10 ms·

Let’s hear it for the four-hour working day

146 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

ThomPete 9y ago
I recently left Square to start a product consultancy&portfolio with a colleauge of mine. One of our primary principles (we have a few) is "Time to think" so we structure our working week with 3 days of work, 1 day of potential meetings and one day of company time working on building a product portfolio. Our clients seem to like it as we give them time to get back to us. We are not cheap but we (think) we provide a lot of value. Furthermore we avoid the hours spent discussion and only do days/months. This model is not for all businesses but it works surpringly well both for us and the kind of clients we work with.
sagakina 9y ago
I liked the article but this contradicts it: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
kapauldo 9y ago
There's always going to be a competitor who is willing to work 5 hours.
- mc32 9y ago
  Not a problem, just make it illegal and export the externalities. On the other hand, you're right if you mean workers abroad would be willing to work longer hours for less pay --be they overseas outsourced workers or otherwise. But, internally, at least, it could be made illegal to get over the competitive aspect out of the picture.
- TwelveNights 9y ago
  The question the article wants to address though is whether or not working longer is working better. Maybe 5 hours will produce more work than 4, but this is attacking our traditional 8 hour system with the concept that, in the long run, you may be as productive while working less hours. Then again, their last point about hunter-gatherers isn't very convincing, since our needs have dramatically changed in the last couple hundred years.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I think people's natural tendency will be that if they can get away with 25% slack time now, they'll also take 25% slack time then, rather than halving their proportional slack time. Basically people adjust really quick to the new baseline.
- zsd 9y ago
  Preposterous. The inertia holding the 8-hour day in place is due to employers' not needing to change their ways, not due to some imagined environment where businesses compete on how much time is worked. Were that the case, there'd be such an effect now. Businesses don't seem to be driving 9-hour days. Some lawyers, doctors, and others do work that much, I will grant you that. But they're clearly the exception because they also make good money, had to work hard to become accredited, and generally clearly chose that kind of lifestyle rather than being forced into it. Sure, you could now claim 8 hours just happens to be the economic equilibrium. But then I invite you to reread this article.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Lawyers in particular will happily bill as many hours as they can, generally speaking.
    - vostok 9y ago
      More specifically, partners will happily have their associates bill as many hours as they can.
- jxramos 9y ago
  I remember listening to Daniel Hannan throwing this number of the number of Germans it takes to work as many hours as an American. Maybe they're just more productive ;). "In the short term, what's not to like? But there comes a point when you realize that you've been funding this on credit, that you've been depending on external assistance, and that your productivity has fallen further and further behind until you've got to the stage that we've now reached where it takes 4 Germans to work the same hours as 3 Americans. And that in the long term that is just not sustainable. Europe now that it's in a globalized economy competing against China and India and indeed North America, finds that it is shrinking precipitously. In the 1970s, in 1974, Europe accounted for 36%, or Western Europe, for 36% of World GDP. Today it's 25%, 10 years from now it will be 15%. That is an extraordinary decline, over a period when the US share of world GDP has remained pretty steady, round about 26%. So there was always going to be a reckoning and I'm afraid that reckoning has come now." Daniel Hannan https://youtu.be/Ufyov9RO8I0?t=648 https://youtu.be/Ufyov9RO8I0?t=648
  - cameldrv 9y ago
    The difference in work culture in Germany is large. Americans may spend more time at work than Germans, but Germans work more hours. Even friendly watercooler chats are kept to a minimum, and doing something like looking at Facebook on company time would be considered an infraction in a majority of German workplaces.
    - jrs235 9y ago
      This is the experience I had while visiting and working with German colleagues. They don't mess around at work. They get done in 4 hours what Americans do in 8.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      Really? I'm a German working in Germany and if you look at the timestamps on my comments, you'll see that a fairly significant proportion of those are made during work. I've seen plenty of coworkers trading Facebook or whatever, and people chit-chat all the time. Well, not everybody of course, but for example, my own morning routine involves visiting the coworkers at their desks to check on their work and coordinate, and that includes some friendly banter, of course.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  But it will not always be the most successful approach. Really depends on the type of business and project.
- Aeolun 9y ago
  There's also always going to be a competitor who is willing to work 10, 12 or even 14 hour days. That doesn't seem to hold back the businesses working 8 hours though.
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    > That doesn't seem to hold back the businesses working 8 hours though. Because the competitor is a hardworking idiot who didn't realize that sort of thinking stopped being effective once computers took over.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - latigidigital 9y ago
    The extended workday is underrated. I'd much rather whip out two 16-hour days than waste all week accomplishing the same tasks.
- DonbunEf7 9y ago
