This is one of the reasons I hate the eight-hour work day. Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life. I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks), but I think our culture needs to change before we can really put the onus on people to improve their sleeping habits. I'd love to get 7-9 hours of sleep, but I just don't have the time.
I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.
Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?
Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)
Bear in mind that we segment our activity more in "modern" society. For example, in agrarian societies you didn't need to carve out time for exercise. Work was exercise. You also didn't need to carve out time for child care, because children worked alongside adults much of the time. And commuting wasn't really an issue when workplaces and residences were in the same community with minimal geographic separation.
It's our societal lifestyle that has demanded separate time for separate activities, resulting in a need for a greater than 24-hour day.
I think the lack of children working along side adults is a great shame. Not that I'm a fan of child labour but I think there is something that adds to a child's self esteem when they take on responsibilities along side adults. I know they complain and don't often like the labour, but I think it brings a sense of purpose and belonging that many young people seem to lack.
That lack of purpose is the point. If you can acculturate children to doing what they accurately perceive as pointless, joyless, regimented tasks and get them used to being told what to do, when to do it and how, to being ranked by an authority figure then school has done its job. An industrial society cannot function with people who won’t just put up and shut up.
I'm also struck by cities that commute heavily by bike (such as Amsterdam). Your commute is your exercise. That is not how most Americans live, however.
I would absolutely love to commute by bike. Distance is a factor but that is not the primary issue. I am in south-east Georgia and bike lanes are an absolute foreign concept. I mean even if we had them, people would use them as passing lanes and all that.
I've seen plenty of 'sleep hack' articles recently; trying to do more with less where sleep is concerned. To me that is a complete non-starter. I truly just need more sleep.
With your four display setup, now perched on your nose, moving between sitting desk, standing desk, and stretching on the floor, means moving a wireless keyboard. And for tasks where phone-like keyboards are good enough, no need for the desk, just wander.
Twitch a finger on a pad, twitch a hand and arm on mouse or controller or knee, or raise your arms and dance. You, not the task, determine your style.
Overlay work, while hanging with children. Or map remote kids, into your virtual world. Helicopter parents, meet drones.
Commuting? Well, I suppose some prefer the village well, to indoor plumbing - it's a chance to socialize, away from family oversight. And I suppose commuting will become more pleasant, as the roads clear out - have you seen video of 1950's highways? ;)
There's a meme, of people blithely living their lives, ignoring the future, not appreciating they will soon be stumbling through the smoking ruins of their city. Perhaps we need its complement. People blithely stumbling through smoking ruins, not appreciating they will soon be living in a city.
Well, with 6 kids or more in each family taking care of small children was a full-time job of its own. Not to mention not having things such as a washing machine...
With 6 or more kids in each family older children frequently helped with chores and helped take care of the younger ones. Even a 5-year old is capable of helping with simple childcare tasks and a responsible 10-year old is capable of being a babysitter for periods of time.
Children would also be naturally spaced because breastfeeding around the clock typically continued until the child was at least 18 months old, meaning that they would normally be 15-30 months apart (the amount of time that breastfeeding acts a contraceptive varies widely from woman to woman but typically breastfeeding on demand will halt a woman's reproductive activity for at least 6 months).
Yeah, it's like trying to work in an open office, with people repeatedly stopping by with problems, and springing surprise meetings, and... well, maybe not quite that bad? :)
I'm not sure what's scarier: a coworker stopping by saying, "hey, the PROD-DB-1 server has been down for four hours" or your four year old stopping by and saying, "there's an oops in the kitchen."
If you train the four year old correctly you might even get "there's an oops on the PROD-DB-1 server". That would be more than I get from some of my adult co-workers.
A friend of mine runs a rural radio-based ISP, while raising... four? kids or so. It's entirely possible that some of his downtime was caused by someone accidentally spilling juice into something and letting the magic smoke out, but I've never asked.
Automation never results in more leisure. It results in more specialized work and increased workloads. The sentiment expressed in the first line is why I intend to stay working remotely for as long as possible. I hated the fact I saw a drab grey cubicle farm more than my house and family.
Children are not working, students are not working, the retired are not working, depending on the household stay at home parents aren’t working that much, the unemployed are not working.
Automation and increased productivity has resulted in a lot of leisure. It’s not evenly distributed but hours worked per capita is not on an upward trend.
Too glib; they've been holding pretty steady at 8 hours, mainly due to regulation. Other work has increased hours, such as in many areas of health care, for example. Many folks also patch together multiple jobs in order to achieve a livable income and can work upwards of 12-16 hour days. I know several, personally.
Keynes predicted we'd be down to 3 or 4 hours a day by now, but that never happened due (partly) to the ever-increasing competitive ability/imposition that technology allows managers and shareholders to impose on labor in an effort to maximize economic potential and productivity.
How many hours do people work, really, though. If management became more lenient of people going home when the day's work is over, I imagine we would be a lot closer to 4hrs/day.
If my workplace announced that policy I'd just assume they wanted to know how productive I actually was. I would leave on time to signal that I had an appropriate workload.
Even now, average working hours in developed nations are above the "legal norm".
Though the automation definitely helped to make it more feasible to work less, there is still a political fight to be had to push the hours down even more.
Once you go remote it's hard to go back. I have been remote for 4 years now and I can't imagine doing the whole commute / office thing ever again. I don't even care if they pay more, nope. No way.
Amazingly enough, this is exactly how I feel. There's no chance for raises, although the company have a lot of opportunities to make more money, but I can't deal with the commute and office politics ever again.
I also used to feel this way. What worked for me is to not to do some of these things. For example, I got a robot vacuum cleaner and a robot mop. For any additional cleaning, I have a cleaning lady that comes every once in a while. This saves me a couple of hours of cleaning each month. If the car breaks, or something needs to be done around the house, I hire someone to do it. Groceries are delivered according to a schedule. Saves me a couple of hours of running around the supermakt.
I am not saying this works for everyone. It works for me. Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high that it is totally worth paying someone to do some things.
As for commuting, I picked a job that is not too far away and is extremely flexible when it comes to when I am at the office. This allows me to only travel to the office at hours at which traffic is decent. At the worst hours, it can take 45min to get to my office. If I avoid those hours, I can be there in 15 min.
Actually, studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do. It's just recent history that's an anomaly...
The commute and school dropoffs are the real lifestyle killer I think.
Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things.
Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot).
I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves.
Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them off at 2 different schools, and both drive to work 30+m away. We also pick them up. That's got to be 3h a day per parent. The picture complicates with after school activities. It's a wonder I don't WFH more often (which reduces my back/forth for kids to 40m total).
> Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things.
I guess it's mostly car owners that waste their time commuting. To me, public transportation user, commuting is actually the time I spend on things like personal mail, HN, little googling and whatnot, so I cannot say it's a total waste of my X hours per week. Sure you're still limited in what you can do, and it's a different story in the US where car is often a simpler (if not the only) option available.
There are some things I pretty much only get done during my commute, like reading more challenging literature. Fun books are great when I'm falling asleep in bed, but deeper books require me to set aside time when I'm not tired—which rarely happens except on trains.
Nope. 10 mins drive to train here, so with margin of safety that's 20 mins. 50 minute train ride. 10 minute walk at the other end.
So 13+ hours each week.
As to being able to do stuff on the train - Maybe on some of the longer haul units coming from further afield where you get a table, power point, and elbow room, but on the commuter trains there's not enough room to work. There's a reason few people try to work on the L or London underground.
Best I can do is scan a few websites on my phone for 40 mins, and catch up (read only) on email.
I used to live in some area where public transportation required me 2x50min to go to work whereas it was about 2x15-25min by car. Bought a bike and turned that 2x60min but went down to 2x30min in the long run, when conditions are good (no night, no rain)
I can recount for you the story that I've heard from those in my area who have kids:
First, the most dedicated full-time parents decided to pick their kids up and drop them off, so that they would have more time with their kids and the kids would spend less time in transit.
