Someone should invent an app that shuts down work laptops for 15min after an hour of continuous output¹, and turns them off completely after 6hrs of total daily use².
Enforcing an 8hr schedule on employees who have no meetings and are evaluated purely on task completion feels like a 9hr prison sentence of play-pretend. You can only stare at a screen for so long before the eyes dry out and the mind boggles and hallucinates with destructive, rather than constructive, thoughts.
Its not the assigned work tasks we’re burnt out from, but the 9hr obligation that companies (or supervisors), especially here in (East) Asia, still believe is the only viable measurement of devotion.
How about measuring how well one can manage being productive at work while maintaining a healthy lifestyle as actual sustainability.
Footnotes
- I mean actually prompting, calculating, emailing, not live status, the heck how companies monitor employees these days
- Accumulated 6hrs of 1hr-straights