
Spanish schedules are downright weird (2016) - jxub
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2016/03/28/inenglish/1459165488_731020.html
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freefrancisco
Skip breakfast, intermittent fasting eating window between 2 pm and 8 pm, fun
lifestyle, and lots of sun, No wonder they are expected to be the top life
expectancy country! [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-
beat-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-
japan-2040-world-life-expectancy-league-table)

~~~
renw0rp
You got the eating pattern a bit wrong; 9-10pm they are just leaving home to
eat out; at least in Andalusia

~~~
dsiegel2275
I saw the same thing in Asturias and Galicia when we visited there last year.
Very late dinners indeed - even families with young children out eating dinner
that late.

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lokedhs
I'm Swedish, living in Singapore and the spanish time table looks like the one
I've followed all my life (both in Sweden and in Singapore).

I'd argue that it's most of the other countries' schedules that are way too
early. They're mostly based on 19'th century farming schedules which most
people don't follow anymore.

~~~
dehrmann
The Swedish one doesn't include fika, so it's obviously wrong.

Singapore is interesting because afternoons are pretty hot, so people take
advantage of evenings more.

~~~
paulmooreparks
True. Every evening here is practically perfect, anyway.

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oftenwrong
Relevant:

 _How much is time wrong around the world?_

[http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-
around-t...](http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-
world/)

or, if you just want to see the map:

[http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV...](http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV2.png)

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harryf
> “Around 46% of Spaniards are still at work at 6pm, and 10% are still there
> at 9pm,” says Berbel. “So they are not having a good time, they are
> working.”

Reminds me when I moved from the UK to Germany (and later Switzerland) and was
blown away, in the German office I worked in, how they worked less hours (most
people strictly 8am to 4pm) and were at least a factor of 5 times more
productive than anything I'd experienced in the UK.

The typical "average working day" I witnessed in a number of UK companies in
London (I was an IT freelancer back in the mid-to-late 90's) went like...

\- Arrive 9am-ish (depending on the Tube)

\- Drink coffee, talk about football, what was on TV last night and whatever
funny thing happened at the pub last night and basically almost no work
until...

\- 12 noon... time to get something done for an hour before lunch

\- Lunch for 1 - 1.5 hours... some people already drinking their first beer

\- Get back from lunch, pretend to work while being half asleep from a large
lunch

\- 4pm something's on fire... big crisis! Gotta be fixed NOW

\- 8-9pm... fire now extinguished. Leave to the pub with colleagues

That's slanted toward an IT department but from what was basically 12 hours of
being at work in some work, there was probably only 4-5 hours of productivity.

The key difference I witnessed in Germany was people went to work to work, not
to socialise, and were actually getting more done in less time. There was also
a bias towards being pro-active over being re-active, which meant less fire-
fighting, which in turn meant time could be better managed.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Huh, funny enough, a guy I worked with in Germany had a similar experience but
felt very different about it.

He disliked the strict 8 hours/day(or more during crunch time) butt-in-chair
concentrated German work ethic that left him(and me) mentally spent and tired
by the end of the day and moved to the UK where, despite the usual putting out
fires before a release was due, he gets paid more and can come at work close
to 10AM and leave before 4PM while not doing much work most of the time
leaving him plenty of energy for fun in the evening and saying he'll never go
back to working in Germany.

Can't say I don't envy him. I mean, is life about being as productive as you
can for someone else or for enjoying it yourself? Maybe the Brits have it
right.

~~~
partyboat1586
It depends on the individual office. 10am to 4pm is rare. I would say the
average is 9:30am til 5:30 - 6pm.

If the office is mostly middle aged people with families or it's a bigger
company you see more early starts early finishes 9am - 5:30pm of for some
people with kids 8am - 4:30pm.

In an office of mostly younger people you see the 9:30am til 7pm+ marathons
when actual work needs to get done. Because so much time is spent recovering
from lunch, recovering from the hangover, waiting for coffee the long hours
become necessary.

A 10am start is quite uncommon, everywhere I've worked (5 different places so
far) no one would look at you funny as long as you're in _before_ 10am and put
in your hours but after 10am is a stretch.

I also personally dislike the alcohol and coffee culture because overall it
just makes you tired. It was fun in the beginning but when the real work
starts to kick it is exhausting. I quit both for a month and felt a lot better
for it.

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pkaye
Now we need to seen the programmer schedule around the world! I don't think I
start before 10am.