Then, some unruly kids caused some trouble on the buses (the district isn't going to station a warden on the bus, and the driver has a route to keep), so some more parents started driving their kids. Now it was super-involved parents and also parents of bullied kids.
A huge fraction of kids get bullied, so now we're looking at a bus filled with the lower half of the parental protectiveness bell curve. Obviously that's doing to distill the troublemakers, further lowering the level of protectiveness a parent would have to have before taking their kids off the buses.
This forms a vicious cycle. The good kids are no longer diluting (and providing social pressure to) the bad ones, and the buses gain a (deserved? I have no way of knowing) reputation for being where bad parents dump their kids to be tortured by other bad kids.
Now there's a social stigma. The set of parents that drive their kids now include the very-involved, the protective, and the responsive to social stigmas. So, finally, the children of the poor (whose parents don't have the means to fall in to one of the above groups) are stuck alone with the bad kids - and now we're at our present state, where cars line up around the street and everyone is spending an hour trying to pick their kids up from school.
Maybe. But do parents think they're protecting kids by driving them instead of letting them take the bus? They're going to get bullied mercilessly as soon as they get to school anyway.
School is simply a horrific hellhole for the bottom 20% of kids. People just like to feel like it's not. And unfortunately "bottom 20%" can happen to anyone -- it's not merit-based. More like affluence-based.
The point is, parents aren't protecting kids by doing that. They're deluding themselves into thinking that it's effective when in reality the kids are getting bullied throughout the day at the school.
Well, it's not like the problem can be solved, so I guess parents need something to convince themselves they're making a difference.
> The point is, parents aren't protecting kids by [driving instead of busing].
Sure they are. A bus is a different environment than school. For one, the only adult is actively concentrating the opposite direction of all the kids, who have large seat backs that block view of all but their heads. That leaves a lot more room for... activities.
I took the bus a few times when I was in junior high school almost two decades ago. I faced very minor bullying every trip. At school 7/8 of my classes were "advanced" in some way (honors, pre-AP, AP, orchestra, etc) so I didn't interact with the kids doing the bullying. I can count on one had the times I felt bullied at school during those years.
Now for me it's possible I would have been better served by just learning to handle small stuff like that, but I can certainly see how a bus ride could be hell for some kids and then they'd be mostly ok at school (maybe just some incidents at PE and lunch).
If we're sharing anecdotes, I only got bullied after school or at the bus stop, never on the bus (at least there's an adult on the bus - usually none at the bus stops).
I think the bussing is avoided simply because it's a chicken/egg problem - if an significant number of parents don't opt-in, then they can't service the populace at large. In my kids current district they only bus between schools - if you live > 1mi from a school, you might as well walk/drive.
It is solvable. If society's violent toward one another then it's probably a symptom of deeper issues. I'd say:
1.) too resource constrained. There are plenty of studies suggesting ties between drier climates with stricter societies. Maybe desertification is a deep enough issue to address actively.
2.) not enough actual mental aid - for one, counseling parents of bullies. I realize this would employ a ton of counselors and I see nothing wrong with that expense.
3.) Look for ways to address the "it's cool to be stupid" meme. Ways to do so could include devoting resources to things like the FIRST Robotics competition.
> But do parents think they're protecting kids by driving them instead of letting them take the bus? They're going to get bullied mercilessly as soon as they get to school anyway.
Not a parent but I wouldn't expect to drive children to protect them from bullies but child kidnappers or other random dangers. I'm pretty sure that's why my parents drove me too.
Is that stuff really a concern? How many random child kidnappers are there? Don't children go out to play? And then walk home alone from wherever they hung out? I thought Stranger Danger was sort of a joke for many areas now. Especially considering people on HN are usually middle class at minimum.
I never had any issues walking to the bus stop starting in kindergarten. Though granted I almost never walked alone. Usually with a friend or two.
I'm in a much more affluent place now. I see parents walking their kids to the corner of the street of our housing complex. Seems a bit extreme to say the least.
Walking distance being two miles in the last couple places I lived... Which is probably fine for high school in areas with decent weather, and somewhat rural.
OTOH though, we have elementary schools in urban/suburban areas where 1/2 of the population of the school falls within the 2 mile radius (great saves money on busing!). Combined with high speed traffic, questionable neighborhoods, bad weather, a tendency towards overprotective parenting, and most parents of early elementary school children are going to be driving them rather than letting them walk to school.
The crazy thing is that most elementary schools are going to be getting out at ~3PM, which is far to early for most parents to leave their jobs, which means they end up paying a few hundred dollars a month per child in after school fees. A real problem for people near the poverty line, so those are the 5 year olds you see walking home alone at 3PM...
Driving kids less than 2 miles to school is a schedule issue, but not the kind of time sink described. It's also reasonable if a parrent happens to dive by school on the way to work etc. I simply object to the idea that having kids ride the bus is somehow an issue.
Our elementary school has no bus and the trip there is about two miles, mostly down a street with fast traffic and poor walkability. The drop off process is at least 30 minutes each morning on average in my experience, even longer if there are multiple kids and they don't go to the same school.
The school isn't built like a sports arena, so traffic flow around it is fine throughout the rest of the day, but morning dropoff in particular is very congested because the volume of traffic spikes for a single 15 minute period each day.
Coupled with general morning rush hour traffic, this ripples out to long left-turn waits (no turning arrow), congestion, angry drivers trying to cut down residential streets, parking problems, and so on. Then depending on how far away you had to park, you have to walk that distance with young kids.
Pick up time is easier, especially with after school programs, because the spike is diffused out over a wider range of time.
That sounds unusually bad. I don't know in your specific case, but I see parents dropping young kids off as the same block as the school. Or even across the street if there are regular crossing guards which provides even more surface area.
I can only suggest this is the kind of thing that's generally fixable by a local community.
When I was in school (90s and early 2000s), it would have been considered extremely embarrassing to have your mom drop you off and pick you up every day. I think it was about the time I graduated that things began to shift. When I was in elementary school, the was nowhere for parents to pull up curb-side and get the kids. By the time I finished high school, the elementary school had blocked off half the curb-side into a separate loop for parents to pick up/drop off kids.
Hah, even more so it was embarrassing to have your parents walk you just to the bus stop for me especially after 2nd grade (which was what separated our early and middle elementary school). Roughly same time period of school. We also only had one bus stop for a pretty big multi-hundred apartment complex.
Things do seem to have changed now. Or it's just that I moved. Not sure.
Two working parents means preschool until kindergarten, and preschool doesn't offer busses. If your district offers wraparound care for school-aged children, it's probably not served by busses. You can't have kids home alone any more because somebody might inform on you.
Inform? Wow... with our muni they would just assume some other adult was caring for the child at hime, unless they had reason to suspect abuse for some other reason, of course.
If your kid does after school activities the bus system doesn't help much. Add that to zoning issues where taking the bus in the morning might mean an extra hour in commute time (in many states the way to get around No Child Left Behind averages was to stick the accelerated programs in the worst performing schools meaning busing children across town to prop up averages) and a lot of parents end up driving both ways.
15h / 5 days is 3h / day -- 1.5 hours each way, that's a long commute.
The average commute in the US is 20 min each way. Suburbanites mostly jump to nearby suburbs. It's the urbanites & rurals who outlie, with interminable train rides or stops-and-gos via SUV & long highway drives to a bigger town an hour away.
I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.
The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.
Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
Would you do it again if something awful happened and you all of a sudden were in the same spot you were when you did that work (less or none of your mortgage paid off or something). Just wondering. Seems like it sucked but worthwhile if it paid off 1/3 of your mortgage. Good job!
