Skip breakfast, intermittent fasting eating window between 2 pm and 8 pm, fun lifestyle, and lots of sun, No wonder they are expected to be the top life expectancy country! <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-japan-2040-world-life-expectancy-league-table" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-...</a>
I'm Swedish, living in Singapore and the spanish time table looks like the one I've followed all my life (both in Sweden and in Singapore).<p>I'd argue that it's most of the other countries' schedules that are way too early. They're mostly based on 19'th century farming schedules which most people don't follow anymore.
Relevant:<p><i>How much is time wrong around the world?</i><p><a href="http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t...</a><p>or, if you just want to see the map:<p><a href="http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV2.png" rel="nofollow">http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV...</a>
> “Around 46% of Spaniards are still at work at 6pm, and 10% are still there at 9pm,” says Berbel. “So they are not having a good time, they are working.”<p>Reminds me when I moved from the UK to Germany (and later Switzerland) and was blown away, in the German office I worked in, how they worked less hours (most people strictly 8am to 4pm) and were at least a factor of 5 times more productive than anything I'd experienced in the UK.<p>The typical "average working day" I witnessed in a number of UK companies in London (I was an IT freelancer back in the mid-to-late 90's) went like...<p>- Arrive 9am-ish (depending on the Tube)<p>- Drink coffee, talk about football, what was on TV last night and whatever funny thing happened at the pub last night and basically almost no work until...<p>- 12 noon... time to get something done for an hour before lunch<p>- Lunch for 1 - 1.5 hours... some people already drinking their first beer<p>- Get back from lunch, pretend to work while being half asleep from a large lunch<p>- 4pm something's on fire... big crisis! Gotta be fixed NOW<p>- 8-9pm... fire now extinguished. Leave to the pub with colleagues<p>That's slanted toward an IT department but from what was basically 12 hours of being at work in some work, there was probably only 4-5 hours of productivity.<p>The key difference I witnessed in Germany was people went to work to work, not to socialise, and were actually getting more done in less time. There was also a bias towards being pro-active over being re-active, which meant less fire-fighting, which in turn meant time could be better managed.
Solar noon in Madrid is around 1 hour and 10 minutes later than in Berlin, yet they both use the same time zone.<p>This is how it would look if you gave Spain a time zone where solar noon would be around 12 (winter time) just like Berlin and Spanish people would keep their rhythm relative to actual daylight: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/u01l47S.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/u01l47S.png</a> (I've shifted Spain up by a bit more than one hour).
Since it took me a while to find the original article: <a href="https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/03/18/articulo/1458309794_132930.html" rel="nofollow">https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/03/18/articulo/145830979...</a>
Italian here, from Rome.<p>Those "weird" Spanish Schedules are my schedules.<p>I rarely have breakfast before 9:30, I rarely have lunch before 14:00 and dinner before 20:30.<p>Except for breakfast (I am not a morning person, never been) I learned my schedules from my family, a normal working class family, with regular schedules, same as many other families around us.<p>I guess we are weird too.
I've always eaten at 2pm lunch and 8pm dinner.<p>No snacks, no tea, no coffee. Only water to quench thrist.<p>Having said that most of my work is technical in nature and I am a partime machinist. Basically, after completing my development work at 5pm - I work in my machine shop for an hour or two everyday.
I live in the western end of the Eastern Time Zone in the US and I know this phenomenon well. The sun rises later and everyone has a harder time getting up in the morning. Compared to New England, where they naturally arise earlier because the sun rises much earlier.
The French schedule is only half the population, the one at 35 hours/week, but many have more hours:<p>- Lunch is often 2 hours for "white collar" workers
- Plenty of people start at around 9~9:30AM and finish work at 7:30PM~8PM<p>Also regarding dinner it starts at 8 for many.
the timetable shown in the article looks very similar to my experience in Argentina. And in the inner part of the country, there is even nap (siesta) after lunch.