I'm pretty sure there's values to that activity beyond having photographic registrations to show afterwards. (I'm also not convinced the little ball of cuteness is anywhere close to matching their choice of scenes yet)
2 of those working hours each day are blocked out for exercise, too, so this should be a real boon.
16 hours a day plus weekends seems like a ridiculous amount of free time given that there's no commuting, family time (other than calls), yard work, social engagements, etc.
Also - they're the best of the best. They sort of earned the privilege of not doing overtime.
https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac...
> In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. This is an experiment that Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter repeated over a century later with knowledge workers. It still held true. Predictable, required time off (like nights and weekends) actually made teams of consultants more productive.
The mistakes/accidents bit is especially compelling when talking about a $100 billion spacecraft.
Startup culture would do well to learn from this lesson.
See also: how NASA wrote software for the shuttle: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
BTW, I'm being down-voted above for expressing surprise at the claim the crew only works 8 hours daily including 2 hours exercise. But the example crew day shown in the following link suggests (by my reading) that it's more like 11 hours (7:30-7:30 with an hour of lunch):
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-daily-schedule-in-th...
Most of the ISS is probably connected to sensors and remotely accessible, but there are probably still a lot of cases where they actually need someone to look at something.