examinations (medicine, law, maths) routinely work more than 10 hours a day.

Yes, for a little bit. But one thing I've consistently noticed is they're operating on borrowed time. Once the exam passes and the semester is over, they go into full burn-out mode. Now they're not even doing their laundry, let alone studying medicine.

Human productivity is incredibly fickle. We can be pushed really, really far, but we have to pay an immense debt.