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It's actually flawed because there are other things that need to be done in a week besides work, recreation, and rest. For example:

- eating: 12-15 hours/week

- making food (or travelling to get food): 7-10 hours/week

- showering, shaving, grooming: 4-7 hours/week

- laundry, cleaning, house chores: 2-4 hours/week

- commuting: 5-10 hours/week

- waiting in line (checkout lines, customer service reps, Comcast/DMV/insurance, etc.): 2-3 hours/week

And that's for me, and I'm single. If I had children, add to that:

- taking care of children: 15-20 hours/week

None of the above counts as work, rest, or recreation. If work stays at 8 hours, that leaves very little time for rest and recreation.

Cutting rest beyond that is physically unhealthy.

Cutting recreation beyond that is both mentally unhealthy AND physically unhealthy (I get all my exercise in my recreation time).

Right, it was a completely different world when the 40 hour work week was proposed and people were pretty interchangeable in the industrializing shift.

Your estimate on time to take care of children is ridiculously low.

I was thinking the same. I don't have children, either, but observing my friends and siblings who do would make me estimate this at 40+ hours/week. (Estimate applies to children below age 6-8. Of course, it's progressively less the older and more independent the child grows.)

It's an exponential back-off kind of a thing. Our 6 month old probably requires 30 hours/week by himself (and that's already much reduced from what it was). Our 3 year old probably requires 10 hours/week. And our 4 year old maybe requires 3 hours per week.

The bigger issue is that this time is spread out pretty evenly throughout the day, so in practical terms it takes up every single hour that the kids are awake. What changes is that, as they get older, you have an increased ability to do other things in the in-between moments.

I easily put 30 hours a week in getting my 3 yr old dressed, to daycare, entertained while my wife makes dinner, and on weekends. My wife puts in similar time.

I guess we just live a different lifestyle. My wife is a full-time mom, so no daycare. The three year old dresses himself at this point, plus he and the four year old entertain each other pretty well.

I think there's also an element of once you have multiple children you just don't have any extra time. As a result, all the inessential time expenditures get cut. For instance, neither my wife nor I spend any time whatsoever entertaining our children. We don't have the time and they can entertain themselves.

I believe those were accounted for in those times with the notion of a stay-at-home spouse (in reality, read: wife) who did most if not all of that non-job work; food purchase/prep, laundry, chores, children, etc.

Correct, which kind of begs the question, why have the work hours not gone down when society started employing both men and women?

Because households basically use all extra income to bid up the cost of real estate in neighborhoods with "better" schools. So if every household has both parents working, then no household is the better off for it. And single parent households are well and truly fucked.

100% agree -- made a small free time calculator along these lines awhile back [1]

[1] - http://www.datadriventhoughts.com/2016/09/27/how-much-free-t...

The issue is that a normalized office environment will demand or imply that all workers work the same number of hours. The suggestion that you can consistently work 80 hours a week might be viable for you, but what about those who only get 20 hours before their productivity craters? What should you, or that person, do in the normalized 40-hour environment?

And what if the 20 hour worker produces more than you in 80 hours? For many environments, pay is by hour because that's the easiest thing to measure. Or it's per annum (salary) and it's supposed to track some loose or arbitrary or indirect metric.

If you shake loose the norms of a 40 hour work week, you have an awful lot of reconciliation to deal with before we efficiently extract the optimal and earnest amount of labor from all workers and compensate them appropriately with respect to their output and not their hours.

If you shake loose the norms of a 40 hour work week, you have an awful lot of reconciliation to deal with...."

Yes agreed.

The point is that people should be given roles and responsibilities commensurate with their personality type and then given the flexibility to execute their job as they see fit.

"Why doesn't every sports team just get good players and have those players play consistently well?"

As usual, the difficult part is among the details.

Guess what, I want to [work 80 hours], that's how my body works, why are you trying to stop me from doing that?

No one's going to "stop" you. We're just not going to believe you when you say that's how many hours you work.

Elon Musk says entrepreneurs should work 80-100 hours a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtaxU6DZvLs

Where can I find this research showing the health of these 100 hour persons?

Not reasearch but still relevant: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39981997

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703712504576242...

No research on sleep requirements ? are you serious ?

Have you been sleep deprived ? There's a clear limit under which you're useless. For an extreme instance, I lost sleep for 5 days and went borderline insane.

Maybe 6h of sleep is adequate but saying 8 is arbitrary bulls$t is... exactly that.

Can you elaborate on what you believe to be the reasons you're able to work productively for 12 hours a day? I'd love to have that superpower.

Couldn't tell you for certain. Probably some combination of genetics and intense training, with previous periods of long sustained critical work.

Often I find I compare whatever my current situation I'm in, with previous tough situations I've dealt with, and know that if I made it through those, then my current situation is tractable.

On multiple occasions in a previous life I've worked multiple 24-36 straight hours doing intense cognitive and physically intensive work for multiple crises in Korea, Iraq and other wartime places. So that's a good benchmark to compare to.

I suspect having peoples lives in your hands is a different kind of pressure than pleasing your manager

Right, everything else is trivial in comparison. As a result, working an extra few hours on some Python is just a great thing to be able to get paid for.

The secret according to my business professor who was an electrical engineer, a sniper in the military, and started a multimillion dollar PE firm, and sleeps <6 hours every night: eat more.

I honestly think most programmers do best with about 10 hours of actual coding a week.

You must have no life, and no outside interests.

And yes, I've succeeded just fine on less than 40 hour weeks throughout my career. The obsession with stupidly long hours doesn't extend much into Europe, or Australia.

I mean seriously, by the time you add in a half hour for lunch and a half hour each way for travel, 80 hours translates to over 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, working.

That's not a life.