Mentally detoxing at the end of each day/week/month helps me keep my sanity throughout it all. I think there’s something to be said about working harder less of the time, than hardly working most of the time.

But for me, I’m talking creative work, thought work, non-manual labor work. And with that, i absolutely believe people need to take breaks. Supervisors who don’t see or care about that don’t care about their employees, and that’s nowhere near where I want to work.

If you are on a team and can work out the philosophy as described above amongst the team, superb. If not, and you are on a team whose boss cannot see the proverbial forest because HE/SHE is the workaholic running frantically amongst the trees and expects all to do and be likewise, or even worse, is not and expects all to be the workaholics to make up for the fact that he/she is not, see point one.

Also “from error of experience,” effectiveness will never be recognized by bosses who can only evaluate it by hours worked. Many of us find this out too late (after repeatedly asking ourselves why we are still taking work home or have once again hit or overshot the threshold when we SWORE we would never do it again!).

We also find out that these bosses are completely locked into archaic standards regarding vacation, overtime, comp time, ‘big brother is watching you’ mentalities that fail to recognize that the brain can only endure a certain amount of effort of any kind before it must rest, and that productivity increases if one is both enjoying work, feels empowered to do it, is supported in it, is rewarded for it, and is able to rest from it when needed.

John Ruskin was a champion of the working class and said it best. “In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.”

When your brain is fried, it does not matter that more hours are left in a day. What would matter is a boss that could recognize the value of and try to avoid a staff of fried brains. Some jobs SEEM to simply do not allow for fried brains to recharge before the end of a shift. But…if the shifts were not 8 hours rotating 24, if the 8 hours could be shifTED sometimes dependent upon when the worker worked best, if bossess could entertain innovated job sharing ideas, if vacations could be taken when needed not when someone ELSE needed them, if COMP time REALLY existed based on projects not the clock, etc., etc., ad nauseum, et vomitus.

I digress. See point one.