  Since no other comment explicitly spelled it out fully: Why don't people work nine hours in the USA? The answer is very simple: Benefits, overtime, breaks, and other bits of labor law are written around an eight-hour day. This coerces employers and employees alike into preferring eight hours over seven or nine, simply as a matter of optimizing the business's need to pay out overtime with the employee's need to secure FTE benefits. If there were such a thing as a 20hr work week in law, not defined as part-time with no benefits, but defined as part-time with partial or full benefits, then I imagine that everybody's tune would change quite quickly and we would end up multimodal, with one peak at four hrs/day and another at eight hrs/day.
- mdekkers 9y ago
  There's always going to be a competitor who is willing to work 5 hours. Great, and as long as they will work 5 hours, and I will work 4, I know I will have the fresher, better ideas in the long run.
zackmorris 9y ago
Another way to look at this is the level of detail of problem you try to solve each day. Every day that I'm working, I try to implement 1 feature. I'll often implement 2 or if I'm lucky 3, and sometimes I'll lose a little ground and take 2 or 3 days to implement something. But averaged out - 1 feature per day results in steady forward progress and keeps clients and bosses happy. It turns out (for me at least) that the level of problem that fits into 1 day most optimizes my productivity. I don't waste time on low-level minutia and I don't let tasks slip into being too broad. So if you consider a 4 hour workday and imagine this pipelined, then the other half of your day goes into preprocessing the next task with your subconscious. This is where the real gains are made, because as far as I can tell, the subconscious has no real abstraction limit. I'll often sleep on a seemingly insurmountable problem and wake up the next morning knowing the answer. Put all of this together, and most days I don't do more than 4 hours of work. Sure I'm at the office 6-9 hours, but I find than any more than a single 4 hour stretch of being in the zone each day is not sustainable and actually lowers my productivity. Luckily my workplace realizes this and currently has 6 core hours where it's encourages to be in one's chair, but this has been as low as 4 hours and isn't heavily enforced when overall productivity is up. I highly recommend a policy like this to any leads/managers out there looking to find nonlinear speedups, especially on projects mired in scope creep and overages.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ghosthamlet 9y ago
Four-hour working day have many more benefits in modern days, if all companys become four-hour working day, it not just for work efficiency: First it can give more equality to workers or say human self, let them spend more life time for themself, for family, rather than more work time for companys; Second it can slow down the whole world entropy, something like in this book: Entropy: A New World View[1] [1]https://www.amazon.com/Entropy-World-View-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0670297178 https://www.amazon.com/Entropy-World-View-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0...
- r00fus 9y ago
  Add in the fact that with that extra time, I have time to spend that money I earn. Right now I barely have time to use Google express or Amazon, with an occasional trip to TJs. Forget about department stores. More free time for me would = more money spent on leisure activities.
  - herbst 9y ago
    As someone with 99% free time I can not agree. I only did that when the free time was just inbetween jobs and I felt I need to treat myself for doing so much work. Since I don't I enjoy the little things again and actually spend way less money
    - donnedslug 9y ago
      How do you manage to have that much free time?
      - herbst 9y ago
        I create things when I want to and sometimes they sell. I own(Ed) a few content websites and a rather well working SaaS
- sokoloff 9y ago
  How long until enterprising folks decide to work two "four-hour" jobs to get ahead? I predict less than one then-full working day.
touchofevil 9y ago
I'm completely over the 8 hour plus 1 hour lunch workday that results in spending 9 hours at or around your place of employment. When you factor in your commute of, say, 30 min each way, you've just spent 10 hours of your day. Add 8 hours sleep plus 1 hour for dinner plus 1 hour getting up and ready in the morning, that leaves you with 4 hours for your life during the weekdays. Then you watch an hour of TV with your significant other, now you've got 3 hours left. It gets pretty hard to pursue a side project, art, or a hobby living like that. Can you cut an hour or two off sleep? Maybe, but I didn't factor in things like working out or calling your friends/family so it's probably a wash. What's more is that the lifestyle I've described above doesn't leave people with much time to consume products/services. If people had shorter workdays they would actually have time to spend money, which you'd think capitalism would want most of all. Cutting down the workday would save people so many pointless meetings as well since managers might actually feel some sort of constraint on the time they have their employees in their offices. I think most people in tech or high-skilled white collar jobs see how their fellow employees do various things to reduce the 40 hour workweek to something reasonable. People work from home one day a week often, or they work four days a week supposedly doing 10 hour days instead of 8. There's a lot of charade involved in the 40 hour week for many employees. However, many other employees aren't able to find these loopholes and it results in a real grind...especially when the job isn't just 40 hours a week and turns into 50 or 60, which quickly becomes unbearable. We've really got to stop this madness. If you work at SpaceX or Blue Origin, then yeah, what you're doing is pretty important and you might actually save the human race, so you can feel good about those 40 hours. But if you're working at an ad agency making gum commercials, let's get real, it could and should be done in 4 hours a day. And besides, SpaceX and Blue Origin can double their staff if needed to offset the shorter hours. Since their employees would be better rested and happier they probably won't even need 2x their staff, maybe just 1.5x.
