Stephen <mca### [at] aoldotcom> wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10153286.stm

  I like how these things are always unilaterally labeled as "x million
dollars in lost productivity", as if even 10 seconds of not doing your
work means that the firm is losing money relative to that amount (by paying
you for 10 seconds of not doing work, and you getting 10 seconds worth of
results not done).

  This is a really naive approach. It could well work in reverse: Getting
your mind off of work and relaxing for 10 seconds might cause you to get
the subsequent work actually done quicker than if you hadn't taken that
10-second break (or whatever timespan we are talking about). Humans are not
machines which produce things at a steady pace, and every second of the
machine being shut down correlating directly to an equivalent amount of
lost productivity.

  In fact many studies have shown that on a typical 8-hour workday people
are, in average, only able to do 4 hours of productive work. This is not
just them being lazy for the other 4 hours, but actually a necessity. If
they worked at full capacity for the entire 8 hours every single day, they
would stress out pretty quickly (which in turn would cause even larger
losses in productivity).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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