The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of t...

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce. I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

Saved by Mo Brewer

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One of the facts of modern life is that a relatively small class of people works very long hours and earns good money for its efforts. Nearly a third of college-educated American men, for example, work more than 50 hours a week. Some professionals do twice that amount, and elite lawyers can easily work 70 hours a week almost every week of the year.

The Economist • Why Do We Work So Hard?

“ resisting the pull to work endless hours is as much about keeping ourselves able to sustainably do the work [...] as it is about leaving space in life for other sources of fulfillment.”

Guardrails on the work day — on the work week! — make it possible for you to do the work for longer . Not longer hours, but, like, longer in life . It makes passi... See more

Anne Helen Petersen • When Your Profession is On Fire

The problem is that “saving” time and labor have become default settings and social imperatives. Rather than wisely judging what labor or time can and ought to be “saved,” our tendency is to buy into the promise indiscriminately.

L. M. Sacasas • Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend on It

"The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology." (Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism)

But unlike in the industrial sector, in this invisible factory we’d constructed for ourselves we didn’t have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits. Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence: colonizing as much of our time, from evenings to weekends to vacations, as we could bea

Cal Newport • Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying

theatlantic.com theatlantic.com