I have little knowledge about the truth here but I'd heard that this sort of warring stuff only ramped up after agriculture became common, no? Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer, but if everyone can hunt/gather for enough food, the motivation seems reduced.
OTOH if I can ignore preparation for winter and just raid your village for grain stores, the calculus changes.
The usual tribal conflict pattern is to seize territory as a hunting ground. Note that for nomadic tribes, there is no village and therefore no fixed location to raid.
E.g. the Comanches had a longstanding war* with the Apaches not because they wanted to seize each other's grain stores, but rather because they wanted control of the best buffalo hunting grounds.
* Not a war in the sense that we'd call it today. There were e.g. no organized charges, battle lines etc. Maybe "long slow series of irregular cavalry skirmishes" is more accurate than "war."
I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that's a popular misconception. Many technologically primitive tribal cultures have low absolute numbers of violent deaths, but they also typically have very low populations compared to agricultural societies. Their per capita casualties from intra- and inter-tribal violence are quite high.
Humans are Klingons. We in the developed world are currently living in a very strange universe unlike any before it in the history of humankind. Previous to the peaceful, violence-free lifestyle most people enjoy in the West everyone was pressed into sustaining the human war machine. American Indians had a long history of inter-tribal warfare to rival any European combat. It's just what humans do. Our apex societal violence is force-multiplied by a small group of people operating complex technological machinery, even though everyone else is still pressed into service and driven to exhaustion for industrial productivity.
> Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer
Yes, and not just for food and similar non-human resources. Reducing competition for mates is a common reason; even well past hunter-gatherer society, killing the men to take the women as mates remained a thing.
Tribal warring is common even in apes. Territorialism is especially strong. There are also plenty of things to war over besides food, such as space, shelter, mates, glory, gods, historical feuds, etc. Remember if we don't sacrifice one human before nightfall, the sun won't rise tomorrow.
Keeley says peaceful societies are an exception. About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize warfare in tribal warrior society, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare.
The Hobbsian trap: kill them before they kill you.
Minor motivations and proximity are enough to set it off. And thereare plenty of motivations anyway: fighting over good hunting areas, water, gathering areas, and women.
The commute has been an issue of mine for a while - and listening to podcasts or audio books helps but, I'd rather just step outside to get to work. I blame this on where I live and my absolute reluctance to move. So yeah, commuting is my choice in the end.
Great essay. Bertrand Russel never ceases to amaze. For others, the essay is titled In Praise of Idleness, but is about using your idle (non-working time) for pursuits.
Not to turn this into something else, but pursuing things during "idle" time is another reason why if reasonably possible, basic income could be great alongside more advancements like automation occurring.
What studies? This is the internet, use that fancy hypertext.
I'm not very familiar with this particular area, but I do know from books like The Better Angles Of Our Nature (and criticisms thereof) that this is a contentious statement. There are many myths about ancient humans, some that overly indulge in 'savagery' and others that are too idyllic.
The evidence for either interpretation is fairly fraught and I'm deeply skeptical of any affirmative claims one way or another.
Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin's view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, where as people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Common_charact...)
Sackett, R. 1996. "Time, energy, and the indolent savage. A quantitative cross-cultural test of the primitive affluence hypothesis". Ph.D. diss., University of California, Angles.
Hunter gatherer societies also weren't paying for cell phones, and internet, and mortgages/rent. I'm sure you could get by working part time for 15 hours a week if you gave up all of your modern conveniences and lived outdoors in a tent, but it wouldn't be very enjoyable.
> I'm sure you could get by working part time for 15 hours a week if you gave up all of your modern conveniences and lived outdoors in a tent, but it wouldn't be very enjoyable.
It’s interesting you’d say that. I agree on average, but the enjoyment in that lifestyle would be hard to imagine in ours. I don’t think it’s hard to see our perception of pleasurable things is different from frequency.
Frankly I think there are only small, incremental improvements to happiness possible after modern healthcare and plumbing. Which are, granted, still extremely expensive where I live.
I would love to work, say, 20-30 hours a week for 50%-75% of my base salary. Buy stuff on sale, cook for myself instead of eating out, I think I could live quite happily that way. But unless you're good enough (and social enough) to find work as a consultant, there aren't many skilled jobs that will let you do that. If you're not willing to work at least 40 hours a week, they're not interested.
Yeah, their leisure time sucked pretty badly though. And they lived a precarious existence with none of the nice things we take for granted. I wouldn't swap.
>>hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working"
Looking at it purely in terms for food and survival requires very little energy to get by life. But that comes with its own problems. Actually Hellenistic period in many ways was a far better time to live in than now.
Some people feel that humans have evolved over millions of years to do well in hunter-gatherer tribes and we have not genetically adapted yet in 6,000? years of civilization. If we think returning some habits of hunter-gatherer tribes would be beneficial, then we need to know what they are/were and not just wild-ass guess based on the Nobel Savage myth.
It's worth adding that there were still some nomadic traits, initially. They'd plant and move on, hunting as they went, and would come back to where they planted when it was time to harvest. The speculation that I'm familiar with suggests that they did this with naturally growing crops before they began to cultivate them.
I was thinking that the beginning of writing as the start of civilization, but the start of agriculture could work. With a bit more thought, the beginning of cities (greater than, say, 10,000 people) might be a better one.
Right, its good to present a model of what their habits were, if that was your area of interest. To use them as a prescriptive guide to base your habits on, requires further explanation and reasoning.
Because only well designed studies can show a truth. It is obviously the case that when you drop a big rock and a little rock at the same time the big rock will hit the ground first. Because we have a study we know this to be false even though it is obvious.
I understand the thrust of your comment and generally agree with your broad sentiment. But, most scientific studies present a model that fits data. While you are right that they can show a truth, that is not their aim, and often they are contradicted with newer data and models.
Studies are only valuable when they form a scientific consensus over repeated experiments or provide some predictive power that can be confirmed through other experiments.
To use a studies as a prescriptive guide to base your life on, or change of habits is an error IMHO, and ironically, quite unscientific.
I guess you could say its a pet peeve of mine. 9 times out of 10 when I investigate a "studies have shown" comment, it turns out to be half-true or based on weak science, or too new to be replicated by other scientists, or sometimes the context is completely different from its use in an argument.
There was no such study. Galileo showed this was false with the following famous thought experiment:
Suppose it were true. Join a heavy rock and a light rock by a cord and drop them from a tower. If the light rock falls slower, eventually the cord will be pulled taut and retard the fall of the heavier, so this system falls more slowly than the heavy rock alone. But the system is heavier than the heavy rock alone, so it should fall faster, a contradiction.
The gold standard is a model that explains that behavior, and experimental studies that work as the model predicts. The model that big ricks fall faster makes sense, but it isn't backed by experiences. Many studies have seemed to show something but in fact the authors just didn't realize they had to control for something important (sometimes an accident, sometimes outright scientific fraud)
"The experiment did take place in Delft in 16th century the Netherlands, when the mathematician and physicist Simon Stevin and Jan Cornets de Groot (the father of Hugo de Groot) conducted the experiment from the top of the Nieuwe Kerk."
Well, that particular scenario is false only when there is no air resistance (nowhere on this planet?). More importantly, it wasn't just a "study" that figured out the law of gravitation.
I am aware of that famous experiment on the moon. However, my point was that the law of gravitation was developed centuries before such an experiment could possibly be performed.
For long periods of time humans were malnourished, didn't wear proper shoes, didn't have proper beds, and didn't bathe properly. Just because it was done in the past and people survived doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way to go about things.
>I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks)
People also used to work much less back in the day -- well, except sharecroppers, slaves and the very poor. This changed with the advent of the industrial age.
Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
And as somebody already pointed "studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do".
