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There are lot of articles on the internet that talk about diminishing productivity in relation to overtime and include graphs like the following:

enter image description here

but I cannot seem to find a reputable and scientific study. What studies are there to prove this relationship?

Oddthinking
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Dan
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    possible duplicate of [Does working over 40 hours a week makes you less productive?](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/14028/does-working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-you-less-productive) – Ryan Frame Dec 27 '13 at 19:53
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    This question is aimed specifically at knowledge workers. – Dan Dec 27 '13 at 23:38
  • Towards an answer: the long hours traditionally(?) assigned to medical residents and interns have been studied (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa041406) and might contain some relevant data. – Larry OBrien Dec 30 '13 at 17:28
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    I came across a good article discussing the arguments put forth by a few books on the subject (http://www.basilv.com/psd/blog/2006/overtime-considered-harmful) as well as a research paper on the topic from the perspective of software development (http://micsymposium.org/mics_2011_proceedings/mics11_olson.pdf), but nothing backed with a study, unfortunately. – Steve Dec 31 '13 at 13:28
  • I came across claim, that for knowledge workers, only 5-6h of work a day are truly 100% productive. Also, I'm quite skeptical about the graph above, I don't think 60h/w would double productivity (nor even add 50%). – vartec Dec 31 '13 at 16:09
  • problem is, how do you study it? As the study would put the health of these people at risk, as well as the turnover of the companies in question, and there are many other factors besides just hours determining productivity of knowledge workers (like non-constant workloads), it's rather hard. – jwenting Jan 02 '14 at 05:35
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    @jwenting There are many known experiments for industrial workers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). Since people often work long hours, don't think the health is the problem. And companies are often performing such studies themselves. I do agree however that defining and measuring productivity for knowledge workers is much more difficult. For example when programmers are measured by lines of code produced. However, it's what most of managers do every day. – Dan Jan 02 '14 at 16:32
  • @Dan long hours themselves are not a health problem, but when combined with high stress, lack of sleep, and over a long period (rather than occasional long hours for a short while, followed by time off to recuperate, as is the case with say airline pilots and offshore crews) it does cause trouble. – jwenting Jan 03 '14 at 17:16
  • @jwenting agreed... – Dan Jan 03 '14 at 18:07
  • @jwenting: Isn't that just part of the claim? – Oddthinking Feb 20 '14 at 21:56
  • @Oddthinking not mentioned explicitly, though maybe implicitly. But then of course it's not the long hours themselves that cause the reduced productivity, but the lack of sleep and stress that are result and cause of those long hours (the stress usually comes from bad planning, leading to people being both tense AND having to work long hours, both causing lack of sleep). – jwenting Feb 21 '14 at 07:44
  • @jwenting: Support those claims with references, and you have an answer. – Oddthinking Feb 21 '14 at 07:46

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