> “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.