Shift work in the context of Night shifts

Everyday life, daily life or routine life comprises the ways in which people typically act, think, and feel on a daily basis. Everyday life may be described as mundane, routine, natural, habitual, or normal.

Human diurnality means most people sleep at least part of the night and are active in daytime. Most eat two or three meals in a day. Working time (apart from shift work) mostly involves a daily schedule, beginning in the morning. This produces the daily rush hours experienced by many millions, and the drive time focused on by radio broadcasters. Evening is often leisure time. Bathing every day is a custom for many.

A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization. Originally, layoff referred exclusively to a temporary interruption in work, or employment but this has evolved to a permanent elimination of a position in both British and US English, requiring the addition of "temporary" to specify the original meaning of the word. A layoff is not to be confused with wrongful termination.

Laid off workers or displaced workers are workers who have lost or left their jobs because their employer has closed or moved, there was insufficient work for them to do, or their position or shift was abolished (Borbely, 2011). Downsizing in a company is defined to involve the reduction of employees in a workforce. Downsizing in companies became a popular practice in the 1980s and early 1990s, since it was seen as a way to deliver better shareholder value by helping reduce the costs of employers (downsizing, 2015). Research on downsizing in the US, UK, and Japan suggests that downsizing is being regarded by management as one of the preferred routes to help declining organizations, cutting unnecessary costs, and improve organizational performance. A layoff usually occurs as a cost-cutting measure. A study of 391 downsizing announcements of the S&P 100 firms for the period 1990–2006 found that layoff announcements resulted in a substantial increase in the companies’ stock prices and that the gain was larger when the company had prior layoffs. The authors suggested that the stock price manipulation alone creates a sufficient motivation for publicly traded corporations to adopt the practice of regular layoffs.

The shift plan, rota or roster (esp. British) is the central component of a shift schedule in shift work. The schedule includes considerations of shift overlap, shift change times and alignment with the clock, vacation, training, shift differentials, holidays, etc. The shift plan determines the sequence of work (W) and free (F) days within a shift system.

A diner is a type of restaurant found across the United States and Canada, as well as parts of Western Europe and Australia. Diners offer mostly American cuisine, a casual atmosphere, and, typically, a combination of booths served by a waitstaff and a long sit-down counter with direct service, in the smallest simply by a cook. Many diners have extended hours, and some along highways and areas with significant shift work stay open for 24 hours.

Considered quintessentially American, many diners share an archetypal exterior form. Some of the earliest were converted rail dining cars, retaining their streamlined structure and interior fittings. From the 1920s to the 1940s, diners, by then commonly known as "lunch cars", were usually prefabricated in factories, like modern mobile homes, and delivered on site with only the utilities needing to be connected. As a result, many early diners were typically small and narrow to fit onto a rail car or truck. This small footprint also allowed them to fit into tiny and relatively inexpensive lots that were unable to support a larger enterprise. Diners were historically small businesses operated by the owner, with some presence of restaurant chains evolving over time.

An operator is a professional designation used in various industries, including broadcasting (in television and radio), computing, power generation and transmission, customer service, physics, and construction. Operators are day-to-day end users of systems, that may or may not be mission-critical, but are typically managed and maintained by technicians or engineers. They might also work on a 24-hour rotating shift schedule.

Late-night television is the general term for television programs produced for broadcast during the late evening and overnight hours—most commonly shown after, if not in competition with, local late-evening newscasts; programs that have been showcased in the daypart historically (though not necessarily exclusively) encompassed a particular genre of programming that falls somewhere between a variety show and a talk show. Late-night shows predominantly cater to night owls, people suffering from insomnia, shift workers with irregular schedule assignments, younger male audiences and college students, along with spillover audiences through viewers of entertainment and news programs aired earlier in the evening.

In the United States, the late night slot primarily encompasses the "late fringe" daypart leading out of prime time (and typically encompassing the half-hour to 35-minute "late news" slot associated with local and, in some cases, network late-evening newscasts), usually running after 11:00 p.m. and through 2:00 a.m. Eastern and Pacific Time (ET/PT). An informal broader definition of the daypart includes the designated overnight graveyard slot (encompassing programs airing as late as 5:00 a.m. local time).