kleinbl00:

This is a discussion worth having but the Inc. article is spurious as hell. The "new research" they cite is a single 240-head business that ran a trial for two months and had a researcher hand out surveys. They get this from a New York Times article that also touches briefly on France's experience with shorter work weeks which, after all, have been law for 18 years.

Results from that rather larger sample size are mixed.

Meanwhile they also loop back to a 2016 self-reporting "study" conducted by a British Groupon knock-off as if it had any scientific rigor, then throw back to infamous clickbait publisher Business Insider (which also trumpets the Groupon knockoffs) for the spurious factoid "One study found people struggled to stay on task for more than 10 seconds" which links to a tutorial service for online learning hosted at the University of Utah. It doesn't say anything about struggling to "stay on task for more than 10 seconds" but it does say

    Or, take the advice that Mr. Hoots gave Ernie: "Put down the duckie if you wanna play the saxophone!" (http://members.tripod.com/tiny_dancer/duckie.html)

Yep. Tripod still exists. I checked.

The entire linked page is about multitasking. The study Business Insider is probably referencing is this one, in which 60 undergrads were given 10 seconds to read a sentence, then distracted, then asked to answer questions about that sentence.

Which is about as applicable to "how much work do we actually do at the office" as Ernie and the Duckie.


posted 2090 days ago