No Surprise, Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news107934277.html

http://www.physorg.com/news107934277.html

There"s not a single surprise in this survey. What it shows is what people already generally intuited: that every year you have to get up earlier to get to work on time, and you get home later in the evening, only to be faced with a few hours of household chores and/or work brought home.

They should do a study that correlates this latter bit -- work brought home that cuts into evenings and creates evening stress that makes getting to sleep more difficult -- with the growing trend of companies to require salaried workers to put in 60 or more hours of effort every week just to meet expectations. The Japanese have a word for this: karoshi, which means "death from overwork."

It also shows that the people who do not have to overwork get a healthier amount of sleep, but are more likely to spend non-sleep hours watching TV -- the couch potato syndrome. I can guess that the majority of these people were retired, unemployed (for whatever reason) or minimally employed. There"s another thing they might want to include in a future round -- correspondence of sleep deprivation with income level.

And why do the shortest sleepers watch the most hours of TV? They"re insomniacs too tired to do anything else.

I"m a microcosm of this study. I get 7-8 hours a night when I am working a project from home and can set my own schedule and do household chores at the most convenient times -- I"m a GTD maven, and when I can control my schedule, I get a lot done. However, my sleep drops to 6 hours or less a night when I have an on-site project. That drop directly corresponds to the number of hours I have to spend away from home (including a commute). Working onsite also creates inefficiencies like constant interruptions, meetings, and lunch out of the office. The productivity lost to these inefficiencies usually leave me with work to take home at the end of the day, whereas had I been working at home, I would have been done by 6 PM. Instead, I leave the office at 6 PM and can"t get home until after 7. This means I won"t have time to make dinner and still have alert time to spend working, so I spend another hour (and too much money) eating dinner on the way home. Then I get home, do the couple of hours of work I brought home, then, at 10 PM, I get to start doing my bill-paying (doing that while not fully alert is a serious issue) and other home chores. The local cops are used to seeing me in my garage at 1 AM, still doing laundry! The cycle starts over the next morning at 5:30 or 6 AM.

Notice there is no "me" or "relaxation" time in there, and when working an onsite project, weekends are a mad rush to catch up all of the things that were left undone during the past week and try to prep ahead for the coming week, so there"s almost no time for socializing, working toward something better for myself, or anything else I would like to do. No, that"s not healthy, and I know a lot of other people in exactly the same position. When workers have to use sick days or take unpaid time off between projects to rest and do anything they want to do, they are seriously overworked.

Oh I agree with you for the most part Keter.

However it's not only the salaried workers who are getting pinched. It's also the blue collar worker who is being forced to work 10-12 hours at a minimum 6 & 7 days a week now. And it will only increase because of the simple equation of: fewer workers(through fewer shifts) mean more profit due to lower employee costs.

I use to work for Newell/Rubbermaid and my normal work hours were 12 hours. This wasn't counting the 45 minute - 1 hour drive to and from work everyday nor the 30 minutes - 1 hour prepping for work, or the 30 minutes - 1 hour relaxation time after I got home from work. So often out of 24 hours I was left with 8 hours and very little will to do more than sleep or do some minor chores.

There was quite literally "no time left in the day".