- cakedoggie 9y ago
  Easy. Skip the one hour for lunch, one hour for dinner, and one hour to get ready in the morning. I got for a run and shower and dress, and only need 30 minutes to do all that and leave the house. These are things you can fix yourself. If you really want more time, millions of people do it. Also, I cycle in and out so that commute is actually exercise and much more pleasant. > If people had shorter workdays they would actually have time to spend money Ok, not sure why that is automatically a great thing.
cgb223 9y ago
Sounds like a great way to only pay employees half of what they currently make
- nitrogen 9y ago
  Some people would be very happy to have 50% of the money for 50% of the time. There's not currently an option for that, so there's no way for the market to discover the right balance.
  - cgb223 9y ago
    It exists, it's called a part time job, and it makes it very hard to do things like "pay rent"
    - Qantourisc 9y ago
      Rent is indeed the real killer, it takes waaaay to much of the budget. It's the only thing that has not gotten more affordable. Maybe even worse over the year.
      - isostatic 9y ago
        This is the irony. If people worked 4 hour days for the same salary, some would do two jobs to earn more, and then buy/rent bigger. This leads to an increase in rental costs a which means that working 2x 4 hour jobs is essential to get what 1 4 hour job used to get. The same phenomena has been seen over the last 30 years. When a parent (usually the mother) stayed at home houses were affordable on a single income. After both parents started working prices shot up, now it's essential for both to work, just to pay the extra rent/mortgage. This pushes childbirth later in life, if at all, and means that children are brought up as a factory process rather than parenting. In the UK this is explicitly encouraged by tax breaks for outsourcing childcare, taxpayer funded childcare, and penalising single working parents through the tax system (60% marginal tax on £50k household income with 1 earner, 33% on £50k household income with two earners, but no way to share tax subsidies)
      - 9y ago
geewee 9y ago
I've recently started a small software consulting company with work from home options. I've considered taking two weekdays where I just work 4 hours from home, and then working 4 hours from home every day in the weekend. It seems like a really pleasant way to hit the hours required in a regular work-week. Just imagine how much time you'll have only working 'till lunch - there'd be time for a bunch of other stuff after work instead of just coming home and being tired.
sigi45 9y ago
blah blah blah how can we work less and say it is a good thing? Lets write an article about it and rewrirte stuff which is out there for years. There is a difference if you work 4h a day or 8. 4h. 99% of Jobs do benefit of working 8h a day. A cleaning person can do way more in 8h than in 4h. the construction worker will also do more. But not the software engineere! Because he/she is doing 'mind work'. This is bullshit. Yeah we are privileged and yes we understand that there might not be a need to work 8h but than just say it how it is and not invent some bullshit.
- mdekkers 9y ago
  But not the software engineere! Because he/she is doing 'mind work'. This is bullshit. Can you qualify your "this is bullshit" statement? Other than just ranting about it? There is a significant difference between manual workers and knowledge workers, and pretending it is all the same thing is disingenuous. This isn't a statement about knowledge workers being "better" or "superior", it is simply a recognition of the the fact that these two labor types are not the same. I actively try to limit my "work" time, because like it or not, my brain doesn't stop working on my active problems and tasks. As somebody who has suffered through 3 consecutive burn-outs, I can only say that I wholly agree with the 4-hour workday.
  - sigi45 9y ago
    There is a difference between not knowing when there is to much stress and saing, that 4h are enough. I do get more stuff done when i work longer. I might get distracted by stuff but this is also a part of my work. Helping my collegues? Yes part of my job. I do not count my lunch time as work. And no not the majority of my work as a software engineere is thinking, thinking and thinking. What i really think is tiring is making decisions. Most of people out there have bad jobs and get paid little. But look at us: Earning good money and talkling about 4h workdays for the same pay. Its fucking arrogant. I can only recommend to read this: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity... and no there is no 'but i did my work so i can go home' How about spending the rest of the time to improve something in your company? or bring the garbage out? Or whatever? And if you are part of a team, you put less work in than others and let them down :(
5_minutes 9y ago
Completely agree with the perspectives here, it is however when telling this to my non-tech friends and collegues a tough pitch: like I'm spoiled or am just living on a completely different planet.
- indemnity 9y ago
  To be honest, given how well tech is compensated, you are living on a different planet. My brother is smarter than me, and works harder, as a teacher. Arguably a more important job since he is educating the next generation. I’m building widgets to help some company do something a tiny bit more efficiently. The excess value thrown off by increasing this efficiency is captured by the company and entirely distributed to the various middlemen, it is not a net benefit to society, it is not changing the world. Someone just found a new way to clip the ticket. Due to the fact that my skills are more in demand, I earn twice his household (him + wife) income. When you add my wife, it’s triple. My struggles are self-actualisation and finding meaning, materially we are very comfortable. His struggles are keeping food on the table. It’s fucked. The answer is not that everyone should become a tech worker or banker.
