Stop Working More than 40 Hours a Week

Someone I know all they do is draw/paint until their hand hurts every day. It's all work related for them. Yes... some people do work for real long hours and are not wasting most of their time. I think it's more the people who are not doing work chasing rewards but doing the work because they genuinely love it.

Use https://www.rescuetime.com/ and you can track your time spent working and easily block distractions so you can focus.

Yes, the worst thing about HN is that it's work related enough that you can sort of justify counting checking it as "work", indeed I've read things in HN comments and articles that have been very useful to my work.

On the flipside, I'm sure in practise it is a net time waster.

having grown up on a farm, forty hours came and went usually mid week. In the business world its not the hours I work that wear on me, its the non productive hours during that do.

I guess the difference between the farm and business is that the former doesn't have non productive work. It is amazing how much energy I lose in meetings or similar.

Id say 75% is programming or programming related. The other is dealing with clients or meetings. I'm very productive.

> without losing face.

Honestly, isn't the crux of the problem? Even if you are a superstar, you'll still get typecasted as smart-but-lazy and find yourself on the outside. Generally speaking, this is an organizational problem.

I have to agree. The first two hours before everyone else shows up are my most productive.

You could use the extra hour to exercise. Go to the gym, or go for a bike ride, if your office has a shower. Exercise is almost as important as sleep for health and creativity. Lunch is included in normal 9-5 hours.

This is very true. I use RescueTime to monitor my output. This works for me because of the menial nature of much of my work in addition to ensuring that I'm completely honest in my logs / productivity scoring.

I shoot for eight "very product hours" (+2) per day. Even though the standard workday is considered eight hours, it's pretty difficult for me to hit such a target without invest 10-11 hours of what I would call pretty distraction free work. I'm self employed, so I'm able to avoid a large amount of the normal worktime lost to meetings, chitchat, and the like.

Comparing eight hours of "very productive" rescuetime output feels as if it would be comparable to about 12+ hours standard in a normal work enviroment.

Often, when I hear people exclaiming that they've put in a 70hour/week or whatnot I wonder how many very productive rescuetime hours that would correlate to... 50? 40?

I find that most of the "most people" who fall into the category of "working" that many hours but actually only doing 40 hours of work related work are the younger/entitlement generation (I'm 35 fwiw)

When you are at work, do you work. You shouldn't be browsing reddit or checking facebook/twitter or fantasy football/espn. You shouldnt have a chat client open with friends/family (create a work only one)

At our office we are allowed (and encouraged) to read tech blogs such as hackernews, but no one abuses that and reads for hours on end.

We use RescueTime and part of our 8 hours includes email, irc (work #channel), instant message (work only 'friends' screenname), reading rss on top of the actual coding. No one is looked down on for having a high google/stackoverflow time in a week.

Two 4 hour blocks of coding is not that hard (and normally broken up with meetings or some form of communication anyways)

I find people that have to work 10+ hours to get in 8 actual work related hours are the same people who used to "NEED music" to study. Just have some self discipline and focus.

I'm a developer. I don't mind taking mental breaks during the day and still counting it as work since I solve work problems while driving, showering, or even sleeping all the time. I'm lucky enough to work for a supervisor that doesn't require time logs. I often wonder if I could get away with "I'm leaving for the day an hour early since I was thinking about the problem I'm working on while at home".

Wow; I guess if you are doing product development, everything is so clear cut! But what if you are a researcher? Your primary output is creative, so measuring the amount of code or text you write is not very effective. I don't think just researchers have this problem, but anyone who has to do any substantial amount of real thinking or design, even most programmers have to think a bit about what they need to write. And sometimes you need to twist your brain to do it.

Yes, I had about 6 months to a year where I didn't really do anything but work and pay off debts.

The worst part is meeting up with friends who you haven't seen in a while and realising that you are officially the most boring person in the world because you have nothing interesting at all to talk about. It wasn't even like I was building something exciting that I could talk about.

If you live alone, why not move closer to the office?

Same goes for the UK, to some extent: our politicians are generous enough to have secured for us the ability to "opt out" of the 48-hour limit. The result is that almost all employment contracts contain a clause opting the new employee out.

Having said that, I've personally never exceeded 48 hours in a week, and it may be that the prevalence of the opt-out is more due to a disinclination to add bureaucracy that to a desire to exploit workers.

As someone who did that for a longer strech of time last year, because of starting a company, organizing a conference in parallel and socializing within the local programming community: it sucks you out. Not physically, but mentally, because all you do is "work". Worse: you get used to that state.

I still do that from time to time if things just cannot be pushed, but in very short spans.

