I have this funny feeling that we could shout our lungs hoarse about 80 hours being detrimental and not convince anybody. Social norms are powerful, powerful things.
Instead, anybody want to get some data together? I track productivity. I can't be the only one. (PLEASE tell me I'm not the only one.) Poor sample sizes, self-selected reports, and non-comparable metrics aside, going from hoary old wives tales to actual numbers has to be an improvement at the margin. (Data collection on this topic at the day job convinced salarymen that overtime was overdoing it. You know why? Because the hours worked versus productivity graph was so unbelievably borked that climatologists couldn't coax an upward trend out of it, that's why.)
It was (very lightly) discussed on HN six days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971708 (I posted clickable links to the references, so you don't have to retype them).
Instead, anybody want to get some data together? I track productivity. I can't be the only one. (PLEASE tell me I'm not the only one.) Poor sample sizes, self-selected reports, and non-comparable metrics aside, going from hoary old wives tales to actual numbers has to be an improvement at the margin. (Data collection on this topic at the day job convinced salarymen that overtime was overdoing it. You know why? Because the hours worked versus productivity graph was so unbelievably borked that climatologists couldn't coax an upward trend out of it, that's why.)