There is something that is caused by long work hours that is not really being recognized by society. Ask any working adult (in most countries and in most levels of society) and they will talk about it, but it is not something that we see covered by legislation or by the mainstream media.
Long work hours have a way of creeping further and further into our private lives. The longer you work and the more consecutive those long work hours are, the worse it gets.
I have spoken before on the definition of fatigue and how it is very different from being tired. Running a sprint makes you tired. Running all the time and not getting proper rest brings fatigue and this brings you a state of exhaustion before you have even started.
This means that people wake up tired. They struggle to keep focus the way they would usually do and are thus more prone to mistakes. This is why at 12 hour shift sites we have a Fatigue Management Plan as part of the Health and Safety documents.
But there is a limit to this of course.
What the Health and Safety document does, is to make provision for the workers to get some mandatory time off allowance to allow them to be more rested when they return.
The truth however, is that no Fatigue Management Plan can account for the human aspect of fatigue and the human aspect result of long work hours.
When you are an adult living on your own, you are responsible for certain things around your house. It becomes impossible for you to do these things on the long shifts.
Let's look at the "Normal" work week as well as the long work hour week as a statistic:
Normal week day
- 8.5 hour work day
- 1.5 hour commute (45mins either way on average)
- 6 hours of sleep (This is the lower end of sleep spectrum 7-9 hours is more normal)
- 1 hour food preparation for dinner and breakfast
- 1 hour to eat food at dinner and breakfast
= Total of 18 hours.
So when you consider this bare minimum then you have 6 hours left. This is more or less what I do. Some people will say to you that you should sleep 8 hours and then you are down to 4 hours.
This usually translates into 1 hour before work and 3 hours after work.
However...
12 hour shift work (Like I just did at the docks)
- 12 hour work day
- 1.5 hour commute (45mins either way on average)
- 6 hours of sleep (This is the lower end of sleep spectrum 7-9 hours is more normal)
- 1 hour food preparation for dinner and breakfast
- 1 hour to eat food at dinner and breakfast
= Total of 21.5 hours
This now leaves 2.5 hours left over.
What SHOULD happen here is that you should definitely sleep for 8 hours and thus you have a half hour free!
As a person on your own you might take some short cuts now by eating take-out or ready made meals. Majority of the time this leads to a bad diet. You might also use sugar and energy drinks to try bolster yourself if you are not taking the 8 hour sleep option.
Up till now I have not even looked at the adults with partners or the adults with children.
Having another adult in the house usually helps you with some of the tasks around the house but they too will start feeling fatigued if they need to do all the work all the time!
And then it eventually coms back to the...
Weekend!
Whether you are working the 8.5 hour day or the 12 hour day, you get to the weekend and it is meant to be some great holiday or a rest period for you to recuperate in.
But you have not been LIVING for 5 days. It is a: get up, get ready, go work, come back from work, get ready sleep - cycle.
People want to do things on the weekends. They want to socialize. People with kids and spouses however, will need to do some work to make up for the support they have been getting.
There are always work that needs to be done around the house.
So I just had a long weekend. 3 days. So we can start at Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday, Monday all off.
I eventually got time for myself because I MADE time for myself. Around 3-4 hours of painting my warhammer models.
At least I got that done.
I think that it is important for everyone to take some time out for themselves and spend time on their own interests. Otherwise, you will go mad.
I feel that with all our technology humans are working too much and not living enough. We become only cogs in a great machine that enslaves us to many hours of so-called production. I feel that the way we are living wastes a lot of potential production because we are not mobilizing our technology in a proper manner.
Well... that's all time I have for my idel thoughts.
Need to go get ready!
