Relax. You'll be more productive | Hacker News Reader

Relax. You'll be more productive

nytimes.com

123 pointsmoepstein36 comments

Article can be summarized in this line: "A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health."

thanx for the TLDR.

Interesting stuff - and specifically, the numbers recommended are interesting. I've heard a 4-hour work day recommended in a few places.

Personally, I tried working 4 hours a day some years ago, whilst dealing with a death in the family. I was startled at how close to my usual 8+hour workday my productivity was - indeed, I'm not sure, looking at output alone, you could have told my 4-hour period apart from my usual work cycle.

I'll be interested to hear if anyone tries this 90-minute cycle specifically, and how it works out for them!

I think societal pressures would prevent a 4 hour workday even if it was more productive for many classes of worker.

A great many jobs are not fundamentally about productivity, for example a store checkout worker, a hotel receptionist and some IT operations work. In such cases the work is more about being available to cover certain hours and respond to various situations.

For such jobs it would become a hassle to swap workers around every 4 hours for no real benefit. Thus this sets a certain expectation for working hours.

If some types of workers were thus given significantly shorter hours within the same organisation there would be envy and shaming and accusations that those workers were not working as hard as anybody else.

A huge amount of those service jobs you listed, especially minimum wage, rely on specifically the 4 hour work day, or between 4 and 5. I just got out of food service and the 4-5 hour shift was especially common. Their reasoning is they're getting your best hours, so they cycle a lot of people working short shifts.

I used to get put on a lot of 3:30 shifts because if you worked 4:00 you were entitled to a paid 15min break (worked retail part-time in the UK)

Working times/practices will vary across industries. So things like part time shifts, split shifts etc will seem normal to people working in food service in the same way that weird irregular hours might not seem strange to people working in startups.

I think though that once a particular industry has an expectation around certain working hours they will tend to try and apply that across the board in order to seem fair.

I worked in IT for a bank, for example which had a very strict 9-5 culture. Things like taking breaks for coffee/lunch etc were to very strict times and taking 30 seconds longer than allowed was a serious business.

I think they had these rules in place for the callcenter employees, where they needed to ensure adequate levels of availability throughout the day. In order to seem fair they made this a rule across all departments.

When I work on my own , if I have a hard problem I will sometimes prefer to go and walk for an hour rather than sit in front of the computer as this can help me think more clearly. However a bank employee would never be able to do this.

I worked for many years in blue collar service industries. The sort shifts have more to do with ensuring that the workers don't get full health benefits, thereby driving the cost of each worker down for the company.

You're right, Jiggy. For a lot of jobs, it's about coverage and service, being able to fill the hole and be familiar with the situation. Training new people to be effective is more difficult than it seems in any job; four or five hours makes it even more difficult.

Five hours a day is about my limit for any kind of creative work. I can sit at a desk longer than that but nothing significant happens.

Obligatory link to The Programmer's Stone, which was a real eye opener for me when I read it.

http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/

It starts with Mapper vs. packer mentality, stress level mismatches, and the effect of stress on your brain, and goes forwards from there :)

Is it fair to repost a comment from the original article? That's what I've done here:

Who exactly do you think you are talking to? I work in a call center and had a meeting where if we didn't work more efficiently and faster we would be determined "burnt out" and let go. We're temps so the ax is over our heads at all times anyway and it only pays $12 an hour. Vacation, what a laugh.

If you had been talking to say decision makers about how workers are treated that would have been something. Instead, your article is about how decision makers should treat, wait for it, themselves, with no consideration of whom they supervise.

Workers have become treated like machines and have little choice. Your privileged point of view is out of focus on the lives of most Americans today.

Interesting distinction between worker and decision maker.

Call center employees don't need creativity. They are 21 century assembly workers.

In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

...

In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.

Uninterrupted work sessions of 90 minutes are not a cycle, since they don't include a rest phase. It may be that 90 minutes is an optimal number for uninterrupted work, but I don't understand how it relates to a "Basic-Rest Activity Cycle" of 90 minutes.

In an early-stage start-up environment putting in grind hours is often necessary. Right now I'm the sales person, account manager, blog writer, PR person, admin, CFO and content person. Each of these requires time to just put in the basic work (eg. took a few hours to write 100 emails to leads today). Yes, it's a marathon not sprint but if we don't make it through the first few miles then that's that. So at least for start-ups, I think that's where it comes from. There's just actually lots to do and very few people to do it.

Having said that what I struggle with most is how to do all this grind stuff without which we can't survive and still have time to think and reflect on our vision/growth/etc. So then that's where weekends come in. I tend to rest up and then by Sunday afternoon I feel energized enough to really think about our business.

People are always talking about how it's possible to run a start-up while working normal hours. And perhaps that's true when you have a team with real roles. But in the very early stages it's very hard to get by on stress-free hours.

Nice in theory but hard to put in practice in the more traditional 9-5 corporate environments.

Relaxation isn't a theory, it's a way of life. When you step outside of the insane and stressful mentality of having to kill yourself to make a good living in life then your life will improve immensely.

