Staying Healthy When Working 12 Hours a Day? 204
dwija asks: "I just got a new job where I just sit in one place all day and work for 12 hours at a stretch. This goes on for 4 days a week and I get 3 days off. The journey to and from my office takes up about 3 hours of my day. I am a little worried now cause i am becoming really weak and I am not as healthy as I used to be. I want to ask others on Slashdot about the kinds of weird times in which they work and what they do to take care of their health and stress."
eat well, excersize, sleep (Score:1, Insightful)
Quit and find a new job (Score:5, Insightful)
And I bet your hourly pay sucks.
And it could be worse than that... if it takes years off your life, you could be "working" more than 168 hours a week.... arbitrarily more.
What you are doing is something that you are simply not designed to do. Some people may be able to do it, neither you nor I are one of them. Stop it, or pay the penalty, collected by Reality, the least lenient loan shark of them all.
Change Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you can talk to your employer and see if you can work out a compromise. Work is like a rubber ball, if you drop it it'll always bounce back. Your health is like a glass ball, drop it too many times and it'll crack or shatter.
Health on the job (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution was to find a job closer to home and spend no more than 45 hours a day at work. The rest, diet, exercise, etc. became easy after I got away from the pressure cooker.
balance (Score:3, Insightful)
Quit before you die (Score:5, Insightful)
Find something easier, lest you burn out and become useless. If you feel you are doing the work of two people, it's because your company is too greedy and short sighted to hire someone else. Once they ruin you, they'll just hire some naive college graduate and ruin them too.
How about you or someone else reveal the company name as 'anonymous coward' if need be, to save the souls of others, who should not be harmed needlessly.
Sitting?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Be sure to get out on your days off. Don't think that three days of no work equals a three day weekend where you can game for 24+ hours at a time. Take advantage of the extended time off that most of us, with jobs, dream about and go places, do stuff, and be active!
zerg (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, you can't be working 12 hours straight, because if you don't get up to walk around for a minute every ~45 minutes, you'll go blind. Anyone who tells you otherwise is begging for a visit from OSHA.
Re:Take solace... (Score:5, Insightful)
Buy a rowing machine (Score:5, Insightful)
Rowing is low-impact, aerobic, and you can start
as slowly as you like. 30 mins a day while you
listen to the radio, watch TV, or just ponder your
latest bug.
The unit I mentioned above is suitable for
beginners through elite athletes.
Definite nerd appeal with a USB connection and
a wireless heart monitor. Lots of builtin
stats and uses a plug-in memory card.
Regenerative power means a D-cell lasts years.
I'm on my 2nd rowing machine (the first was
a competitor but it did last a dozen years
and thousands of kms). I'm about to hit 1000
km on this one.
No other $800 piece of exercise equipment will
dissipate enough energy (without self-destructing)
to give you a decent workout. You'd have to
drop more than $3K to get a treadmill anywhere
neare as durable. And getting on your feet to
walk/run requires a lot more motivation than
sitting down on the rower.
Re:Quit before you die (Score:5, Insightful)
To help with my health I workout every morning for about 45 minutes and it gets me going for the day. I'm worried about getting diabetes and so I choose to do something about it, exercise daily (M-F), quit drinking soda (& caffiene), and limit my calorie intake (~2000 cal/day). I've lost about 45 lbs and have 20~25 to get to my college/poor person weight. Not to mention I will be fit again when I get there. If I can do it anyone can. Quitting caffiene was hard for about a week (3 days of headaches and 4 days of craving sodas) but I sleep better and wake up without needing my alarm. I used to drink about 3-4 liters of soda so 90% of my days calories were coming from there.
And like the other people said, you can always find another job.
Practical tips (Score:5, Insightful)
Use any excuse to get up and walk around. Walk around the office to talk to people F2F instead of IMing them. Walk to the bathroom. Walk up any stairs that may be around. Any excuse to move is a good one. Offer to help new people move their desks, etc.
If practical, bike to work. If necessary, park a few blocks away and bike in. I can't emphasize physical activity enough.
Assume that during those 4 days, you do nothing but work. Get enough sleep, take the time to cook all of your meals, and work. That's all you have time to do, really, before you have to start eating fast food and being sleep deprived. Any movies will have to wait for the weekend.
On your days off, exercise a lot. Devote one of your days to Dance Dance Revolution, Rock Climbing, Frisbee golf, swimming with your kids, or whatever, but you have to require yourself to spend the day being active, preferably outside, preferably with the people you care about.
