
Relax. You'll be more productive - moepstein
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html
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sethbannon
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."

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Giszmo
thanx for the TLDR.

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thenomad
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!

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jiggy2011
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.

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giamgiam
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.

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jiggy2011
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.

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anthonyb
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 :)

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jchrisa
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.

~~~
tomjen3
Call center employees don't need creativity. They are 21 century assembly
workers.

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stephth
_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.

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esharef
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.

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

~~~
ihsw
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.

~~~
matdrewin
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?

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

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dsjoerg
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/>

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

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begurken
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.

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

~~~
crazygringo
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).

~~~
viscanti
> 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.

~~~
johnjlocke
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.

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luketych
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.