Heck, to Romans and Ancient Greeks being hard at work was only fit for a slave -- not a citizen.
>Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
You can kind of see this transition happening if you visit currently-industrializing countries like India or China.
No kidding. Mine are 4 and 1.5, and my hobbies now include watching Paw Patrol, being the starting gun for pee races, and picking up toys in rooms that were clean an hour before. I think back on the days where I could play video games or practice the guitar with such fondness.
3.5 and 2 year old, we have Foxtel but it's only ever used for watching Paw Patrol, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and a cycle of Disney movies. Ah the days when my partner and I could just go on dates whenever!
It gets better after a few years mate, I generally have a few hours at night now to spend time with the missus, game/watch movies, do writing/side projects. This is with a 3.5 and 2 year old.
For what it's worth I don't regret it but man, I really do think "hmm... when will I next have 15 minutes where I have the use of both hands and no creature yelling at me and I'm not at work?"
I could just sleep less (with dire consequences noted here), but I've managed to keep getting 7 hours or so a day (not all in one go, but it could be worse).
Millions of years of biological imperative. The fact that you are here is proof that your ancestors were successful at procreating. Its in your genes (and your jeans).
Humans can decide a lot of things. We're all still dumb animals driven primarily by instinct, although we like to think the levels of abstraction we put on top of those instinctual actions makes us somehow enlightened. It's a matter of what instincts are stronger: the desire to reproduce, or the desire for pleasure and comfort.
Four sixes or three eights feels like about the right balance, to me. It'd be the point at which a working professional could plausibly and in a non-trying-to-make-a-point way respond with something other than their job to the question, "so, what do you do?" It also might be just enough time off to let a working couple also homeschool their kids (they'd still need a daycare or some kind of parent-free activity or something some of the time, though) without running themselves entirely ragged.
You’re not imagining it. With 8 hours of sleep and a 9 hour work day plus all the other things that are effectively ‘required’, we are left with about 4 free hrs per weekday in a very optimistic scenario (commute is 30 minutes each way, you’re really fast with your bathroom routine, you down breakfast super quick, dinner and lunch are 30 mins each, etc).
The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.
In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.
What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.
And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.
I think the most annoying part of the 8 hour work day is that a vast majority of people aren't actually working close to 8 hours. There's a lot of talking and looking at mindless stuff. My friend worked for IBM in the finance department and he streamed every world cup game. Got a promotion too.
I don't think we have to get out of hand. The average American watches 2hours of TV a day (Nielson). I don't think we would say that was "a job". There are plenty of leisure and other activities one could forgo to actually "work".
* You can collapse your commute and exercise in to one activity.
* You either pre-cook meals on the weekend, or utilize a meal substitute like Soylent (or both)
* Most chores involve cleaning things that just get dirty as part of their normal use, if you shower and spend most of your "toilet time" at work, you automatically have someone who's going to clean up after you.
In what possible way? Biking or walking to work is "dreary and sad"? Spending less time cooking so you can spend more time doing exciting and fun activities is "dreary and sad"? Pooping at the office is "dreary and sad"?
What kind of life do you lead where being stuck in traffic, daily meal preparation, and shitting on your own toilet is a constant thrill ride?
My commute to work is 10 minutes. I poop and shower at home, in my own lovely bathroom. I cook elaborate meals at home and serve them to people I love.
I guess I'm just surprised when people don't share the same joy of cooking. Or, for that matter, taking an excellent bowel movement in one's own toilet.
eating - I think that's why Soylent was so popular. People liked the idea of drinking a meal while working/multi-tasking. I'm not 100% into it, especially since I'd prefer something with a better ratio of protein, but I see the appeal.
for me personally the bigger issue is the actual 9-5ish work hours. I'm way more productive later in the day, so if the schedule would allow something like a Noon-4 pm/break/8 pm -midnight type breakdown I'm all for that. this is sometimes possible with telecommuting arrangements, whenever I'm able to do that I'm more productive, more rested and feel like my personal work/life balance is better.
I was having a conversation with my boss at lunch today - and he made a joke how the difference between our respective sleep/activity schedules is basically the same as the difference between our schedules on the east coast of the USA and our team overseas (he's a morning person, I'm not and have never been).
I told him I'd never again work at a job that required me to be there at 9am, because I'm effectively useless before 11am, completely independent of how much sleep I've had the night before. The only plus side, I joked, was that even though I'd only gotten 4-6 productive hours of work done, no one batted an eye when I left at 5pm, since I'd been there since 9.
Many advanced nations outside the United States (talking mainly about Europe) have learned long ago that the eight hour workday is too much. But in many places in the United States, an eight hour workday would be considered quite short. The other issue is annual vacation time; it's surprisingly short on average in United States compared to most other places.
I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.
If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.
It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s
You nailed it! Everybody expects something from us - our partners, bosses, children... We also have needs and expectations - we need to exercise etc. How should we find time for all this working eight hours a day (realistically - at least 10 hours as most people are commuting. You wake up, go to work, get back, try to do your best at whatever you need to do... No wonder people sacrifice their sleep.
Working remotely has helped me a lot (cutting commuting). I work 8 hours, eat, exercise and get 8 hours of sleep. My wife who isn't working does more chores than I do (although I help a lot during the weekend). My only complain is that outside of exercising I have very little freetime, but that's mainly because I spend lots of time with my kids.
Do something about it bro. If you want something you gotta take it. Nobody is gonna come offering you a dream work week. But the catch 22 is you gotta lose some sleep to find time to develop some systems to make passive income
Its not "rent seeking" if you solve a problem that others have in a way that is repeatable and low margin for you. It does favor software solutions a LOT though.
Hmmm, I get what you're saying but I still don't feel like that can be a global solution for everyone. At least not until we live in a post-scarcity society of some sort where we can all get paid from some software we wrote.
Totally on board with this. I'm currently looking for a 1/2 time contract gig, mostly because that's about all I want to work in conjunction with running a household and raising two kids.
> Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life.
It's a cultural marker that you define 'eating' as 'not part of having a life'.
One important thing the article doesn't cover: we now have good reason to suspect that chronic sleep deprivation can cause brain damage. Not just a long term decrease in function, but actual cellular damage.
In a major triumph of medicine, we now know that brain cells shrink during sleep (about 60% in rats), allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow about 10 times as fast [1] [2], helping to cycle out built up toxins and waste products and eventually drain them into the bloodstream. It was previously a medical mystery how the brain was able to eliminate toxins without being connected to the lymphatic system (although it's since been shown that the brain is directly connected to the lymphatic system to some degree as well [2])
As far as I know, it's not proven that this contributes to the cognitive effects of chronic sleep deprivation. But it would make an awful lot of sense, and also help explain why sleep debt becomes more difficult to pay off the longer you let it sit around, and why the damage possibly even becomes permanent.
It's a tradeoff - I can go home and spend more social time, leisure time and put more personal time into my projects if I sleep less. The 2-3 hours of extra time I get by sleeping like crap allows me to do things I wouldn't otherwise get to do. Productivity couldn't improve these if there's no time left in the day to do them.
It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it? There's no need to be obsessed with scraping every last ounce of productivity out of myself at work. I like my job, but feel no obligation for that.
Because you’re doing long-term damage to your brain?
Now, it’s possible that you’re not, and the brain can heal itself, but that’s why I try and get enough sleep. It disturbs me to think that the impossibly complex biomechanical machine in my head is slogging through excess waste products to try and crank out acceptable performance.
Most of these studies tend to be focused on temporary effects, including this one. Most of that "damage" can be undone with a good nights sleep.
But even if some amount is permanent, so what? Does my brain need to be in mint condition? If the cost of getting more enjoyment out of life is a little brain damage, so be it. I hold no ego about my brain being perfect. Performance is only one aspect of life and not one I strive to prioritize significantly over enjoyment.