Get sunlight. This can be the hardest thing if you work in the middle of an office building, come in before the sun comes up and leave after it goes down, but adequate lighting has a tremendous influence over mood. Add more lights to your desk and work area, and take your lunches outside under the sun. Open all of your curtains at work and at home.
Take up different projects or responsibilities at work. If you work on the install routine for banking software, help the office setup an intramural softball league. If you are engineering a new print head for a new type of hybrid lazer / inkjet printer, help the marketing people write promo material. This will help stave off burnout, and let you go through the necessary periods of dicking off without guilt. Studies have shown that a workforce produces the most in total if it is offtask "wasting time" for roughly 10% of their worktime. If you're working 12 hours a day, that's about an hour and fifteen minutes. And because you're working extra long, you will need extra time off of your primary task.
Move closer to work. If you can't do that, talk to your boss about telecommuting 2 days of the week. Invest some time getting to know the roadways between your home and work really well, and risk a few speeding tickets. I managed to shave 2-hours off of a 4-hour commute just by learning which highways and roadways were abandoned when, and which stretches the cops wouldn't bat an eye about speeding until you were over 150. I also avoided 6 dollars in tolls.
Find things to do in the car. Create a life diary on tape for future generations. Get lots of audio books from your local library. Carpool with interesting people. Learn to speak a foriegn language. The more intellectually engaged you can be in the car, the less the footprint of such a long commute will be.
Good luck!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ask your bank where to buy a car (Score:3, Insightful)
What people say on the internet is very useful, even if it's taken with a grain of salt, and that's how I realized i had asthma. I thought I was just out of shape, just wheezing and feeling like I was going to pass out for like a year, until one day when I was bored... I made my way to medline, webmd and some forums to see if it was anything in particular. It soon dawned on me that I wasn't really out of shape but more along the lines of something I really didn't even think of. So I went to my doctor, and now I'm happily puffing away at my inhaler and gaining weight because of the advair. If I didn't do that, i wouldn't have known until I was in serious trouble, or decided to ask my doctor about it (which would be after being in serious trouble).
It's not being lazy so much as it is asking for advice from people I suppose he/she can relate to.
Re:Quit your job (Score:5, Insightful)
Move to another city, state or country. Don't put yourself any artificial constraint. There are lots of places on earth where you'll get a decent life. Move.
I was going to mod you up, but I wanted to expand on your comment.
The biggest problem with corporations is they can burn you out if its cost effective. Workers are not treated as human beings, they are treated as cattle, if they can make money by working you harder and getting away with it, they will do it.
Thats the problem, people think that corporations will follow the rules, try to make the best working environment they can. Thats not true, the have a responsibility to make money for investors, period. This is why unions where formed for the back breaking and dangerous jobs, to give some sort of safe working environment to the workers.
No forward 40 years, now people are working in an office. Its not back breaking, so the want longer hours, no OT, and if you are lucky your benefits will include the counseling you need when you loose your family due to divorce. Don't think your wife will put up with it..
Seriously, how many hours should a person be working? How many hours for that is commute time? You give up your vacations because you have a deadline? You working longer hours for crunch time? You think that 2 dollar an hour more is worth your family time?
Doesn't make sense you would trade your health for a short term job, because you will burn out.
But, if your 18 or just out of college these jobs look attractive, good pay, good beneifits, and hey, you work for a fortune 500 company... Be careful..
Also, hey, if you do burn out, they have insurance right?
Re:Excersize at work (Score:3, Insightful)
When I went into the office (before I started telecommuting) I'd park in a lot on campus (worked at a large university) that was close to a mile from my building. In the morning, that was mostly a downhill walk; likewise an uphill walk at the end of the day.
So, 1.9 miles of brisk walking I wouldn't otherwise take at the cost of maybe 10 minutes each way.
Next, I stopped using the elevator for getting to my 4th floor office. I *usually* took the stairs down, but when I started taking them *up* every time I returned to the building, I got a short workout.
It may not seem like much, but over the course of a couple of months, I could notice my short-windedness disappearing. I didn't see a weight loss, but I felt a touch better.
Let me get this straight... (Score:4, Insightful)
Assume you need abouyt 6-8 hours of sleep a day. Boy, I'm surprised you lasted this long.
You'd better sit down with your boss and have a heart-to-heart. This is going to kill you. You can't do this. Either you have to get a raise so you can move closer to work, or you have to cut back on the hours to a more reasonable 8. Humans aren't machines. We need far more care and uptake and downtime to remain in peak condition.
