[dalek_cannes]

8 hours for work, 8 for leisure, 8 for sleep and 2 rest days a week seems reasonable, at least mathematically speaking. If it were up to me, I'd include commuting time in those 8 work hours as well, making the number no more than 7 hours.

[stdbrouw]

You're basing your assessment of reasonableness on the aesthetically pleasing properties of symmetry? :-)

[dalek_cannes]

Not really. Eight hours for sleep covers almost everyone's biological requirements. It's hard to decide in what proportion to split the remaining 16. So split it 50-50 unless someone can propose something better!

[mbrock]

That's a bafflingly unfounded and useless "suggestion!" Enormous amounts of people have been working 8 hour shifts for decades -- instead of just guessing that the status quo is probably optimal, why not ask a variety of people if they think two hours more of family/leisure/commute/exercise/learning time would be of any benefit?

[vidarh]

More likely because Robert Owen's original slogan from 1817 has had nearly 200 years to get deeply ingrained in culture...

[lotsofcows]

Sounds pretty arbitrary. It seems to me that a huge number of jobs are all about providing entertainment for people who are too knackered from work to take part in an intellectually and/or physically satisfying hobby. If we could distribute the real jobs evenly how many hours would we _need_ to work to maintain our lifestyle?

[clarry]

> It seems to me that a huge number of jobs are all about providing entertainment for people who are too knackered from work to take part in an intellectually and/or physically satisfying hobby.

This is something I've been trying to say for years now. Thanks for putting it in words so succinctly.

[guard-of-terra]

"8 hours for work, 8 for leisure, 8 for sleep" Where's commute?

[sportanova]

I'll need at least 12 hours of sleep :). But seriously, I think including commute time would be smart, except that it could lead to discrimination / resentment against the commuters