~~~
de_watcher
The natural programmer's schedule is around 30 hours so it constantly slips
relative to the day cycle.

~~~
seisvelas
Nothing has ever rung truer for me than this comment. I've battled against
this almost my entire life. Now that I'm working from home I still keep a
basic schedule that involves waking up in the morning and not totally
drifting. But having the slack to drift around a little has massively improved
my quality of life.

I had no idea this was common for programmers. Is there any evidence to back
up your claim, other than our two points of anecdata?

~~~
bboreham
I worked with a guy who lived on a 28-hour schedule; 6 days to the week. He
swore this suited his natural body clock.

It was quite difficult to figure out when you’d see him in work next.

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skrause
Solar noon in Madrid is around 1 hour and 10 minutes later than in Berlin, yet
they both use the same time zone.

This is how it would look if you gave Spain a time zone where solar noon would
be around 12 (winter time) just like Berlin and Spanish people would keep
their rhythm relative to actual daylight:
[https://i.imgur.com/u01l47S.png](https://i.imgur.com/u01l47S.png) (I've
shifted Spain up by a bit more than one hour).

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sixQuarks
If you think Spain schedules are weird, you should see Argentina's.

You go to a restaurant at 9:30pm and you're one of the early birds.

~~~
polymeris
Chile is even worse, at least in terms of clock time, since, like Argentina,
we are on UTC-3 most of the year, when geographically we should be on -5.

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polymeris
Since it took me a while to find the original article:
[https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/03/18/articulo/145830979...](https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/03/18/articulo/1458309794_132930.html)

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chinesempire
Italian here, from Rome.

Those "weird" Spanish Schedules are my schedules.

I rarely have breakfast before 9:30, I rarely have lunch before 14:00 and
dinner before 20:30.

Except for breakfast (I am not a morning person, never been) I learned my
schedules from my family, a normal working class family, with regular
schedules, same as many other families around us.

I guess we are weird too.

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Xcelerate
Interesting that so many people eat lunch late. I skip breakfast, each lunch
at 11 AM, and then dinner is normally around 6 PM.

~~~
chinesempire
that's a kid schedule where I come from, they love their snacks, but hate
having "grown ups" meal schedules.

I'm saying it without any kind of judgement.

~~~
Xcelerate
There’s two reasons why I eat this way. The first is that I think intermittent
fasting is probably beneficial in terms of preventing too many calories, and I
also seem to focus much better when I’m slightly hungry. The morning is when I
get the bulk of my work that requires deep focus completed, and the few times
I have eaten breakfast I’ve felt lethargic and unfocused afterward. The second
reason is that I’ve really gotten into cooking, and dinner can take 3 hours
(sometimes more) to prepare. Three meals a day is too much when one of them
takes so much time.

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econcon
I've always eaten at 2pm lunch and 8pm dinner.

No snacks, no tea, no coffee. Only water to quench thrist.

Having said that most of my work is technical in nature and I am a partime
machinist. Basically, after completing my development work at 5pm - I work in
my machine shop for an hour or two everyday.

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projektfu
I live in the western end of the Eastern Time Zone in the US and I know this
phenomenon well. The sun rises later and everyone has a harder time getting up
in the morning. Compared to New England, where they naturally arise earlier
because the sun rises much earlier.

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mratsim
The French schedule is only half the population, the one at 35 hours/week, but
many have more hours:

\- Lunch is often 2 hours for "white collar" workers \- Plenty of people start
at around 9~9:30AM and finish work at 7:30PM~8PM

Also regarding dinner it starts at 8 for many.

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runawaybottle
Any correlation between life expectancy and levels of depression across those
countries?

~~~
josu
Too many confounders.

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29athrowaway
0 min commute? 0 min shower? There must be something wrong here.

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sbassi
the timetable shown in the article looks very similar to my experience in
Argentina. And in the inner part of the country, there is even nap (siesta)
after lunch.

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irrational
Do all levels of school also start late in the morning?

~~~
dmarcos
No, I did all my education in Spain and starting time was 8-9am with a 1-3pm
lunch break. About half of the kids going home for lunch and back to school.

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NikolaeVarius
2 hours?

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projektfu
Spain is somewhat famous for the Siesta, a long lunch and nap break.

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brnt
It's normal in France too (12-2pm).

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leesalminen
Chile as well.