Boeing did some interesting studies during WWII on maximizing productivity. Guess what they found? 8 hours a day for 5 days a week is the optimal number. That's why throughout the 50s and 60s the jobs were all 9-5. You get more done than 8/6 or 9/5, or what ever you are doing (12/4?) Even firefighters spend a great deal of time sitting around and relaxing and doing non-work things.
Seriously dude. You need to take care of yourself. There's only one of you and if you screw up your body, you don't get a replacement. You die.
Exercise, circulation, sunlight, diet, sleep (Score:4, Insightful)
In my case, I try to take 1-2 breaks a day to play ping-pong in our break room. I'm sure you could find something similar like stairs, basketball, flogging the dolphin, whatever.
I try to get outside for 15 minute breaks during the day. I'll take a code listing or an architectural diagram outside and work on it in the sun. Or go eat lunch outside. That 15-minute conversation you have with a buddy about ${local sports team}? Have it outside. A group of us used to take smoke breaks outside once in a while and none of us smoke.
Of course, watch your diet. Stop eating anything that comes out of a snack machine or anything that they bring in like doughnuts, pastries, pizza, etc. Buy a bag of carrots, grapes, etc. for snacks.
Sleeping is the hard part with your schedule but it's huge. Don't fall asleep reading or watching tv. That's supposed to reduce the restfulness of your sleep. Personally, I use half of an over-the-counter sleep aid pill from time to time when things are insane. It gives me about 4-6 solid hours of deeper sleep without the grogginess that a full tablet gives me. Not a great solution, but better than tossing and turning.
And here's one that'll probably set some people off. Pray. Let God run your daily calendar and you'll have time for everything you need to do.
Excercise Daily, Don't Eat Out (Score:2, Insightful)
These things really help. I'm still lacking the muscular workout, but I'm healthier than most of my coworkers.
My train is my living room (Score:2, Insightful)
I try to use my commuting time as efficiently as possible. I always start my morning journey with a healthy home-prepared breakfast and I read my newspaper. Then I start reading or preparing for my courses. From time to time I take my laptop with me and do some programming or work on one of my personal websites. All the while I am listening to, mostly classical, music in order to block out as much background music as possible. I try to make my journeys as comfortable as possible and I often think of a train as an exestension of my private living room.
When I get into an overcrowded train, I get a seat as fast as possible and within seconds I put some books, my newspaper, my lunchbox, etc. on the little table in front of me and on the chair next to me. Within less than a minute it looks as if I have been sitting there all day and as if I am working very hard. I am generally the last person to be bothered when no places are left. I now this may seem a bit anti-social, but I am probably sitting much more hours on these trains than all those other people.
During my lunch breaks I try to have a short walk, in order to get some fresh air. I also cycle to and from the railway station. And I go swimming once a week. The days that I am at home I try to get outside as much as possible. And I almost exclusively eat home-made meals with lots of fresh vegetables (thanks to my girlfriend, who is a great cook).
It is also of utmost importance for your mental health that you do not become socially isolated. Try to see your friends and family as often as possible. Go have a drink at least every two weeks, but preferably once a week, BUT never overdo it. You do not have time to recuperate from a heavy night spent drinking too much. Your friends will have difficulty understanding your complicated schedule (certainly in my case, I work every weekend and every national holiday: no christmas dinner for me and I only have four weekends off every year), but they will understand that you can only go out with them for a couple of hours. They will appreciate that you go out with them, even if you have to leave after two hours or so.
And last but certainly not least: try to get enough sleep. Never, or at least almost never sleep less than six hours. This means that when you come home from work, you have dinner, take a shower, watch television for half an hour tops and go to bed. It is good idea to build in some small ritual, like having a cup of lime tea or hot milk right before going to bed. I also listen to the same CD every night before going to work. I almost never lie awake past track 3. The other days you can follow a more relaxed schedule, but make sure you get six hours of sleep. I myself try to sleep for eight hours at least twice a week.
And if you do still fall sick, it is better to stay home a couple of days. Do not try to go to work half-sick. If you do, it might linger for weeks or even months on end.
12 hour days (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My train is my living room (Score:2, Insightful)
Meditation (Score:2, Insightful)
A 20 minute session of "proper" meditation can reset your mind more than a good hour long nap.
There are similarities between lifting weights and meditating. When you bench your max amount, when you push with all your might, there is not a single thing on your mind except to move the bar away from you. It clears your mind. Meditation has the same effect on the mind....
Exercise is most certainly key to maintaining your health. Meditate as well to make your routine full circle