I was referring to evidence that chronic sleep deprivation can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s and other dementias by allowing the brain less time to flush out amyloid proteins that can aggregate.
...But everyone’s brain is different, and if you don’t feel your enjoyment of life is being affected, then it’s entirely possible your brain is getting all its maintenance needs met in the time you sleep.
I didn’t mean to sound moralizing or judgmental— these decisions are of course entirely ours to make for ourselves.
My personal experience is that long term sleep deprivation took me several months of recovery to even approach the mental capacity I had previously. Having kids really fucked up my sleep schedule, and I was not getting enough rem cycles for about 2 years. It wasn't until my first was sleeping through the night consistently that I began to recover.
> It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it?
That's exactly it, it's a lose-lose. Honestly, I think it's the number one thing I look for when weighing a job offer: if I spend 5 hours a day writing high quality code, will anyone care if I take off after? I'd rather have time to go home, go to the gym, relax, and get 9 hours of sleep. I hate the feeling of just being at the office because I feel like I should. It makes me happier and honestly, over the long-term, my work output is better than when I was working 10 hour days.
You're approaching productivity from the wrong angle. It's not about producing more, and especially not producing more while tired... it's about doing less unnecessary work. This requires thought, and is easier with a full night's sleep.
However you define productivity, I still work the same number of hours in a given day, so whether it's more output or better output, it's still all the same to me. There's no reason for me to invest the extra hours in sleep to improve it when I can invest that time in things I enjoy. I don't see how that changes anything I said. My work is defined by hours, not goals, not lines of code, but hours.
If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay. You might also be shortening your life by not sleeping enough, perhaps by a larger amount than you're gaining by sleeping less. That is clearly the case in the limit of not sleeping at all -- you would shorten your life to a month at best, not to mention that the quality of life would go down.
> If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay.
That's making the huge assumption that you're willing to constantly seek your maximum pay and that you get paid solely for your measurable productivity output, which is in my experience very rarely the case. More often than not you get paid based on capabilities and responsibilities, not significantly more or less on your output. It's certainly not a direct X% less productive = X% less pay relationship. I believe it's been shown that seeking new employers is the best way to maximize pay, but that means interviews are often the difference between you and more pay, yet no one can judge future productivity in an interview.
> you would shorten your life to a month at best
To my knowledge, sleep dep hasn't actually killed people directly like this, they simply start sleeping.
There is a somewhat rare genetic disease where at some point in their life people can't sleep any more and eventually die from it. So yes, there are more.
"If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work"
That is not how it works practically. Less productive people don't get less salaries, unless their productivity is going really really down. Most companies use hours spend at work as proxy for productivity for salary purposes. Oftentimes you may look like super productive cause you are fixing a lot of bugs or constantly runing meetings. That bug were cause by you or those meetings could be half shorter is something superiors rarely see.
If you feel groggy in the morning or just not well–rested even after 7-8 hours sleep, get your sinuses & lungs checked.
Could be sleep apnea, but in my case I felt congested all the time. What I thought was allergies was actually the linings of my sinuses inflamed to the point of closing off air passages.
Unclear if the root cause in my case was acid-reflux into the sinus cavities or exposure to dust from ground zero.
The resulting surgery kind of sucked (free tip: don't have your sinuses roto-rootered in the winter) but ever since I've been able to sleep a solid 6-7 hours every night. I now wake up rested, don't feel groggy, typically without an alarm.
I used to sleep until noon on the weekends and could easily spend 10+ hours sleeping a night if I let myself. After a year of my wife kicking me out of bed because of snoring too loud, I finally went to the doctor and was diagnosed with a severe apnea. I'm average weight, never had a problem waking up, and didn't feel that tired throughout the day like a lot of sufferers feel. Using the CPAP machine wasn't a life altering experience that immediately changed how I felt.
Fast forward 6 months or so... I have serious difficulty sleeping more than 8 hours, can hardly sleep past when the sun comes up. Don't need an alarm to wake up, and feel well rested after 7 hours of sleep. I'm also so much more productive at work, actually feel awake and can focus on things. Prior to the CPAP machine I don't think I ever actually understood what it was like to not feel tired, it was just my normal state so I was actually tired without even realizing it. It was a life altering change that didn't happen overnight. I've tried a couple times to sleep without the CPAP machine, and it just doesn't happen. I imagine its the same as sleeping before, I just notice how I'm unable to sleep now.
This might not be true for everyone, but if you're told you snore really bad, and don't feel exhausted all the time, but can sleep constantly... you may have sleep apnea and are just dealing with the symptoms without even realizing. It was absolutely worth getting checked out for me.
I had almost the same experience, except I was moderate sleep apnea rather than severe. I remember being disappointed after the first night with my CPAP because I didn't have the "holy cow, I slept so good and I feel amazing and refreshed now" experience that a lot of other CPAP users were reporting.
Luckily I stuck with it, and after a few months I had to sleep without the machine for about a week and noticed a massive difference - I felt like hot garbage. The whole week without it I was so tired, had headaches every day, constant brain fog, and it was just hard to sleep in general. Now I'm a big believer in the CPAP machine and happily wear it every night.
Bonus: my wife no longer wakes me up every night for snoring ;)
I had so much shit that just sucked in my life the first 21 years of it. I always had sinus infections, I would constantly have what my friends and I call "poo-brain," where you just have slug thoughts and can't get your shit in order and your speech might even slur. Depression. Etc.
Then I started taking fexofenadine (allegra) and fluticasone (nasonex) every day. After 2 weeks, nearly every problem I had vanished. No more sinus infections, I could breathe and smell, I slept incredibly, no more poo brain, no more 2pm "head of concrete." It was like I started a new life.
Anyway if you have any of the above try that drug routine maybe? You gotta keep it up non stop for 2 weeks straight to see results, and the potential downside is that now if I get off my antihistamines for like a day even, I'm likely to instantly get a sinus infection.
I used to do Allegra. But I started getting an irregular heartbeat. (It's called a premature ventricular contraction - basically, the nerves tell the ventricle to contract too soon after the previous heartbeat, and the muscle says "I just did that, I'm on my coffee break now", and the heartbeat gets skipped. The next heartbeat happens reliably, though, so it's not at all dangerous. But more blood has shown up at the heart, so the next heartbeat kind of hurts - kind of like when you swallow something a bit too big for your throat.)
Anyway, that all went away when I quit Allegra. Now I just use the fluticasone. But I had to get allergy shots for a while, because in my case, the problem was the cat that slept on my bed.
I actually had the same issue for the first 21 years of my life as well. Doctors gave me all of those those things, fluticasone, zyrtec, etc.
I cut gluten out of my life, and basically everything changed. I no longer get 10 sinus infections a year, I don't have to take any allergy medicines, my depression went away, and I can sleep less.
All of my doctors told me to take drugs to solve it, but it turns out I am gluten intolerant, and cutting it out has changed my life forever.
I'd like to second the gluten thing, as an unexpected behavioral change that changed my life immeasurably.
I was told to cut wheat down to 10% max of my diet, under very strange circumstances (not going to go into it here; it was weird and made no sense, also, this person wasn't a doctor or anything and didn't tell me how it might affect me to change my diet this way).
I tried it for two weeks. I went to the store, got gluten-free equivalents of regular foods, and this was long before gluten-free was a fad so it was hard to find stuff.
Within two days, literally, I felt 10 years younger. My digestion went from kinda bad, always feeling bloated, often unpleasant times in the bathroom, to, well, a really good experience. My skin went from being kind of sallow and puffy to healthy and glowing.
I used to strain my back and neck regularly, and for no reason. I'd spend maybe a month's worth of days limping around with back/neck strain. That ended, entirely.
My mood improved to an amazing degree, which was also really surprising.
