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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>>> So instead of having large breaks every few months or once a year, it’s better to incorporate simple recovery practices into your everyday routine.

Is this some Orwellian nightmare? Rather than have the workers do less work through holidays, let's have deal with the stress during their off hours. Don't take a 2-week holiday, just exercise more every day. Sitting at a desk all day isn't making you fat, it's that you're spending the hour between work and sleep with your kids rather than at the gym.

Some things matter more than productivity. Give your people the time off they need. Or how about just allowing employees to exercise and de-stress on company time.

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Agreed, I'm kind of shocked people aren't seeing this for what it is.

Like the much ballyhooed open office plan, or the typical "we don't track vacation time" policy in modern startups, the real bottom line, so to speak, is always the bottom line.

It may very well be that employees who don't take vacations are more productive, overall than those who do. But by placing the burden of self-repair entirely on the employee, on their personal time and dime, the employer effectively washes its hands of the matter. If we take this article to its logical conclusion, burnout is your own fault, even in the face of pathological organizational structures, workloads, etc. That's an outward radiation of risk and responsibility par for the course in the new economy.

This is an article from Australia, where we have 4-week legally mandated vacation time. What the article _is_ saying is that positive vacation effects only last a couple of weeks and that everyday routines can help you, well, every day.

> Or how about just allowing employees to exercise and de-stress on company time.

That's the key to the obesity epidemic right there. Have an onsite gym, and let employees take up to an hour off their normal 8 hours a day to exercise (or perhaps at a nearby gym, with some sort of oversight).

If you just give people that hour off, they'll be lazy and use it for other things, but if it's set aside specifically for exercise (or at the very least sitting their butts in the gym), it'll get done over time.

But it has to be unstructured and unforced. They can do it any time throughout the day, for as little as they want, but it will be no questions asked if they're in the gym (or out taking a walk or something).

And then group health premiums will drop, employee energy when they are working will increase, and they'll get just as much work done as they would have otherwise.

As a society we went from having mostly active jobs to mostly sedentary jobs. These sedentary jobs are slowly killing their employees. It should be the company's moral imperative to allow for exercise breaks during company time.

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