Jennifer

“The forty-hour week is there for a reason; it gets the best work from people. The first four hours of work are the most productive and, as the day wears on, everyone becomes less alert, less focused, and prone to more mistakes. In 1908, the first known study by Ernst Abbe,5 one of the founders of the Zeiss lens laboratory, concluded that reducing the working day from nine to eight hours actually increased output. Henry Ford, who studied productivity issues obsessively, reached the same conclusion and infuriated his manufacturing colleagues when, in 1926, he had the audacity to introduce a forty-hour work week. Subsequent studies by Foster Wheeler (1968), Procter & Gamble (1980), members of the construction industry, and many, many more show that, as the days get longer, productivity declines. No study has ever convincingly argued otherwise.6”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“We also have a problem because sometimes we wanted to do stuff with other people, and they are not as accommodating. We wind up not going, and it looks like we chose not to go, but really we couldn’t go because there were all these factors that needed to be in place for us to go on vacation with them. We couldn’t [get them in place], and they didn’t want to bend a little bit, so we couldn’t do it. When family members have expectations that are unrealistic, parents can be placed in an awkward position of having to adapt to these expectations or explain that the expectations are unrealistic.”
― Kate E. Fiske, Autism and the Family: Understanding and Supporting Parents and Siblings

“This was how I discovered the most powerful way I know to kill our own cowardice as we approach a gate to hell. We must pull our minds away from situations that exist only in our hopes and fears, and rivet our attention—all of it—on the present moment.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We’re too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we already trust.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril