Dear Graduate/Undergraduate History Students,<div><br></div><div>I'm an undergraduate who is doing a paper about the 8 hour day for programmers. Programmers are notoriously overworked by big silicon valley companies and it would be very enlightening to them to prove that they could do more if they worked less than 12 hours.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I know that there's a lot of research that shows the 8 hour day is very effect for manual laborers.</div><div><br></div><div>I read on <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/?partner=yahoo-smb">Salon.com</a>, that "<span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Helvetica;line-height:0.07in">In
fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good
hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six
hours, as opposed to eight."</span></div>
<div><br></div><div>The author doesn't cite any research that proves this though.</div><div><br></div><div>I was wondering if there was any research done about the productivity of office workers. Something that shows the 8 hour day is best for office/knowledge workers too!</div>
<div><br></div><div>I've looked a lot into mental fatigue, direct attention fatigue, the eight hour day, chapman's hours of labor, directed fatigue, procrastination, cognitive task analysis, knowledge management..</div>
<div><br></div><div><i>My question is, is there any research that shows knowledge workers have about 4-6 hours of good productivity a day?</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div>Thank you for your time.</div><div><br></div>
<div>
-Sean</div><div><a href="http://seanneilan.com/">http://seanneilan.com/</a></div><div><br></div>