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Comment by sportanova | Hacker News Reader

I hope we start seeing more things like this, especially in the US. Does 6 hours a day maximize happiness / productivity? I don't know. Does 8 hours? It's the custom, but I don't know. I think it's almost impossible that 8 hours is the best number across every industry => vertical => company. I'd love to see more experimentation

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8 hours for work, 8 for leisure, 8 for sleep and 2 rest days a week seems reasonable, at least mathematically speaking. If it were up to me, I'd include commuting time in those 8 work hours as well, making the number no more than 7 hours.

You're basing your assessment of reasonableness on the aesthetically pleasing properties of symmetry? :-)

Not really. Eight hours for sleep covers almost everyone's biological requirements. It's hard to decide in what proportion to split the remaining 16. So split it 50-50 unless someone can propose something better!

That's a bafflingly unfounded and useless "suggestion!" Enormous amounts of people have been working 8 hour shifts for decades -- instead of just guessing that the status quo is probably optimal, why not ask a variety of people if they think two hours more of family/leisure/commute/exercise/learning time would be of any benefit?

More likely because Robert Owen's original slogan from 1817 has had nearly 200 years to get deeply ingrained in culture...

Sounds pretty arbitrary. It seems to me that a huge number of jobs are all about providing entertainment for people who are too knackered from work to take part in an intellectually and/or physically satisfying hobby. If we could distribute the real jobs evenly how many hours would we _need_ to work to maintain our lifestyle?

> It seems to me that a huge number of jobs are all about providing entertainment for people who are too knackered from work to take part in an intellectually and/or physically satisfying hobby.

This is something I've been trying to say for years now. Thanks for putting it in words so succinctly.

"8 hours for work, 8 for leisure, 8 for sleep" Where's commute?

I'll need at least 12 hours of sleep :). But seriously, I think including commute time would be smart, except that it could lead to discrimination / resentment against the commuters

As far as I know the 8h workday is purely the result of industrial three-shift work

No, it's the result of nearly a century of unions fighting tooth and nail.

The 8 hour working day was first promoted by Robert Owen in 1817, using the slogan "Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest".

It was picked up by various unions and other organizations towards the middle of the century, such as the first International - the International Working Mens Association, where people like Marx and Bakunin were leading forces. But in most places they met fierce opposition, and many places it took decades of strikes and demonstrations and campaigning to push it through.

Without organized labor we'd all be working at least 12-hour-days of two-shift work.

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