  - 5_minutes 9y ago
    Here in Europe, IT is better paid, and can range up to "much better paid". But it's less of a huge gap compared to, I suppose the US and the real startup scenes there? You can make 500-800 more then the average other people behind a desk, which are perhaps "managers". But the double of them is only for real teamleader positions. So I guess it also depends a bit on location... where are you roughly based? Let's say the average worker is paid 1800-2000. And as decent IT you can add 500-800 on top of that, depending on if you get a car etc also. But hey yes, it's fucked!
    - indemnity 9y ago
      I'm in New Zealand, not the US. But in many ways, our culture is the same, and inequality is rampant. Our current center-right government is also systematically dismantling social welfare and public health systems, with the end-goal being something very similar to the US, I guess.
mseebach 9y ago
Whenever there's a pop-business piece on here, commenters are very eager to point out the obvious blind angles, typically survivorship bias. Let's hold pop-psych to the same standard: Once you look at people who actually have skin in the game (ie. actually runs a company and thus has the authority to put such as change into effect), they aren't doing this. Why? Something doesn't add up, and these books are as a rule very light on analysing what. If things are so simple as they are laid out, where is the startup that cut their daily working hours to four and still succeeded? It should be possible to find at least one (and it would be easy for them to attract top talent). What are they seeing that these writers aren't? Also, journalists do intellectual, creative work and are often employed as freelancers and paid by the word, not time -- so they'd make perfect guinea pigs. If the argument is as good as it's being presented here, there should be plenty of journalists willing to give it a try. If you can indeed actually get as much done, and possibly even of a higher quality, they'd obviously make it permanent. Yet it doesn't seem to be happening? (Or if it is, why wouldn't this reviewer have added a simple anecdote from his personal experience, or that of friends?)
- mcless 9y ago
  You seem to be making an assumption that just because you have not seen companies where the management encourages cutting down on daily working hours, then such companies must not exist. From my experience, I would claim that your assumption is false. During my career, I have worked for a few small as well as big companies where the management indeed encouraged limiting the working hours to about 4 to 6 per day. All of them had 40 hour week on the contract or legal agreement but the company culture went beyond the written contract to support something like a 25 hour week. In my career, I did not see any kind of correlation between financial success of the company, productivity and the number of working hours. Financial success had a strong correlation with good decisions made by higher management. Productivity had a strong correlation with high skill-level of engineers and managers hired. Another way to describe what I mean is: When I worked for one of these companies that encouraged four-hour working day, there were competitors who worked the regular eight-hour working days and were beating us in the competition, and there were also competitors who worked the regular eight-hour working days and were losing to us in the competition.
dolzenko 9y ago
Also advocated by Bertrand Russell in his In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
krylon 9y ago
I recently reduced my working hours from 40/week (8/day) to 30/week (6/day), and so far I am very happy with it. Work is much less stressful, and when I get home I have time to get a few chores done and unwind so I can get to sleep in time. My daily commute is two times 70 minutes, but it is by train, so I have time to read, stare out the window and enjoy nature (lots of rabbits, roe deer and birds to see, plus beautiful landscape) or listen to music or podcasts, which is mostly enjoyable.
- herbst 9y ago
  I did 32 hours weeks most of the time. I never understood my peers who would insist on 40 and be stressed out all the time
  - krylon 9y ago
    The reduction in working hours came along with a proportionate reduction in income. My lifestyle is fairly modest, so I can handle it (no car, no children, no mortage). It has reduced my financial flexibility, for sure, but I think it was worth it. Quality of life is hard to quantify. ;-)
CosmicShadow 9y ago
I've always heard people say if you can get in 3 hours of good development work a day, that's pretty much the max and you should feel good about the day. So if I get that done, I feel accomplished. I do consulting work and can live that lifestyle, you just plan for it in the contract. I've found even when working on startup stuff I want to get done, if it's not just monotonous busy work style coding and requires thinking and planning, meanwhile the system is getting bigger and more complex, then yeah, you can only get done a good 2-3 hours of hard thinking work, then you are just braindead, and any more work just means fixing that shit work the next day, meaning you lose productivity. Maybe some people can push past this, maybe some people just think they can and don't recognize, but at least for some of us, that's just it. I ask my friends about this who work for a living and they agree and say you get 2-3 hours of good work in, the rest is fucking around, meetings, facebook, whatever. I'm not going to comment on non-dev work because I don't do it, and most of it probably doesn't apply to this, unless you are doing intense thinking. Most of the people reading this are probably devs or have hard thinking jobs.