And last, I used to get sick 4-5 times a year, and without fail if I didn't get enough sleep, even two nights in a row. Now, I get sick maybe once a year, much more in line with what I see in other people.
I think I too had a low-grade gluten intolerance (probably not celiac, though I've never been tested); getting rid of it was probably the best health decision I've ever made, for impact on quality of life.
This was true in South Carolina, Houston Texas, Tokyo Japan, Ningbo China, Taipei Taiwan, and San Francisco CA. Many are hot and humid, and Tokyo/Houston is lousy with tree sperm, but I didn't think it'd have followed me to SF. I think I just have a bad nose. Or I'm addicted to anti histamines now.
I was just diagnosed with sleep apnea this week after it wreaked havoc on my personal and professional life for the last 6. I couldn't work, couldn't engage in anything. Now I'm pretty much terrified to go to sleep every night as I know I'm probably not going to get any rest and wake up zombified. I heard the surgery was a hit or miss. Would you recommend?
No opinion on the surgery, but you might try a CPAP machine! I have a family member whose epiglottis was damaged in surgery, and she developed really bad sleep apnea as a result.
It took her a solid year of being a zombie before she figured out what was happening and why. She bought a CPAP, and it's made a huge difference in her quality of life.
So if you're looking to try out a non-surgical fix while you ponder a surgery, consider buying/renting/borrowing a CPAP!
They are. But when the alternative is surgery to enlarge your nasal passages (which, like any form of surgery, may or may not work), well, forcing oneself to get used to it is the lesser of two evils.
CPAP is usually the first line for sleep apnea. I've been using one for the past couple of months. They've improved the masks so the really only annoyance is being tethered to the machine when you roll over but it isn't too bad.
Another thing I've learned is the CPAP machines now phone home to the insurance company to give them compliance data on how and when you use the machine. Less happy about that.
Absolutely 100% get the CPAP machine and give it a few months. I didn't immediately feel better after using the machine, but I'm about one year in at this point and it was life changing for me.
I was also diagnosed with it last week. I'll be buying a CPAP as the night I tested it improved my sleep quality. I've also removed my pillow and that has helped.
Just a follow up…I got tested for sleep apnea because I fit the profile (overweight, snorer) but they found no evidence that I stopped breathing at all overnight. The sinus thing didn't get diagnosed until one of my frontal sinuses closed off during descent into JFK. Can't begin to explain the pain other than feeling like your head is exploding.
No. The only thing that helped a bit was the saline spray the ENTs use, which I suspect had some mild steroids. That would help sinuses open for a few hours.
The symptoms, in retrospect, were the constant feeling of a stuffy noise and headaches during air pressure changes like sudden altitude changes while flying (gradual ascent/descent didn’t bother me most of the time).
My doctor initially declared I had sleep apnea, only after that test did he refer me to an ENT who diagnosed it in a few minutes with some sort of scope they stick up your nasal passages.
I'm interested as well. Despite the fact that I take similar allergy medications, I find that as soon as my head hits the pillow my nasal passages close. It's really frustrating.
Are you allergic to dust mites? My nighttime stuffy nose lessened when I was tested for dust mite allergy and my doctor instructed me to put allergy barriers on my mattress and pillows and launder all of my bedding (blankets included) once a week with hot water.
I don't you can generalize things like this. I am sure there are people who can get by on 6 hours or less naturally. But the problem starts when people who need more try force themselves to sleep less. I have done a lot experimentation with this and had to accept that the only sustainable way for me is to sleep around 8 hours every night. It would be cool if I could make do with 4 but it's just not in me.
Anecdote is not data, but I have not set an alarm for many years - I sleep 5-6 hours (only 5 since I went vegan) and I wake up on my own, refreshed. Occasionally I’m tired, I take a nap. I don’t do coffee, I have unsweetened tea but don’t go nuts on caffeine, social drinking.
I don’t feel any need to ‘sleep in’ on weekends.
Yes, I work from home and own my own company, so I have the luxury of taking a nap in the middle of the day.
If I were to try to force myself to sleep 8 or 9 hours I feel worse; so I don’t do that anymore.
I'm in the same boat, working from home to no one else's schedule, but probably with a worse habit of body. I have no idea when I might last have slept for more than seven hours, and I very rarely nap. I'm considering acquiring a 'real job' again, but I'm probably not willing to ever compromise my sleep habits for an employer. I don't think anyone else should either, but I suspect that's not likely to be a popular opinion.
I can't be alone in being exhausted at these studies. Doctors and Lawyers have spent the better part of the last century working on little to no sleep. Academics too. As an engineer, I would regularly work through little sleep because the process of loading a large project into my head to work on it would take more time than the gains from being more well rested. I'm older now, and no longer work as an engineer. I value my sleep and appreciate how much more I can task-switch on a good nights rest, but the idea that I'm not being productive when I'm grinding through work that has to get done and I'm tired seems an overwritten idea.
I'm not arguing against rest and recharging and clearing your mind. I just don't see what these articles are trying to prove. When I was in college I had several stints of no sleep days to finish projects. Even into my early engineering career, I once billed 40 hours straight. Was I as "productive" per minute for that entire time as if I had slept through 5 nights? No. Would the work have gotten done faster than those 40 hours if I had slept for 8 hours in the middle a few times? No. I had a deadline, and there was nothing getting around the work needing to be done.
The argument seems to be against a constant sprinting mode, which I don't think any company employs. Humans burn out after continuous work for weeks, sometimes months. But a week or 3 of little to no sleep to get through everything you need to? It's worked for a long time. Arguably building up muscle memory while forcing rote things to be learned while on little sleep works. What are we trying to prove by this? That "the man" is out to abuse workers? Of course he is. But did anyone make partner at a law firm by claiming he's going to more productive by working less? If you're goal is work life balance, go ahead. But if you're goal is to excel in a field, then it probably involves some sleep deprivation. PG wrote an article about the reason startups were suited for youth is that you could push through unreasonable hours to crank a lot of life into fewer days.
Sorry for the rant...just wondering if I'm alone in thinking this
If you're saying that in the short term, short-term thinking works, sure. If you're in college and are doing a bunch of work that doesn't matter to deadlines that are entirely made up, sure, you can get away with it.
You claim that doctors do fine without enough sleep, but even doctors don't claim that any more. Doctor friends tell me it's a big focus for reform. [1] And in areas where safety is even more important, like piloting planes, they take mandatory rest even more seriously.
Software is mostly not life-critical, but I think it's uniquely bad in this regard. Doctors can bury their mistakes, but version control systems preserve ours forever. It's too easy to be negatively productive in software, and enormously easier if you're not getting enough sleep.
I don't mean to claim doctors do fine without enough sleep. Doctor friends I have spoken to talk about this talk about the reforms but it is not uniformly positive. I am trying to posit that the claim that we function better with more sleep is true. But that claim is made in a vacuum. Person A operates at 100% well rested. But operating at 80% or 60% is more valuable than 0% if averaged out over time. So I can write better code when I'm well rested, sure. I agree with that. I think everyone logically will. If I have 1000 lines of code to write. And it will take me 10 hours to write it. And I have 2 days to do it. I'll spread it out over 2 days and write good code, and maybe it only end up taking 800 lines of code. But if I have 1 day to write it. I might end up writing 1200 lines of code, but still get it done in that day, it is more valuable to me, than a day later when the code doesn't matter anymore. I'd argue I'd rather a doctor save my life that day, than do a great job and make sure I never scar over two days when the option isn't there.
Medicine is a regulated industry in that the number of people trained almost precisely matches the number of jobs available. The training process is designed to prune out people who cannot function when they have to choose between life saving procedure, and doing the life saving procedure perfectly but losing the patient. It's a straw-man I know, I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious? Does anyone feel like they work better when they are tired? What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?
