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Comment by patrickgzill | Hacker News Reader

My personal experience with Germans is that they are hard workers for several hours, then they take off and play. During the time they are working they are focused on getting work done.

Americans will put in long hours, but then during the course of the day will play in the form of checking personal email, talking around the water cooler, etc.

You can cross ref. this with NASA's finding that programmers who were only allowed to work 5 days a week of 8 hour days were as productive and had less bugs in their code than those allowed to work more hours.

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My experience echoes this. I really believe there is a fixed limit to the amount of work one can do and once you cross that line, you just end up goofing off or procrastinating. And it's nowhere near 40 hours per week. I would say it's more like 20-30.

The 40 hour work week is standard because Henry Ford's productivity studies found that for repetitive, manual labour, that was the maximum amount of hours one could work before a drastic reduction in productivity. That bar was set nearly 100 years ago and yet we still follow it even though work has drastically changed.

I never understand people who work insane hours. They may be at work for X hours per day but I really doubt they are working all that time.

Ironically the 40hour week in America came about because it was MORE efficient than working 6day weeks - in fewer hours you got more done with the weekend to rest.

Then somebody forgot this and decided that if 40 was good 48 must be better.

I saw a PBS documentary sometime in the early 90's about the Labor Movement in the US. Just after getting the 40 hour work week, they pushed for 32 hours because it was found to be optimal. Industrialists fought harder against that one so Congress felt it was a worthy compromise to leave at 40. I'd love to find the study the Labor Movement based its conclusion on.

My own experience is that I'm maximally focused for 6 hours each day but it's split into 2-3 hour bursts.

I have the same experience as a mathematics grad student. After two or three hours I run out of focus and need to go for a walk + food.

I noticed the same thing when I was a math undergrad. While working on proofs for Abstract Algebra and Real Analysis, I couldn't go more than a couple of hours.

Sounds like an interesting study. I searched for it but didn't find anything. You don't happen to have a link?

Production possibilities frontier... If I recall correctly, we learned this is my MacroEcon class in undergrad.

I found the American model of screwing around all day in order to have something to do during your (essentially mandatory) overtime to be present in Japan as well. It's taken to an extreme in both cultures, and the drop in productivity is obvious to the outside observer. The funny thing is that, at least in Japan, pretty well everyone recognizes it as a problem, but no one is willing to make any progress towards fixing it. They are completely resigned to it's "necessity".

This might also be true in education (e.g. Finland has the least amount of school hours in OECD-countries, while its results are the best according to PISA).

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