And Another Thing

I am reminded, as I round the corner to ten days of work without a day off, that we need to address work load in the new regime. I cannot remember whether we talked about this before, although I suspect I've mentioned it, but it is worth repeating:

People, or at least the people I know, typically work too much.

That is, hours are definitely longer than they have to be. I am admittedly new to the workforce, but I am already getting a sense of how long people in my office seem to be able to push on without a break, and what the work atmosphere is like. From flyers on college study tips, which I took by the stack during my academic career, I know that it often makes sense to take a ten to twenty-minute break every two hours or so. There's a bunch of literature out there on the power of naps, which are not for me per se, because I am too proud to nap, but the point remains that breaks are nice, and usually helpful. I don't understand why they have to be so furtive. I don't get why Internet needs to be restricted to the point where my 5-minute brain-clearing break means checking my bank account or doing Google image searches for "contemporary living room." (Yep--my bank site and Google--but not the results themselves--are the only things I can apparently type in without being blocked by the massive security monster at work.)

I think short breaks should be okay, in an explicit way, and I think there should be some system so that if you get all your work done early you should get to go home and still get paid, cause you did all your work, instead of hanging around twiddling your thumbs and proving you are in the office. I haven't worked out the details yet, but when I take over the world, there's got to be a better system than the blanket 40 hours a week.