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Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has a similar plan - he says we should all work just three 11 hour days per week (and change the retirement age to 75). I think

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has a similar plan - he says we should all work just three 11 hour days per week (and change the retirement age to 75). I think that, at least for jobs that require significant context-building spinup time at the beginning of a work period before you can start producing useful work, this is a great idea.

Arizhel 10y ago
Normally anything billionaires advocate in changing society is horrible, but in this case I have to agree heartily. Working only 3 long days a week would work out great for me. That would give me 4 full days off, plus as a programmer there's a significant amount of "spinup time" as you put it; this just isn't the kind of work you can work on in short bursts. However, I think the 6-hour day plan has some real merit too. I think it just depends on the job. For an engineering or programming job, I think the 11-hour day makes a lot of sense. But for some job like nursing (as in the article), or customer-service jobs where you're running around the whole shift, I think the 6-hour day (5 days a week) makes a lot of sense so workers don't get too worn out.
Bartweiss 10y ago
There was one great point in this article: setting society-wide hour counts is probably a bad plan. 11 hour days sound delightful for a lot of jobs - lots of productive time at work, with enough time off to relax and travel. They also sound hellish for some work (11 hours of manual labor is wretched) and impractical for some (11 hours waiting tables misses prime hours). So I think that conditional is important, but it sounds like a great thing to offer where possible. I can certainly see taking it as an occasional or even permanent schedule.
importantbrian 10y ago
That's very interesting. I wonder if you would start to run into staffing issues with this. Especially in industries like healthcare where it is already difficult to find adequate numbers of staff in certain roles like nursing.

Arizhel 10y ago

Normally anything billionaires advocate in changing society is horrible, but in this case I have to agree heartily. Working only 3 long days a week would work out great for me. That would give me 4 full days off, plus as a programmer there's a significant amount of "spinup time" as you put it; this just isn't the kind of work you can work on in short bursts. However, I think the 6-hour day plan has some real merit too. I think it just depends on the job. For an engineering or programming job, I think the 11-hour day makes a lot of sense. But for some job like nursing (as in the article), or customer-service jobs where you're running around the whole shift, I think the 6-hour day (5 days a week) makes a lot of sense so workers don't get too worn out.

Bartweiss 10y ago

There was one great point in this article: setting society-wide hour counts is probably a bad plan. 11 hour days sound delightful for a lot of jobs - lots of productive time at work, with enough time off to relax and travel. They also sound hellish for some work (11 hours of manual labor is wretched) and impractical for some (11 hours waiting tables misses prime hours). So I think that conditional is important, but it sounds like a great thing to offer where possible. I can certainly see taking it as an occasional or even permanent schedule.

importantbrian 10y ago

That's very interesting. I wonder if you would start to run into staffing issues with this. Especially in industries like healthcare where it is already difficult to find adequate numbers of staff in certain roles like nursing.