If you are throwing away your tired-brain code a week later, godspeed. Do what you like. But if you are checking in that code and making other people deal with it, then quality becomes much more important. If you write 1200 lines of code instead of 800, then you have something that has 50% more maintenance cost and 50% more bugs. (And it's probably worse given that you were tired and thinking with a short-term mindset.) So hell yes, it matters to me whether my coworkers are putting long-term value above short-term incentives.
> I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious?
It is not in fact obvious. So many places reward time spent more than quality work. Just today at a meetup we were talking about how to shift people away from damaging and expensive heroics to investing in not creating such big problems that you need work-all-night heroes. The industry is notorious for death marches and work-all-the-time startups. And it's also notorious for buggy, low-productivity, high-tech-debt code bases and giant rewrites caused by years of accumulated short-term thinking.
If it's obvious to you, skip over the articles. Not everything has to be for you.
> I'd argue I'd rather a doctor save my life that day, than do a great job and make sure I never scar over two days when the option isn't there.
> What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?
Sure, if that was all there was to it, then you'd be 100% right. The knowledge we seem to be gaining from these discussions is that a programmer who works 6 hours a day is overall more productive than one who works 8 hours a day, let alone one who has been on a 16 hour death march for 6 months. The same idea applied to the doctor example may mean that your doctor is less likely to save your life if they're on the 28th hour of their shift than one that wasn't.
Yes, there's a time and a place for burning a candle at both ends, but we seem to think that this is OK to do in the long term. So sure, if you need to pull a rare 20-hour marathon to fix an urgent problem, do it - the value might well justify the cost. But don't tell yourself that it's sustainable or even optimal in the long term, evidence seems to suggest the exact opposite.
I feel like my natural body clock is a 28-hour day. If I have no reason to get up I'll sleep for about 10 hours, but then I'm not ready to sleep again for about 18 hours.
I'm guessing the 10 hours is just making up for sleep debt and that might taper off if I could sleep as much as I wanted every night. But the realities of life (kids in school, work, kid's activities, etc.) mean that I have to be awake by about 6:45am and being in bed and asleep before 10:00 just doesn't happen very often either.
I used to think that about myself. Now I'm pretty sure it's just the result of having light pollution (lights outside candle temperature and brighter than three or four candles) including glowing screens, electronic device hyperstimulation, and the Internet info treadmill, after 9:00 or so. If I give myself a good long stretch of low light and no electronic toys my "28-hour clock" not-so-mysteriously turns into an ordinary 24-hour one. Being outdoors and active as much as possible during daylight hours also helps (especially in Summer, when dark hours are in short supply).
My natural day lasts considerably more than 24 hours, but only when TV/video is active. Without them, I'm ready for bed by 10 PM. If I still had any working grey cells, I'd run some week-long A/B experiments to verify and assess the impact of each. But I don't think I could live with all that silence, so...
I'm the same way. Back when I used to have summer breaks (highschool / college if I didn't have a part-time gig) my days would start 2 hours later every day. So I'd wake up at 8, then 10, then 12... until I was fully nocturnal. But then 4-5 days later I was back to waking up in the morning.
I feel like when I get 8-9 I am much more productive and have a much better mood. Seven for me is sort of the point where I can go throughout the day but I will be distracted. Six or less is really bad for me.
I really notice when I get less sleep I make a bunch more comments on HN / reddit or use Twitter much more.
I'm much more interested in why a body needs an amount of sleep, what processes it is conducting, and how you can affect those processes.
What happens in the 7th hour that didn't happen in the 6th? If it's a fourth REM cycle, why do we need 4? What does the fourth do that the third didn't? Why do REM cycles take that long? Can you make them take more or less time? Can you determine lack of sleep from a brain scan? Can you tell the difference between a 6th hour brain and a 7th hour brain? Does anything you eat or do during a day affect how long this process takes? What about hydration / nutrition?
I'm sure these are all answerable, but I'm not sure most people know the answers, and this article certainly doesn't get us any closer to understanding.
This article isn't exactly a presentation of research. Several of those answerable questions will probably be worth Nobel Prizes for the people who can answer them. This is fundamentally a puff piece with a sleep expert promoting his new general audience book on sleep health (Not discounting the tips, or his expertise, but this is obviously not a research paper). Several of the sleep hygiene tips he gives are things that aren't really settled AFAIK in the field, possibly why he even specifically mentions "practicing what he preaches" in that last question. He's preaching at least as much as talking about settled science.
I think the headline is misleading. Let's say I stay up late to do X, Y and/or Z. These things to mean have meaning. In doing them I feel a sense of accomplishment. I've been productive.
Now I show up to work the next day. Certainly less sleep has some effect on me. But that doesn't devalue the increased productivity from the previous evening.
The brain is a limited resource. There might be occasional short term hacks/cheats. But on average you'll have X gallons in the mental tank. This is true. If you spend that at home then yes you will be "less productive" at work.
Maybe I'm weird, but I've never deluded myself about the impact of a lack of sleep. My entire life I've strived to get 7.5 to 8 hours a night. I'm not that successful lately, but I make it a priority.
What I don't get are people that brag about not getting much sleep. It's clearly unhealthy. Would you brag about your poor eating habits? Or not following a medication regimen?
I know the science is still early, but I have no doubt that poor sleep has a significant, long-term, permanent impact on health.
Most of the problems being discussed here in this thread regarding work hours per week, commute times, finding time for leisure and exercise and family time, the time spent dropping off kids at school, etc -- there are mostly unique to America. Americans could really learn a lot about how successful you can be despite spending less time at work, as well as less time fretting about other things, by looking at any of many countries on the continent of Europe, who offer a much better work/life balance but with no sacrifice on work output.
Some of the most talented and productive developers I know are in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and have a lifestyle that would be considered impossible by many in the States.
The brain needs time to recharge, time away from "work", time to think about work without actually doing work, and the punch that gets packed into a shorter work day can be much greater if the brain is working at optimum capacity, which usually doesn't happen if it is taxed for loads of hours day after day after day.
For me personally, my best ideas come when I am away from a computer, and my brain is free to wander. The more time I sit at a computer, ironically the less likely good ideas will come. Most work environments in the States have not learned this yet.
Considered impossible due to the different laws set by companies for their employees. European employees get way more vacation time among other things, and American employees get a whole lot of pressure due to the fact that they can be fired anytime with no warning or explanation while places in Europe, for example Denmark, make it much harder to fire employees on a whim, which inherently puts a whole lot pressure on the American employee
>> If you were not to set an alarm clock, would you sleep past it? If the answer is yes, then there is clearly more sleep that is needed.
Totally wrong. I just finished 4 months of military training. Sleep deprivation was part of the training. We were constantly sleep deprived. It impacted our performance, that was the point. That said, I'm one of those people who always seems to get up 2 minutes before the alarm. Even in my sleep-deprived state, less than four hours a night for weeks, I still woke up before my alarm.
Your point, although interesting, does not invalidate the quote.
Let A be « you would sleep past the alarm clock without it » and B « you are sleep-deprived »
They say A → B. You say false since I got B and not(A).
A → B does not imply B → A which would be proved false by your case.
Why not sleep 8 hours a day if needed (Personally, I'm even more useless on less than 7-8 hrs of sleep)?
I am sure you can reinvent the wheel and then some in what's left. People are productive when they are productive, you can come up with the idea to change the world in 60 mins...or never in your lifetime.
If Einstein had lived to 150 it's not a given that his contribution to the would would have 2X...
I recognize the thrust of this argument, and anecdotally agree with it from my experience,but it's not practical advice. Work 12 hours, spend at least 30 minutes each way commuting,work out, prepare and eat meals, and you're at pretty nearly 15 hours, without counting preparing for work. Sure,you have time for sleeping 8 hours,but only if you eschew any personal life and find your work sufficiently exciting to not see any need for recreation/fun all week. Dropping to about 6.5 hours of sleep at least doubles time for those things each work day.
