[Grad_history_students] Is there any research about mental fatigue on knowledge workers?

[Sean Neilan]

Dear Graduate/Undergraduate History Students,

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.

I know that there's a lot of research that shows the 8 hour day is very
effect for manual laborers.

I read on Salon.com<http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/?partner=yahoo-smb>,
that "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."

The author doesn't cite any research that proves this though.

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!

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..

*My question is, is there any research that shows knowledge workers have
about 4-6 hours of good productivity a day?*
*
*
Thank you for your time.

-Sean
http://seanneilan.com/
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