5 ms·

The Productivity of Working Hours (2014) [pdf]

82 points by luu 11y ago

mastermojo 11y ago
TLDR: Productivity per week is a linear function of time spent working, up to 48-49 hours, where it starts to fall off.
georgeecollins 11y ago
It is TLDR. But I am up voting it because it shows how long people have known that human productivity declines after 50 hours of work a week.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
cma 11y ago
How is it that some people can spend e.g. 100hours a week in an MMO getting all kinds of things "done."
- xchaotic 11y ago
  It is also less productive past the initial 50-60 hours
- tehrei 11y ago
  It's low mental load, nonexisting physical load, not work. There isn't anything else they would rather be doing at that time, they can cruise through on automatic, the interaction with the environment is with simple direct manipulation... You might as well ask how can some people spend 168 hours a week breathing with no loss in oxygen capacity.
jvdh 11y ago
The best information is at the very end of the report where all the tables and graphs are. They show that munition workers are at peak production at around 50 hours or so. There are many many caveats for drawing conclusions from these results: * The collected data is from 1915-1920 * The collected population is very very small (most sets are less than 50 individuals, one is ~100) * The work performed by the population is extremely repetitive manual labor With these caveats, it is safe to say that most of the audience of HN has nothing to gain from the results of this study.
- galfarragem 11y ago
  Empirically, my best output p/hour will peak with 35h/week. More than 40h/week and I start to feel overworked. I did also manual labour and the feeling wasn't very different. The difference is that instead of feeling mental tired you feel mental bored.
- 78666cdc 11y ago
  I'll respectfully disagree. The fact that the data is from 1915 - 1920 does not invalidate it unless you want to suggest that human nature in 1915-1920 is different than it is now - which would seem a strange point to defend. And the sample sizes are quite decent. I know that the HM userbase had a tendency to dismiss studies that are incorrectly conducted, but I don't think that this is one of those cases.
  - jvdh 11y ago
    The life and the work back then is very different from the life and work that we have now. A big factor is that there is no war to motivate people to work hard. Another is that labour circumstances are very very different now than what they were previously. Finally almost nobody who reads HN does repetitive manual labour. Manual productivity is very different from mental productivity. From my own experience, I'm not even productive for 40 hours per week. Let alone working 50 hours consistently every week.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    "Human nature". Alternatively: People who think the data is not as pertinent today or in other lines of work believe that human behavior is largely determined by context, not a priori hardwired behavior.
- mathattack 11y ago
  Very well put. Hard to extrapolate factory work to office work. I do believe that there are diminishing returns in software development (and startups) but a lot of it depends on the type of job, stage of company, existing support processes, etc.
dolzenko 11y ago
In other words, our typical working hours are supposed to get most out of us, or close to :)
pbhjpbhj 11y ago
I've found I can be productive for around 4 years then I get bored of my surroundings, agitated, can't focus, etc..
awinter-py 11y ago
ok but this is before modern worker amplification technology like intermittent wifi outages and slack. One can argue that frequent interruptions from these sources gives workers the opportunity to 'micro-recharge'.
- namenotrequired 11y ago
  Or to lose focus for the rest of the hour/day.
yunque 11y ago
Repetitive manual labour seems as good a proxy as any for productivity. It would be nigh on impossible to find such a robust index for software development work, but other modern professions, particularly repetitive ones, e.g. administrative positions, may be an interesting population to study today. Software specifically is too variable to accurately measure productivity. It's too subjective. Not only from a personal point of view, but also dependent on the task. Given the tendency towards automating the boring tasks, it seems that conducting such a study in the software development world becomes less and less likely.
philmcc 11y ago
I'm curious as to the effects of extending past the 40-49 hours in week one, on subsequent weeks. That information I think would be more compelling to an employer (or self-employer), because without it, you're simply saying 'You'll get more out of overworking people, you just won't get as much more.' Which still reads like "more."

82 points by luu 11y ago

TLDR: Productivity per week is a linear function of time spent working, up to 48-49 hours, where it starts to fall off.

It is TLDR. But I am up voting it because it shows how long people have known that human productivity declines after 50 hours of work a week.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

cma 11y ago

How is it that some people can spend e.g. 100hours a week in an MMO getting all kinds of things "done."

xchaotic 11y ago
It is also less productive past the initial 50-60 hours
tehrei 11y ago
It's low mental load, nonexisting physical load, not work. There isn't anything else they would rather be doing at that time, they can cruise through on automatic, the interaction with the environment is with simple direct manipulation... You might as well ask how can some people spend 168 hours a week breathing with no loss in oxygen capacity.

jvdh 11y ago

The best information is at the very end of the report where all the tables and graphs are. They show that munition workers are at peak production at around 50 hours or so. There are many many caveats for drawing conclusions from these results: * The collected data is from 1915-1920 * The collected population is very very small (most sets are less than 50 individuals, one is ~100) * The work performed by the population is extremely repetitive manual labor With these caveats, it is safe to say that most of the audience of HN has nothing to gain from the results of this study.

galfarragem 11y ago
Empirically, my best output p/hour will peak with 35h/week. More than 40h/week and I start to feel overworked. I did also manual labour and the feeling wasn't very different. The difference is that instead of feeling mental tired you feel mental bored.
78666cdc 11y ago
I'll respectfully disagree. The fact that the data is from 1915 - 1920 does not invalidate it unless you want to suggest that human nature in 1915-1920 is different than it is now - which would seem a strange point to defend. And the sample sizes are quite decent. I know that the HM userbase had a tendency to dismiss studies that are incorrectly conducted, but I don't think that this is one of those cases.
- jvdh 11y ago
  The life and the work back then is very different from the life and work that we have now. A big factor is that there is no war to motivate people to work hard. Another is that labour circumstances are very very different now than what they were previously. Finally almost nobody who reads HN does repetitive manual labour. Manual productivity is very different from mental productivity. From my own experience, I'm not even productive for 40 hours per week. Let alone working 50 hours consistently every week.
- danharaj 11y ago
  "Human nature". Alternatively: People who think the data is not as pertinent today or in other lines of work believe that human behavior is largely determined by context, not a priori hardwired behavior.
mathattack 11y ago
Very well put. Hard to extrapolate factory work to office work. I do believe that there are diminishing returns in software development (and startups) but a lot of it depends on the type of job, stage of company, existing support processes, etc.

dolzenko 11y ago

In other words, our typical working hours are supposed to get most out of us, or close to :)

pbhjpbhj 11y ago

I've found I can be productive for around 4 years then I get bored of my surroundings, agitated, can't focus, etc..

awinter-py 11y ago

ok but this is before modern worker amplification technology like intermittent wifi outages and slack. One can argue that frequent interruptions from these sources gives workers the opportunity to 'micro-recharge'.

namenotrequired 11y ago
Or to lose focus for the rest of the hour/day.

yunque 11y ago

Repetitive manual labour seems as good a proxy as any for productivity. It would be nigh on impossible to find such a robust index for software development work, but other modern professions, particularly repetitive ones, e.g. administrative positions, may be an interesting population to study today. Software specifically is too variable to accurately measure productivity. It's too subjective. Not only from a personal point of view, but also dependent on the task. Given the tendency towards automating the boring tasks, it seems that conducting such a study in the software development world becomes less and less likely.

philmcc 11y ago

I'm curious as to the effects of extending past the 40-49 hours in week one, on subsequent weeks. That information I think would be more compelling to an employer (or self-employer), because without it, you're simply saying 'You'll get more out of overworking people, you just won't get as much more.' Which still reads like "more."