[mercer]

Even in recent history my experience in countries that haven't caught up with the 'productive' Western-Europe approach contain a lot of downtime. The experience was often annoying for us Northern-Europeans, but in hindsight seemed moderately healthier to me.

It involved a bunch of guys standing around on construction sites sort of getting stuff done, but mostly when the owner was present, and enjoying their time outside part of the time when the owner was not.

Or women spending easily 50% of their time in their shops not selling things but chatting with various other women, or watching their kids.

I wasn't a fan of the clear gender-separation, but it was interesting to see that both men and women spent much of their day interacting in personally meaningful ways with their neighbors/customers, rather than bleeping products as fast as they could to hit some kind of target.