146 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

I recently left Square to start a product consultancy&portfolio with a colleauge of mine. One of our primary principles (we have a few) is "Time to think" so we structure our working week with 3 days of work, 1 day of potential meetings and one day of company time working on building a product portfolio. Our clients seem to like it as we give them time to get back to us. We are not cheap but we (think) we provide a lot of value. Furthermore we avoid the hours spent discussion and only do days/months. This model is not for all businesses but it works surpringly well both for us and the kind of clients we work with.

sagakina 9y ago

I liked the article but this contradicts it: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

kapauldo 9y ago

There's always going to be a competitor who is willing to work 5 hours.

mc32 9y ago
Not a problem, just make it illegal and export the externalities. On the other hand, you're right if you mean workers abroad would be willing to work longer hours for less pay --be they overseas outsourced workers or otherwise. But, internally, at least, it could be made illegal to get over the competitive aspect out of the picture.
TwelveNights 9y ago
The question the article wants to address though is whether or not working longer is working better. Maybe 5 hours will produce more work than 4, but this is attacking our traditional 8 hour system with the concept that, in the long run, you may be as productive while working less hours. Then again, their last point about hunter-gatherers isn't very convincing, since our needs have dramatically changed in the last couple hundred years.
- mc32 9y ago
  I think people's natural tendency will be that if they can get away with 25% slack time now, they'll also take 25% slack time then, rather than halving their proportional slack time. Basically people adjust really quick to the new baseline.
zsd 9y ago
Preposterous. The inertia holding the 8-hour day in place is due to employers' not needing to change their ways, not due to some imagined environment where businesses compete on how much time is worked. Were that the case, there'd be such an effect now. Businesses don't seem to be driving 9-hour days. Some lawyers, doctors, and others do work that much, I will grant you that. But they're clearly the exception because they also make good money, had to work hard to become accredited, and generally clearly chose that kind of lifestyle rather than being forced into it. Sure, you could now claim 8 hours just happens to be the economic equilibrium. But then I invite you to reread this article.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Lawyers in particular will happily bill as many hours as they can, generally speaking.
  - vostok 9y ago
    More specifically, partners will happily have their associates bill as many hours as they can.
jxramos 9y ago
I remember listening to Daniel Hannan throwing this number of the number of Germans it takes to work as many hours as an American. Maybe they're just more productive ;). "In the short term, what's not to like? But there comes a point when you realize that you've been funding this on credit, that you've been depending on external assistance, and that your productivity has fallen further and further behind until you've got to the stage that we've now reached where it takes 4 Germans to work the same hours as 3 Americans. And that in the long term that is just not sustainable. Europe now that it's in a globalized economy competing against China and India and indeed North America, finds that it is shrinking precipitously. In the 1970s, in 1974, Europe accounted for 36%, or Western Europe, for 36% of World GDP. Today it's 25%, 10 years from now it will be 15%. That is an extraordinary decline, over a period when the US share of world GDP has remained pretty steady, round about 26%. So there was always going to be a reckoning and I'm afraid that reckoning has come now." Daniel Hannan https://youtu.be/Ufyov9RO8I0?t=648 https://youtu.be/Ufyov9RO8I0?t=648
- cameldrv 9y ago
  The difference in work culture in Germany is large. Americans may spend more time at work than Germans, but Germans work more hours. Even friendly watercooler chats are kept to a minimum, and doing something like looking at Facebook on company time would be considered an infraction in a majority of German workplaces.
  - jrs235 9y ago
    This is the experience I had while visiting and working with German colleagues. They don't mess around at work. They get done in 4 hours what Americans do in 8.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    Really? I'm a German working in Germany and if you look at the timestamps on my comments, you'll see that a fairly significant proportion of those are made during work. I've seen plenty of coworkers trading Facebook or whatever, and people chit-chat all the time. Well, not everybody of course, but for example, my own morning routine involves visiting the coworkers at their desks to check on their work and coordinate, and that includes some friendly banter, of course.
ThomPete 9y ago
But it will not always be the most successful approach. Really depends on the type of business and project.
Aeolun 9y ago
There's also always going to be a competitor who is willing to work 10, 12 or even 14 hour days. That doesn't seem to hold back the businesses working 8 hours though.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  > That doesn't seem to hold back the businesses working 8 hours though. Because the competitor is a hardworking idiot who didn't realize that sort of thinking stopped being effective once computers took over.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- latigidigital 9y ago
  The extended workday is underrated. I'd much rather whip out two 16-hour days than waste all week accomplishing the same tasks.
DonbunEf7 9y ago
Since no other comment explicitly spelled it out fully: Why don't people work nine hours in the USA? The answer is very simple: Benefits, overtime, breaks, and other bits of labor law are written around an eight-hour day. This coerces employers and employees alike into preferring eight hours over seven or nine, simply as a matter of optimizing the business's need to pay out overtime with the employee's need to secure FTE benefits. If there were such a thing as a 20hr work week in law, not defined as part-time with no benefits, but defined as part-time with partial or full benefits, then I imagine that everybody's tune would change quite quickly and we would end up multimodal, with one peak at four hrs/day and another at eight hrs/day.
mdekkers 9y ago
There's always going to be a competitor who is willing to work 5 hours. Great, and as long as they will work 5 hours, and I will work 4, I know I will have the fresher, better ideas in the long run.

