The big picture is trivially true -- if you don't sleep, you die. Where's your favorite language, now? Similarly if you don't eat -- yet few people would make a rant about "food quality matters more than languages".
There's still a lot of nuance. What studies there are don't negate the existence of variability either. Well, then what's the point of bringing up the subject? Taken broadly sleep is important as life itself, but then it has no place in an earnest discussion around improving productivity. Taken narrowly, it's very context sensitive, so it's again rather useless in discussing improving your own or even your team's productivity unless you're already in the weeds of knowing individuals' detailed backgrounds.
There's a fun fact johnc's comment in that thread points out. We can all agree if we want that if people aren't getting their 8 hours (or some number close by), that has to happen first, and we can ignore whatever nuance/variability/context objections one might have. But with 8 hours, there are still over 100 other hours in the week. 80 if we're just talking M-F. What are you going to do to fill those more productively? If switching languages lets you do something in half the time as otherwise, why wouldn't you switch, and rather than just taking half the day off, continue working and do twice as much as you would in the other language for the day?
Is the point that you shouldn't unnecessarily waste your waking life for some company? Fine, but you shouldn't do that even if you're getting 10 hours every night and are only asked to work 30 hours a week if those 30 hours are truly a waste. On the other hand, you might be in a situation where 80+ hours this week (hopefully not forced to be compressed to M-F or intrude on your sleep requirements) spent on work is the most non-wasteful thing you can think to be doing with your life at this time. Circumstances are different.
Sleep is only a part of it — avoiding burnout (which is the real goal here) requires taking time not only to sleep, but also to work out, do your laundry, cook and eat food, see friends... we’re not just our jobs. We need lives outside of work or we will burn out — often at the most stressful and least opportune moment. If you’re working 100+ hours a week, you’re almost certainly offloading all that extra work to someone — usually a romantic partner, which can damage the most important relationship in your life.
That leaves at most 60 hours a week to truly dedicate to work. The people who work more are sacrificing quality of life for productivity. While a very small minority of people really can maintain that, most of us can’t. We shouldn’t take advice from the outliers who can. We shouldn’t work for companies where a schedule that leads to burnout is the norm. It’s a signal that the company wants to suck you dry then toss you away.
Furthermore, with knowledge workers... we often never stop thinking about a problem. The thinking is “real work” — I’ve had inspiration about how to solve a problem strike during dinner. Whip out the phone, send myself an e-mail, then deal with it in the morning. But the obsession with maximizing individual productivity at all costs is literally killing us.
I would think, in absence of other evidence, that investing in microoptimizing sleep and stress would have more benefits than any language or tool choice.
So it's not just 8 hours, it's also midday naps, circadian rhythms, it's letting people sleep when they need to.
And you didn't even mention stress and there are of course myriad ways to improve mood levels and reduce stress.
And obviously some of that stress will come from your choice of tools and methods, but again, we have little evidence as to which tools and methods produce the least amount of stress.
It's not what you do, or even how you do it, it's the circumstances in which you do it that have the greatest impact on your ability to do it well.
Work 80 hours, work 5, play 50, dig ditches, cure cancer - doesn't matter, fix sleep and stress before worrying about the little things.
I intentionally left out talking about stress, but I think it's also trivially true at the big picture level, too much stress can kill you. X is true, Y is true, X and Y is also true... But stress is a much more vague and hazy notion than sleep when you get down to specifics, we have few rules of action to agree on even in principle like "get your ~8 hours of sleep (even if that involves napping) before you look at other potential boosters" and we have contradictory notions about certain types or levels of stress actually being better for you in the long run whereas chronic sleep deprivation seems to have no long term benefits.
Comments
The big picture is trivially true -- if you don't sleep, you die. Where's your favorite language, now? Similarly if you don't eat -- yet few people would make a rant about "food quality matters more than languages".
There's still a lot of nuance. What studies there are don't negate the existence of variability either. Well, then what's the point of bringing up the subject? Taken broadly sleep is important as life itself, but then it has no place in an earnest discussion around improving productivity. Taken narrowly, it's very context sensitive, so it's again rather useless in discussing improving your own or even your team's productivity unless you're already in the weeds of knowing individuals' detailed backgrounds.
There's a fun fact johnc's comment in that thread points out. We can all agree if we want that if people aren't getting their 8 hours (or some number close by), that has to happen first, and we can ignore whatever nuance/variability/context objections one might have. But with 8 hours, there are still over 100 other hours in the week. 80 if we're just talking M-F. What are you going to do to fill those more productively? If switching languages lets you do something in half the time as otherwise, why wouldn't you switch, and rather than just taking half the day off, continue working and do twice as much as you would in the other language for the day?
Is the point that you shouldn't unnecessarily waste your waking life for some company? Fine, but you shouldn't do that even if you're getting 10 hours every night and are only asked to work 30 hours a week if those 30 hours are truly a waste. On the other hand, you might be in a situation where 80+ hours this week (hopefully not forced to be compressed to M-F or intrude on your sleep requirements) spent on work is the most non-wasteful thing you can think to be doing with your life at this time. Circumstances are different.
Sleep is only a part of it — avoiding burnout (which is the real goal here) requires taking time not only to sleep, but also to work out, do your laundry, cook and eat food, see friends... we’re not just our jobs. We need lives outside of work or we will burn out — often at the most stressful and least opportune moment. If you’re working 100+ hours a week, you’re almost certainly offloading all that extra work to someone — usually a romantic partner, which can damage the most important relationship in your life.
That leaves at most 60 hours a week to truly dedicate to work. The people who work more are sacrificing quality of life for productivity. While a very small minority of people really can maintain that, most of us can’t. We shouldn’t take advice from the outliers who can. We shouldn’t work for companies where a schedule that leads to burnout is the norm. It’s a signal that the company wants to suck you dry then toss you away.
Furthermore, with knowledge workers... we often never stop thinking about a problem. The thinking is “real work” — I’ve had inspiration about how to solve a problem strike during dinner. Whip out the phone, send myself an e-mail, then deal with it in the morning. But the obsession with maximizing individual productivity at all costs is literally killing us.
I would think, in absence of other evidence, that investing in microoptimizing sleep and stress would have more benefits than any language or tool choice.
So it's not just 8 hours, it's also midday naps, circadian rhythms, it's letting people sleep when they need to.
And you didn't even mention stress and there are of course myriad ways to improve mood levels and reduce stress.
And obviously some of that stress will come from your choice of tools and methods, but again, we have little evidence as to which tools and methods produce the least amount of stress.
It's not what you do, or even how you do it, it's the circumstances in which you do it that have the greatest impact on your ability to do it well.
Work 80 hours, work 5, play 50, dig ditches, cure cancer - doesn't matter, fix sleep and stress before worrying about the little things.
Given that your big picture conveniently ignores stress it is not "trivially true" after all. :-P
I intentionally left out talking about stress, but I think it's also trivially true at the big picture level, too much stress can kill you. X is true, Y is true, X and Y is also true... But stress is a much more vague and hazy notion than sleep when you get down to specifics, we have few rules of action to agree on even in principle like "get your ~8 hours of sleep (even if that involves napping) before you look at other potential boosters" and we have contradictory notions about certain types or levels of stress actually being better for you in the long run whereas chronic sleep deprivation seems to have no long term benefits.