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Europeans, who often have upward of twenty paid vacation days per year, American employees are lucky if they get ten to fourteen.
Americans used only about half of their paid vacation days and let the remainder go completely to waste.
Almost half of all working Americans don’t have paid days off for physical or mental wellness,
81 percent of food-industry workers have no employer-provided sick days.
We get pulled into an endless loop of replying to messages, checking for new notifications,
Alex works full-time as an administrative assistant in the Chicago Loop. All day long he edits documents, takes meeting notes, makes copies, and runs errands. During rare moments of quiet in the office, Alex tries to catch up on creative projects. He’s an actor and a performer, so there are always new lines for him to memorize and new auditions to try to book. At the end of an already long, crammed workday, Alex gets home and fires up the website Upwork to look for some side jobs as a copywriter or a transcriptionist. “I end up doing the transcription work more often than the writing, even
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When taking Upwork’s fees and time spent finding new clients into account, Alex’s transcription job pays much less than minimum wage.
A lot of us have turned to sites like Upwork, TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft, Fiverr, or Grubhub in order to make supplementary income.
The harder it gets to make a conventional, nine-to-five living, the more people have to fill their weekends, evenings, and other spare moments with moneymaking side hustles like these.
The gig economy has arrived in full force, and it’s swallowed up the free time and brain space of every driven Millennial artist I know. Ricky drives for Uber in the mornings and evenings when he’s not busy giving singing lessons and performing in choirs. Dio used the app Wag to find work as a dog walker,
Apps like Foxtrot, Upwork, TaskRabbit, and Uber beckon us to work even in our spare time and tempt us to set even more strenuous and unsustainable goals.
Henry Ford famously found that when he cut his employees’ hours from forty-eight per week to forty, productivity actually increased.
Past the fifty-hour point, a person’s productivity declines very sharply; past the fifty-five-hour point, and a person is so unproductive and tired that they might as well not be at work at all.
these standards were developed during the Industrial Revolution, when people were doing repetitive, manual-labor work. Are these numbers even still relevant today, when most repetitive work is done by a machine and most people’s jobs are complex and mentally taxing?
Researchers consistently find that in office jobs, people are capable of being productive for only about three hours per day, on average.
When managers attempt to make up for this supposedly “lazy” time by requiring their employees to work longer hours, it actually backfires, and employees do even less.
the average student cannot pay attention for more than an hour or so without a break.
When I worked to design my own online classes, I learned that students typically keep their attention fixed on a video for only about six minutes.
Workers have trouble staying on task for more than twenty minutes at a time,
their attention levels curved up and down many times per minute, with tons of experiment time “lost” to distraction, daydreaming, and mental fatigue.
Attention fluctuates naturally because the human brain is constantly scanning the environment for new information, potential threats, opportunities for social contact, and more.
Our attention is less like a laser beam (which can be pointed at any single specific point we desire) and more like a rotating lighthouse lantern, temporarily bathing individual rocks in light as it continues to spin across its surroundings.
A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found when health care workers (such as doctors and nurses) are exhausted from working long shifts, they lose the motivation to follow basic hygiene rules and cut back on how often they wash their hands.
These overworked employees were also more likely to suffer from anxiety and to use substances to cope, because drugs were more readily available to them than time off.
Workplaces where the goals were vague and projects were never completed tended to have more burned-out workers.54 In other words, when work seems like an endless, pointless slog, and workers have no sense of being recognized for all that they do, burnout is far more common.
We all overextend ourselves sometimes, and that choice, when freely made, is not inherently destructive. We might stay out late partying with friends one weekend, for example, or pull an all-nighter working on a creative project that truly excites us. But there’s a huge difference between following our passions and pushing ourselves to overwork on a regular basis because the Laziness Lie has convinced us that we have to.
“Everyone talks constantly about how much they need coffee or want more coffee; some workplaces provide their employees with as much free coffee as they want. It’s a stimulant that makes us work more, and it causes so many people to have terrible anxiety. And yet most people don’t even question why they need to consume so much of it. Instead we romanticize it.”
If I needed to be on an anxiety-provoking stimulant every single day in order to function, was I really setting my life up in a healthy way? Was I creating expectations for myself that were sustainable? Was I so afraid of laziness that I couldn’t let my body just be?
When am I most in my element? What doesn’t bring me alive? What feels dreadful? What do I find inexhaustibly fascinating? When have I been most happy? Who are the people I want to work with? What do I need to be physically well?
if you take a job that a person naturally likes doing and then start tying that pleasant activity to rewards or punishment, such as their level of pay or whether they get reprimanded, you’ll actually make the task less pleasant for them.
“Would you rather have this book be the best thing it can be, or would you rather be caught up on every single random e-mail every day?”
He studied all weekend long, devoting energy that could have gone toward dating to earning excellent grades.
“I would stay at the office most of the night writing the memo, typing it, xeroxing it, binding it, and there it would be on his desk when he got in Thursday morning. That was as close as I could come to a sexual experience.”
A lot of queer people still feel an immense pressure to be the “best little person in the world.” We accumulate achievements and accomplishments in the hopes that they will help us earn back the respect and love we lost by choosing to live openly as ourselves.
as the series progresses she ascends through the state government, eventually becoming governor of Indiana.
maybe even president depending on how you read the finale
I’ve always found the show’s inspiring messages to be kind of hollow.
the show consistently rewards her for this success-obsessed behavior. There’s never a moment when she has to learn to take things easy, or when she develops an interest in activities outside of work.
The show even goes out of its way to mock Leslie’s husband, Ben, for getting into stop-motion animation
She knew she would need to fall back on her reputation as a hard worker when she finally started living as a woman.
“As soon as I started coming to work as myself, in feminine clothing,” she says, “people started accusing me of being unprofessional and impossible to work with. And they were so cold to me. It was a night-and-day difference.”
Many Black parents teach their children that they must work twice as hard as white people, with the expectation that doing so will get them only half as far.
The more we adopt an accomplishment-based mindset, the more we come to catalogue, measure, and judge every single thing we do. Unfortunately, the digital age has done a lot to facilitate this obsession. Today, we can easily monitor how much exercise we get, how many likes our Instagram posts receive, how many books we’ve read this year, and how our “performance” compares to that of our friends.
cooking, crafting, or travel, can be documented, shared, and assessed relative to other people.
“My friend Heather is totally scatterbrained,” Taylor says, “but she knows how to code, so she has a well-paying job and fancy, free lunches
Her workplace has a yoga room. God, I should never have majored in English.”
It makes sense that Taylor learned to replace one kind of compulsive activity (arguing online with strangers) with another (completing short quizzes online). That’s because the Code Academy site is designed to be as interesting, rewarding, and addictive as it can be.
I sometimes use a similar site, Datacamp, in classes of mine that involve programming and statistics.
These sites and apps provide immediate gratification. They encourage habitual, regular use, just like video games do.
feel as if every hour that we don’t spend racking up little trophies and new marketable skills is a “waste.”
They’ll bring up that it’s only temporary. In a couple of years, they’ll have enough skills to quit their day job.