zackmorris 9y ago

Another way to look at this is the level of detail of problem you try to solve each day. Every day that I'm working, I try to implement 1 feature. I'll often implement 2 or if I'm lucky 3, and sometimes I'll lose a little ground and take 2 or 3 days to implement something. But averaged out - 1 feature per day results in steady forward progress and keeps clients and bosses happy. It turns out (for me at least) that the level of problem that fits into 1 day most optimizes my productivity. I don't waste time on low-level minutia and I don't let tasks slip into being too broad. So if you consider a 4 hour workday and imagine this pipelined, then the other half of your day goes into preprocessing the next task with your subconscious. This is where the real gains are made, because as far as I can tell, the subconscious has no real abstraction limit. I'll often sleep on a seemingly insurmountable problem and wake up the next morning knowing the answer. Put all of this together, and most days I don't do more than 4 hours of work. Sure I'm at the office 6-9 hours, but I find than any more than a single 4 hour stretch of being in the zone each day is not sustainable and actually lowers my productivity. Luckily my workplace realizes this and currently has 6 core hours where it's encourages to be in one's chair, but this has been as low as 4 hours and isn't heavily enforced when overall productivity is up. I highly recommend a policy like this to any leads/managers out there looking to find nonlinear speedups, especially on projects mired in scope creep and overages.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ghosthamlet 9y ago

Four-hour working day have many more benefits in modern days, if all companys become four-hour working day, it not just for work efficiency: First it can give more equality to workers or say human self, let them spend more life time for themself, for family, rather than more work time for companys; Second it can slow down the whole world entropy, something like in this book: Entropy: A New World View[1] [1]https://www.amazon.com/Entropy-World-View-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0670297178 https://www.amazon.com/Entropy-World-View-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0...

r00fus 9y ago
Add in the fact that with that extra time, I have time to spend that money I earn. Right now I barely have time to use Google express or Amazon, with an occasional trip to TJs. Forget about department stores. More free time for me would = more money spent on leisure activities.
- herbst 9y ago
  As someone with 99% free time I can not agree. I only did that when the free time was just inbetween jobs and I felt I need to treat myself for doing so much work. Since I don't I enjoy the little things again and actually spend way less money
  - donnedslug 9y ago
    How do you manage to have that much free time?
    - herbst 9y ago
      I create things when I want to and sometimes they sell. I own(Ed) a few content websites and a rather well working SaaS
sokoloff 9y ago
How long until enterprising folks decide to work two "four-hour" jobs to get ahead? I predict less than one then-full working day.

touchofevil 9y ago

I'm completely over the 8 hour plus 1 hour lunch workday that results in spending 9 hours at or around your place of employment. When you factor in your commute of, say, 30 min each way, you've just spent 10 hours of your day. Add 8 hours sleep plus 1 hour for dinner plus 1 hour getting up and ready in the morning, that leaves you with 4 hours for your life during the weekdays. Then you watch an hour of TV with your significant other, now you've got 3 hours left. It gets pretty hard to pursue a side project, art, or a hobby living like that. Can you cut an hour or two off sleep? Maybe, but I didn't factor in things like working out or calling your friends/family so it's probably a wash. What's more is that the lifestyle I've described above doesn't leave people with much time to consume products/services. If people had shorter workdays they would actually have time to spend money, which you'd think capitalism would want most of all. Cutting down the workday would save people so many pointless meetings as well since managers might actually feel some sort of constraint on the time they have their employees in their offices. I think most people in tech or high-skilled white collar jobs see how their fellow employees do various things to reduce the 40 hour workweek to something reasonable. People work from home one day a week often, or they work four days a week supposedly doing 10 hour days instead of 8. There's a lot of charade involved in the 40 hour week for many employees. However, many other employees aren't able to find these loopholes and it results in a real grind...especially when the job isn't just 40 hours a week and turns into 50 or 60, which quickly becomes unbearable. We've really got to stop this madness. If you work at SpaceX or Blue Origin, then yeah, what you're doing is pretty important and you might actually save the human race, so you can feel good about those 40 hours. But if you're working at an ad agency making gum commercials, let's get real, it could and should be done in 4 hours a day. And besides, SpaceX and Blue Origin can double their staff if needed to offset the shorter hours. Since their employees would be better rested and happier they probably won't even need 2x their staff, maybe just 1.5x.