There should be no reason at all for you to not take it easy for at least ten minutes a day.

First you talk about relaxation as a way of life and then you say that 10 minutes a day is all you need?

Am I missing something?

10 minutes a day is the start, not "all you need"

Yeah, you missed the "at least" part.

The only reason to have 9 to 5 environments in our field is simply to have everyone communicating at the same time. An office can be anywhere for us, not just a leased office. This is a luxury that most workers will never know.

Unfortunately, the basketball study cited in the article had no control group. So we do not know how much of the performance improvement is attributable to the placebo effect and the Hawthorne effect. Perhaps all of it?

If anyone can post references to better studies I would be grateful.

The basketball study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119836/

http://www.osho.com/en/highlights-of-oshos-world/relaxation/

This message is very well known and understood.

The interesting question is 'why do foolish managers continue to treat their employers in poor ways that are known to decrease productivity?' In terms of productivity, it's a total lose-lose situation.

I'm 37, and I'm pretty sure that I have worked out the answer. Most corporations are run by people (the managerial class) who are more interested in power than results. They hire sycophants who kiss upwards and amplify pressure downwards. Competence is irrelevant; after all, any competent manager would resist managing their employees in ways that management science have proven to be unproductive.

I have been in a couple of these companies, and they absolutely rot from the head down.

At least in tech. we have the option of getting out, because such companies are generally not entrenched and are on track to fail. Unfortunately, in other parts of the economy, such companies are unassailably entrenched, so their workers have no choice but to work for stupid, evil, toxic organisations, or to change career.

The result of these organisations is that much of the US now has a toxic culture of 'if you're not stressed, you're not working'.

A friend also suggested to me that it's possible for groups of people to become 'addicted' to stress; it would be interesting to see more on this.

There's a less cynical answer: it's that managers are subject to the same principle, of insufficient R&R resulting in tunnel vision, and so they're exhausted and hence tend to think short-term (beat this unrealistic deadline now!) instead of long-term (we'll cut the least important features or slip the deadline so we can get it done). The only way to break the cycle is to realize that a good portion of what you do doesn't need to be done, and ruthlessly cull out nonessential tasks so that nobody does them.

It's partly a problem of optimizing metrics that are easy to measure, like ass-in-chair time.

I couldn't agree more. There is absolutely NO way to effectively measure programmer productivity.

If there actually were an objetive way, then it would be a different story. But in the absence of it, a team has to "look" productive at least, and that means people in the office looking like they're working. Even if it means less real work getting done (because again, how do you measure that objetively? can't be done).

i agree that working with breaks and socializing with colleagues for a coffee/a walk/ a fresh breath of air is good for productivity. however i do not agree with some posters who say that there are no metrics to measure productivity. there are ways to measure programmer productivity. not talking about lines added or features added. in general we can get a sense of how involved is a feature addition by looking at the list of data structures needed, algorithms to process the data, algorithms to list/display the output. more formal methods--http://secse08.cs.ua.edu/Papers/Danis.pdf

That approach can set a sort of lower bound on how much work a feature requires, but judging productivity also involves measuring how often the program fails to meet its specification and how much work to modify it could have been avoided up front.

> There is absolutely NO way to effectively measure programmer productivity.

One of the big reasons programmer productivity is so difficult to measure, is that you need to also see future productivity of everyone else who works on the code. If a programmer takes an extra week to build something more maintainable and that improved design saves months of future work, it's likely a productive use of time, but that's not always obvious until those months are saved (or not saved). That's not easily measured until the full lifecycle of the software is complete.

Measuring programmer productivity, as in long-term impact, is much harder than measuring how many hours Programmer X sits at their desk or how many lines of code they can spit out in a day. Those are metrics that other programmers notice after maintaining code that previous programmers leave behind. It's always going to be a delayed reaction.

Addiction to stress is kind of a real thing. It takes a complete stripping away of the mentality that most people have to see it for what it is. The managerial class is also put through the paces in Corporate America. I've seen this first hand. Unless you are a C-level executive, there is always someone using the veiled threat of job loss to keep you in line.

The tech world has some problems, but compared to the work environments that the rest of the country is experiencing, it's Shangri-La.

I wish that all of the country (world, really) would be able to exercise control over their destinies as easily as we can. The mindset and the skills together are a great gift. Never cease to be grateful.

> Most corporations are run by people (the managerial class) who are more interested in power than results.

This made me a lot angrier before I realized that this is just the primate dominance dynamic expressed in business organizational structure. It's the default human response to the circumstance, just like street gangs are the default response to different circumstances.

That has changed my attitude to "I hope these assholes get hit by a truck" to one of compassion to people whose wiring has gotten them trapped in a local maximum. There are no villains, only people who the system has trained to serve the system.

> A friend also suggested to me that it's possible for groups of people to become 'addicted' to stress; it would be interesting to see more on this.

This NY Times article was posted here a few months back and touches on the same idea: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tra...

Interesting. Do you think it's a coincidence that a sleep cycle also happens to be about 90 minutes long?

Maybe the brain works in 90-minute bursts, whether you are sleeping or conscious.

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