<story><title>Discovering the brain’s nightly “rinse cycle”</title><url>https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/05/discovering-the-brains-nightly-rinse-cycle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheFiend7</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, if you account for &amp;quot;productivity&amp;quot; hours instead of &amp;quot;waking&amp;quot; hours. You spend more of your &amp;quot;productive&amp;quot; capable hours in your life working, by a large margin.&lt;p&gt;Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain &amp;#x2F;shrug.</text></item><item><author>sjtindell</author><text>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.</text></item><item><author>thisisnico</author><text>Our society is so focused on productivity that we forget that the foundation for improved productivity is sleep, exercise and diet. Mind &amp;amp; Body, one system.</text></item><item><author>tazedsoul</author><text>If I could pick one of the things to optimize all of society around, it would be sleep. I believe that many of society&amp;#x27;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, &amp;quot;you can sleep when you&amp;#x27;re dead,&amp;quot; but I do despise this prevelant sentiment which has become a culutre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>foobarbecue</author><text>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&amp;#x27;t stand smalltalk, I don&amp;#x27;t. I think 40 hours or more makes sense for employees who spend half of their day chatting or surfing the internet. When I&amp;#x27;m at work, I am working. I still do more than 40 hours, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure if it&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Discovering the brain’s nightly “rinse cycle”</title><url>https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/05/discovering-the-brains-nightly-rinse-cycle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheFiend7</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, if you account for &amp;quot;productivity&amp;quot; hours instead of &amp;quot;waking&amp;quot; hours. You spend more of your &amp;quot;productive&amp;quot; capable hours in your life working, by a large margin.&lt;p&gt;Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain &amp;#x2F;shrug.</text></item><item><author>sjtindell</author><text>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.</text></item><item><author>thisisnico</author><text>Our society is so focused on productivity that we forget that the foundation for improved productivity is sleep, exercise and diet. Mind &amp;amp; Body, one system.</text></item><item><author>tazedsoul</author><text>If I could pick one of the things to optimize all of society around, it would be sleep. I believe that many of society&amp;#x27;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, &amp;quot;you can sleep when you&amp;#x27;re dead,&amp;quot; but I do despise this prevelant sentiment which has become a culutre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hnick</author><text>Yeah most studies I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;It can of course go higher when you have a specific goal and you&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>