cakedoggie 9y ago
Easy. Skip the one hour for lunch, one hour for dinner, and one hour to get ready in the morning. I got for a run and shower and dress, and only need 30 minutes to do all that and leave the house. These are things you can fix yourself. If you really want more time, millions of people do it. Also, I cycle in and out so that commute is actually exercise and much more pleasant. > If people had shorter workdays they would actually have time to spend money Ok, not sure why that is automatically a great thing.

cgb223 9y ago

Sounds like a great way to only pay employees half of what they currently make

nitrogen 9y ago
Some people would be very happy to have 50% of the money for 50% of the time. There's not currently an option for that, so there's no way for the market to discover the right balance.
- cgb223 9y ago
  It exists, it's called a part time job, and it makes it very hard to do things like "pay rent"
  - Qantourisc 9y ago
    Rent is indeed the real killer, it takes waaaay to much of the budget. It's the only thing that has not gotten more affordable. Maybe even worse over the year.
    - isostatic 9y ago
      This is the irony. If people worked 4 hour days for the same salary, some would do two jobs to earn more, and then buy/rent bigger. This leads to an increase in rental costs a which means that working 2x 4 hour jobs is essential to get what 1 4 hour job used to get. The same phenomena has been seen over the last 30 years. When a parent (usually the mother) stayed at home houses were affordable on a single income. After both parents started working prices shot up, now it's essential for both to work, just to pay the extra rent/mortgage. This pushes childbirth later in life, if at all, and means that children are brought up as a factory process rather than parenting. In the UK this is explicitly encouraged by tax breaks for outsourcing childcare, taxpayer funded childcare, and penalising single working parents through the tax system (60% marginal tax on £50k household income with 1 earner, 33% on £50k household income with two earners, but no way to share tax subsidies)
    - 9y ago

geewee 9y ago

I've recently started a small software consulting company with work from home options. I've considered taking two weekdays where I just work 4 hours from home, and then working 4 hours from home every day in the weekend. It seems like a really pleasant way to hit the hours required in a regular work-week. Just imagine how much time you'll have only working 'till lunch - there'd be time for a bunch of other stuff after work instead of just coming home and being tired.

sigi45 9y ago

blah blah blah how can we work less and say it is a good thing? Lets write an article about it and rewrirte stuff which is out there for years. There is a difference if you work 4h a day or 8. 4h. 99% of Jobs do benefit of working 8h a day. A cleaning person can do way more in 8h than in 4h. the construction worker will also do more. But not the software engineere! Because he/she is doing 'mind work'. This is bullshit. Yeah we are privileged and yes we understand that there might not be a need to work 8h but than just say it how it is and not invent some bullshit.

mdekkers 9y ago
But not the software engineere! Because he/she is doing 'mind work'. This is bullshit. Can you qualify your "this is bullshit" statement? Other than just ranting about it? There is a significant difference between manual workers and knowledge workers, and pretending it is all the same thing is disingenuous. This isn't a statement about knowledge workers being "better" or "superior", it is simply a recognition of the the fact that these two labor types are not the same. I actively try to limit my "work" time, because like it or not, my brain doesn't stop working on my active problems and tasks. As somebody who has suffered through 3 consecutive burn-outs, I can only say that I wholly agree with the 4-hour workday.
- sigi45 9y ago
  There is a difference between not knowing when there is to much stress and saing, that 4h are enough. I do get more stuff done when i work longer. I might get distracted by stuff but this is also a part of my work. Helping my collegues? Yes part of my job. I do not count my lunch time as work. And no not the majority of my work as a software engineere is thinking, thinking and thinking. What i really think is tiring is making decisions. Most of people out there have bad jobs and get paid little. But look at us: Earning good money and talkling about 4h workdays for the same pay. Its fucking arrogant. I can only recommend to read this: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity... and no there is no 'but i did my work so i can go home' How about spending the rest of the time to improve something in your company? or bring the garbage out? Or whatever? And if you are part of a team, you put less work in than others and let them down :(

5_minutes 9y ago

Completely agree with the perspectives here, it is however when telling this to my non-tech friends and collegues a tough pitch: like I'm spoiled or am just living on a completely different planet.