I've tried maintaining 8 hours of sleep daily in such conditions. What I've found is that I'm productive for two days. By Tuesday or Wednesday night, I'm frustrated and bored, and spend 3 or 4 hours doing something interesting and, bam, week derailed. For me, 6.5 hours is the compromise that works. Plus, I sleep 9 hours on Friday and Saturday nights.
Great co-workers, somewhat interesting work, insight into a really interesting organization, and a situation where I went in with too little information and now would face substantial costs if I back out rather than persisting for another 3 or 4 years.
That's fair enough, but I think your personal circumstances are unusual (and unhealthy). For the majority of people sleeping 8 hours is practical advice because they work 8 not 12 hours, leaving them with 4 extra hours, which is enough time to go to the gym, spend with family etc..
> the Foundation suggests anywhere from six hours to 11 hours of sleep per night for individuals between the ages of 18 and 25 may be suitable, or six hours to 10 hours for those between the ages of 26 and 64.
A four to five hour deviation is quite significant. That's a difference of 80% between the most amount of sleep needed and the least.
> "I suppose the rule of thumb in adults is about seven to eight hours, but is that based on any really solid science? I would sort of say not," said Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience and head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford.
This is the first time I've ever read about sleep problems caused by a simple glass of wine before bed. About ten years ago some study came out linking red wine to heart health, and I remember one smug kid at school making fun of the Mormons because the article had just "proven their religion wrong". Meanwhile health organizations were recommending you not start drinking because it's also addictive. I've heard that the drinking culture in the US has changed lately, as it is being seen as less and less healthy (I've been abroad for about 5 years).
The genetic variability of humans seems large enough that simple rules about sleep, like nutrition, are probably wrong for many people. Get more sleep if you are tired all the time? Maybe that would work.
Sleep need is variable, work is variable, motivation is variable. It's more likely that sleep is a spectrum, hence the 8.34% variance in required minimum sleep for adults, or how general quality of health affects ability to maintain sleep. It's even possible that sleep has nothing to do with our health and productivity other than being an indicator of it, and not necessarily a cause for it. Thanks, pseudo-scientific studies.
This is all true, but I think it's worthwhile to be very skeptical about your assumption of how much sleep is healthy for you. Everyone in these threads assumes that they are one of the special few who does perfectly fine on 5 hours of sleep.
I'm productive on six hours of sleep in the sense that I get something done. However, I am quite noticeably less productive than if I get more sleep.
Even if I don't feel tired, I notice that my thoughts are more muddled and it's hard to concentrate. If I get 6 hours or less of sleep one night, it's usually not a problem. But if the lack of sleep is over multiple days (like it usually is), then it becomes much worse.
the article states 7 hours is the minimum, but I seem to need a lot more. they state, if you can sleep after the alarm clock goes off, then you should sleep more.
So, what if you get 8.5 hours of sleep but you still could sleep, after the alarm clock goes off? there should be some upper limit, maybe 9?
I recommend a 'Sleep' app on your phone. I set it to 7am and it'll wake me up anywhere from 6:30-7, depending on my sleep cycle. Never felt drowsy on 6:30 days.
It tracks your sound or movement (either via the microphone or the accelerometer) as you sleep to determine your sleep cycles. You set a baseline of typical sleep for 5 days, and after that the app can predict when to wake you up.
Unless there is extend of stress or body injury that needs sleep to continue the recovering process, or other medical situation occurs, a healthy body does NOT require more sleep than 6-7 hours, because it is not about sleep's length but the quality of REM sessions of your sleep. If you happen to to push your sleep over 8.5 hour, you are entering into another REM session (that you don't need) that's why when you wake up in the middle of from it, you feel very tired. But try to wake up precise 6.5 hour after you fell asleep and you will feel very refreshed (given you had interrupted good night sleep)
What is it about those that need less? I personally have been sleeping 5-6 hours per night for decades. In my mid-30's I stopped my youthful partying and found I did not need to sleep as much. Now, at 52, more than 6 hours feel like too much and I'm groggy.
Same. 5 to 6 hours and I feel fine, unless I'm ill or already sleep deprived. I can function on 3-4 hours per night for extended periods of time before I start to notice serious deterioration in mental faculties. I believe it's genetic. Some studies have tentatively tied naturally short sleep cycles to a gene variant (http://www.sleepeducation.org/sleep-disorders-by-category/in...). Also, my father sleeps for about the same amount of time as well.
I'm in the same boat as you. You might Google for DEC2, and maybe there's even a test for it. I'm convinced I have it, and even did a 23andMe thinking they might test for it, but alas, they don't.
Despite knowing that I just don't need a lot in the way of sleep, it seems that every time I make that claim, it's met with incredulity, but having worked a job for 6 years in a different time zone, and with a loose schedule, whenever I just went to bed when I got tired, and woke up when I woke up, I found that the median sleep length was in the 5-5.5 hour range.
Are there any reliable devices that can measure rem phases during sleep reliably and wake you up after 6-8 hours when the rem phase ends? And I'm not talking about sleep apps for phones which work with mics and accelerometers.
Have gotten 6 for decades, but I used to swim/run/yoga. Now I don't do anything because there's no time and am still productive, but need lots of caffeine and morale boosters, like I traded a couple pairs loafer mesh shoes I didn't like for a high end pair of proper fitting ASIC running shoes at Nordstrom's today. In fact I lost a couple hours sleep just thinking about trading those shoes today...
Sleep on your back on the floor, beds are an new invention and a bad one can be painful. So before you go out and buy a new mattress experiment with your sleep. Hammocks are also said to be a good alternative.
I've slept roughly 9 hours every night my entire life. I can't imagine giving up good sleep for anything. Hell, going to bed is usually my favorite thing to do outside of hobbies.
Fuck sleep. I'm waiting for the day when I can click a button on my phone to go to sleep instantly and wake up instantly on a timer. No natural feeling of sleepiness. I hate the time lost to sleep. What does it matter if I lose 5 years in my old age? I gain so much time in my younger years. It's like smoking. It's harmful and will kill you in the long term. But why do you care about living to a 100? You will have n other problems.
>Does the 90-minute cycle mean that so-called power naps are worthless? “They can take the edge off basic sleepiness. But you need 90 minutes to get to deep sleep, and one cycle isn’t enough to do all the work. You need four or five cycles to get all the benefit.
Notice, my sleep pattern contains 3 full cycles a day. And less time between cycles.
I'm not just subsisting on short naps.
The second link simply confirms what I initially said, that sleep is a cleaning cycle for the brain.
I can't attest for that point scientifically or even personally.
The argument in #9 as I understand it is, over the course of your lifetime, the cumulative minuscule effect of how you sleep relative to the Earths magnetic field can have a negative effect on your health, increasing the risk of stroke or brain related conditions.
To prove or disprove would require long term study (in the order of a human lifetime) with equipment capable of detecting very small changes while eliminating all other effects.
I wouldn't downvote you (even if I could) for adding to the discussion, but this certainly isn't the sort of content I come to HN to explore. Outlandish claims without anything to back them up.
I didn’t downvote you but claiming meditation and yoga substitutes for sleep pattern matches to quack/idiot. Your link has the word guru in it which points the same way. Personally I find it credible because I’ve read studies before suggesting meditation can substitute for sleep 1 for 1 up to some threshold but I’m too lazy to search for them. If you make claims that are as credible as a homeopath or anti-vaxxer cite something that at least looks credible.
Fair enough. Was in a hurry. Was obviously a topic that needs more detail. Have also seen those studies (via HN) - in fact they were what originally got me curious about meditation about 5 years ago.
