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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Japanese salarymen are the pathological example of this but I'm sure it manifests everywhere.
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
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 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. But it's not. Sleep is not an 'include' but a 'require' statement.
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 :)
I haven't tried it, but it does seem it is physically possible to sleep much less than 7-8 hours per 24 hour cycle.
I recognize the need to eat, detoxicate and reproduce, but wish we could develop a way to keep sleeping while doing it :)