indemnity 9y ago
To be honest, given how well tech is compensated, you are living on a different planet. My brother is smarter than me, and works harder, as a teacher. Arguably a more important job since he is educating the next generation. I’m building widgets to help some company do something a tiny bit more efficiently. The excess value thrown off by increasing this efficiency is captured by the company and entirely distributed to the various middlemen, it is not a net benefit to society, it is not changing the world. Someone just found a new way to clip the ticket. Due to the fact that my skills are more in demand, I earn twice his household (him + wife) income. When you add my wife, it’s triple. My struggles are self-actualisation and finding meaning, materially we are very comfortable. His struggles are keeping food on the table. It’s fucked. The answer is not that everyone should become a tech worker or banker.
- 5_minutes 9y ago
  Here in Europe, IT is better paid, and can range up to "much better paid". But it's less of a huge gap compared to, I suppose the US and the real startup scenes there? You can make 500-800 more then the average other people behind a desk, which are perhaps "managers". But the double of them is only for real teamleader positions. So I guess it also depends a bit on location... where are you roughly based? Let's say the average worker is paid 1800-2000. And as decent IT you can add 500-800 on top of that, depending on if you get a car etc also. But hey yes, it's fucked!
  - indemnity 9y ago
    I'm in New Zealand, not the US. But in many ways, our culture is the same, and inequality is rampant. Our current center-right government is also systematically dismantling social welfare and public health systems, with the end-goal being something very similar to the US, I guess.

mseebach 9y ago

Whenever there's a pop-business piece on here, commenters are very eager to point out the obvious blind angles, typically survivorship bias. Let's hold pop-psych to the same standard: Once you look at people who actually have skin in the game (ie. actually runs a company and thus has the authority to put such as change into effect), they aren't doing this. Why? Something doesn't add up, and these books are as a rule very light on analysing what. If things are so simple as they are laid out, where is the startup that cut their daily working hours to four and still succeeded? It should be possible to find at least one (and it would be easy for them to attract top talent). What are they seeing that these writers aren't? Also, journalists do intellectual, creative work and are often employed as freelancers and paid by the word, not time -- so they'd make perfect guinea pigs. If the argument is as good as it's being presented here, there should be plenty of journalists willing to give it a try. If you can indeed actually get as much done, and possibly even of a higher quality, they'd obviously make it permanent. Yet it doesn't seem to be happening? (Or if it is, why wouldn't this reviewer have added a simple anecdote from his personal experience, or that of friends?)

mcless 9y ago
You seem to be making an assumption that just because you have not seen companies where the management encourages cutting down on daily working hours, then such companies must not exist. From my experience, I would claim that your assumption is false. During my career, I have worked for a few small as well as big companies where the management indeed encouraged limiting the working hours to about 4 to 6 per day. All of them had 40 hour week on the contract or legal agreement but the company culture went beyond the written contract to support something like a 25 hour week. In my career, I did not see any kind of correlation between financial success of the company, productivity and the number of working hours. Financial success had a strong correlation with good decisions made by higher management. Productivity had a strong correlation with high skill-level of engineers and managers hired. Another way to describe what I mean is: When I worked for one of these companies that encouraged four-hour working day, there were competitors who worked the regular eight-hour working days and were beating us in the competition, and there were also competitors who worked the regular eight-hour working days and were losing to us in the competition.

dolzenko 9y ago

Also advocated by Bertrand Russell in his In Praise of Idleness http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

krylon 9y ago

I recently reduced my working hours from 40/week (8/day) to 30/week (6/day), and so far I am very happy with it. Work is much less stressful, and when I get home I have time to get a few chores done and unwind so I can get to sleep in time. My daily commute is two times 70 minutes, but it is by train, so I have time to read, stare out the window and enjoy nature (lots of rabbits, roe deer and birds to see, plus beautiful landscape) or listen to music or podcasts, which is mostly enjoyable.

herbst 9y ago
I did 32 hours weeks most of the time. I never understood my peers who would insist on 40 and be stressed out all the time
- krylon 9y ago
  The reduction in working hours came along with a proportionate reduction in income. My lifestyle is fairly modest, so I can handle it (no car, no children, no mortage). It has reduced my financial flexibility, for sure, but I think it was worth it. Quality of life is hard to quantify. ;-)

CosmicShadow 9y ago

I've always heard people say if you can get in 3 hours of good development work a day, that's pretty much the max and you should feel good about the day. So if I get that done, I feel accomplished. I do consulting work and can live that lifestyle, you just plan for it in the contract. I've found even when working on startup stuff I want to get done, if it's not just monotonous busy work style coding and requires thinking and planning, meanwhile the system is getting bigger and more complex, then yeah, you can only get done a good 2-3 hours of hard thinking work, then you are just braindead, and any more work just means fixing that shit work the next day, meaning you lose productivity. Maybe some people can push past this, maybe some people just think they can and don't recognize, but at least for some of us, that's just it. I ask my friends about this who work for a living and they agree and say you get 2-3 hours of good work in, the rest is fucking around, meetings, facebook, whatever. I'm not going to comment on non-dev work because I don't do it, and most of it probably doesn't apply to this, unless you are doing intense thinking. Most of the people reading this are probably devs or have hard thinking jobs.