I should say that I consider all my learning endeavors "free time", so its not like I just watch TV after work. I just don't do any business work.

As a sidenote, I had the most productive time in my life when I was working in France, 35 hours a week. As someone used to 40 hours, I always felt like I shouldn't waste any minute to get my stuff done :).

Agree. Great points.

7-7 so, say 5am - 8pm with the commute and the morning thrown in.

That's no family life.

If you're checking into work over the weekend, you may think it's an hour or two, but it'll be 5 or 6 hours, you just don't realize it.

So out of the what, 32? hours you have for family over the weekend, another 5 or 6 are spent working.

And there's no "personal time" in that schedule yet.

That's not sustainable to me.

I tend to agree that European Working Times Directive was especially useful to protect low pay low skill (or semi-skilled) jobs such as factory work. Some fast food workers were expected to turn up for work, and when the restaurant wasn't busy they'd have to clock out, but stay in their waiting room until they got busy, when they'd have to clock in.

That's clearly abusive, and those workers needed protection.

If someone loves their job and wants to work 50 hours; or can work and enjoy the occasional 60 hours, well, it's their choice and they should be able to.

But most people do not enjoy that, and recognise it's not healthy, and do not want to do that, but are pressured either by bosses or by work culture. And so this flexibility has been removed because some companies were not self regulating.

60 hours a week is 10 hours a day, with one day off. That doesn't include travel time. Let's say 30 minutes each way. Does it include lunch hours? (UK: No, but tea breaks are paid). Let's call lunch another 30 minutes. That's 11.5 hours a day. 7 hours for sleep makes 18.5 hours a day. That leave 5.5 hours a day (plus that one day off) for everything else; your parents, your partner, your children, your friends, your bills etc, your life.

I don't agree. You start work at 7am and leave work at 7pm. This takes twelve hours from your day. That leaves you twelve hours for: sleeping, eating, hygiene, commuting and personal time. Say you sleep the normal 7.5 hours per day (to keep a sustainable lifestyle) and commute a total of 1.5 hours per day. Now you have three hours left. Personal hygiene takes at least 0.5 hours per day. Even if you eat quickly, and take your breakfast as 'work', this leaves you 30 minutes per day for two meals. Or if you count lunch as work, then you gain an extra half hour. (Two meals a day as 'working meals' sounds pretty awful to me, btw.) Leaving you 1.5 - 2.0 hours per day of personal time. That's one visit to the gym, or the chance to play with your kids and put them to bed. There's no cultural involvement, no chance to work on a hobby or a passion, no reading, television, or film and no chance to see friends during the week at all.

I simply will not work for you if the only luxury that I get is the chance to visit the gym and whatever time at weekends is left after I finish answering what are almost certainly non-urgent emails. There are too many compromises. You'd need to be a fool to find that acceptable; there's simply no point in having the money from the job, because you won't enjoy it. You may enjoy the job for a while, but if you are a salaried employee, then that depends on factors outside of your own control and will change. And it's much harder to regain a pleasant life than it is to keep one.

Of course, if you are a startup founder, then we have a different meaning of sustainable. There are not very many people at all who live a startup-founder lifestyle for more than a couple of years without significant breaks, I believe. And I'm not saying that it is not possible to live like above - I'm saying that I'm good at what I do, and I don't need to, so I won't.

If its something you have a personal stake in , then yes . But not at some faceless mega corp which dosent care for you.

You've got only 1 life, and even among a pool of the most bright, hardworking people (take a sample that works as many hours as you like), there's only so many Bill Gateses. I'm thinking just one.

Even after all his success, I wouldn't be surprised if a guy like that now regrets some of how he spent his youth. I'm sure he could have done it just as well and been a little less crazy, had some more time outside the office. I'd be surprised if a rational person wouldn't admit that.

Passion and determination are fine, but your idea (or my reading of it, anyway) that places outside the Bay Area are less worthy because they've got fewer kids willing to waste their life away ... it seems pretty low.

Article is about employees, you're talking founder. Very different.

Agree on your first point, but how do you come to the conclusion that such commitment is limited to the Valley?

No-one should be exempt from being paid overtime.

You forgot to mention it is during the quarter one financial crunch.

> Does anyone now a newer, more comprehensive and scientifically solid article having the same claim?

As to "scientifically solid", you may be reaching beyond the plausible. Such studies are in the domain of sociology, and sociology is less scientific even than psychology (in fact, sociology is located at the very bottom of the science heap). One reason is the fact that you can't run controlled experiments with such luxuries as control groups and experimental discipline.