4 ms·

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-psyc

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.
- mseebach 9y ago
  I'm not assuming that, I'm observing that the review doesn't reference any of them, and wondering why (just like when we'd read an article about how some super-successful startup founder owes his success to broccoli, we'd wonder what happened to all the broccoli-eaters who didn't end up as particularly successful). When you're recommending specific radical reform, it helps your argument to analyse specific implementation of said reform, rather than merely extrapolating from a cool research article and sprinkling a few historical anecdotes.
- valuearb 9y ago
  I can believe that people normally can't get as much done in the second 4 hours of their 8 hour day as they do in the first 4 hours. I can't believe that people can get as much done in 4 hours as they can in 8 hours. Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay. You can't change math, companies aren't going to get paid the same amount for making less stuff or providing less services. Maybe the difference is only 30-40% less instead of 50%, but I think most people are willing to put in the extra 4 hours for the additional benefits.
  - mcless 9y ago
    > Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay Where is the math that working for 4 hours produces less output than working for 8 hours? Also, like I said before I don't believe that less output == less revenue. Like I said, I have seen no correlation at all between working more number of hours, or producing more output and revenue. What I have seen though is a strong correlation between working on the right problems and revenue. You are free to believe what you want. Similarly, I am free to believe what I want based on my experience. As a result, I work for companies that don't have a culture where they believe that output is always directly proportional to number of hours spent. A company that believes working for 8 hours leads to more productivity and I may not be a good fit for each other.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Really? If you worked for 4 hours in a single day, there wouldn't be a single useful thing you could do for your company in the next 4 hours?
vacri 9y ago
Well, one issue is that any employee with customer contact generally has to be available for business hours. I can't imagine a sales or support issue being dealt with in the manner of "Sorry, you'll need to contact us between 10 and 2, except on Thursdays". Especially when you have 'clients' rather than 'customers' (~= people who generally expect some continuity in their contact points). You could argue for support to just 'simply' double the staff to cover the 8-hour day, but that has no handover time, and you also double the fixed per-employee training costs (both starting and ongoing training) and fixed HR/management costs.
- mseebach 9y ago
  The book specifically talks about intellectual and creative work, so it doesn't apply to customer service or any of a lot of other areas. The six-hours work day experiment in Sweden also doesn't apply (in this context, there are other interesting aspects to it) as it was for nurses etc.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Well my company kind of do that. It's not a hard rule but it's definitely something that we do.
ThomPete 9y ago
I think it comes down to what industry you are working in, who you are, what kind of projects you are doing etc. As I wrote elsewhere my company is having success along those lines (working 3 days a week) but we are also not cheap so that changes our option space quite a lot. The writers industry is a pretty shitty paid one unless you are famous so you really won't find many stories there. But if you take larger companies who already have a good business you often see that they are wasting quite a lot of their time being inefficient and working long hours doesn't change that.
- mseebach 9y ago
  The premise is that you are as productive, or even more, in four hours than you are in eight, so how well you're paid should be irrelevant. The fact that journalists often work crazy hours would imply that they can indeed produce more in more hours than they could in fewer hours. These big corps would love to eliminate their wastefulness, and if you could tell them how, you would be a very rich man. Simply observing wastefulness and then making the leap to "oh, let's just eliminate the waste and take the time off" is exactly the kind of "not adding up" I was referring to.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    You are assuming an awful lot of things here. First off all being more productive does not mean making more money or being more successful it just means higher output. Depending on who you are that can mean a lot of different things. For one if you spend all your time writing to make money you don't have time to necessarily get new work. I.e. there are diminishing returns on working more. Anyone who have done all nighters know this for a fact. If your mind is only occupied with one thing you don't get it in perspective and thus gets slowed down. So thats just one way to show why working more doesn't give you more. Second of all I would love if you didn't put words in my mouth. I simply observed that large companies DO have a lot of waste i.e. that people work a lot but do not necessarily get work done which is an indication that it's not just heresay. But you can go into a lot of organizations and see that how some teams spend a lot of time and get very little done while others get a lot done in no time. Sometimes it's because some projects are more difficult than others but plenty of time it's not. Has nothing to do with prescribing what companies should do simply that there is some merit that time spent != productivity or perhaps a better word is useful output. Thirdly TreeHouse did it this way. Doberman is doing it, and Google is to an extent doing it plus my company do it. Just because there isn't a lot of companies who do it doesn't mean they couldn't be just as you don't judge the feasibility of remote work based on the number of companies doing it. It's more complicated than that.

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.

mseebach 9y ago
I'm not assuming that, I'm observing that the review doesn't reference any of them, and wondering why (just like when we'd read an article about how some super-successful startup founder owes his success to broccoli, we'd wonder what happened to all the broccoli-eaters who didn't end up as particularly successful). When you're recommending specific radical reform, it helps your argument to analyse specific implementation of said reform, rather than merely extrapolating from a cool research article and sprinkling a few historical anecdotes.
valuearb 9y ago
I can believe that people normally can't get as much done in the second 4 hours of their 8 hour day as they do in the first 4 hours. I can't believe that people can get as much done in 4 hours as they can in 8 hours. Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay. You can't change math, companies aren't going to get paid the same amount for making less stuff or providing less services. Maybe the difference is only 30-40% less instead of 50%, but I think most people are willing to put in the extra 4 hours for the additional benefits.
- mcless 9y ago
  > Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay Where is the math that working for 4 hours produces less output than working for 8 hours? Also, like I said before I don't believe that less output == less revenue. Like I said, I have seen no correlation at all between working more number of hours, or producing more output and revenue. What I have seen though is a strong correlation between working on the right problems and revenue. You are free to believe what you want. Similarly, I am free to believe what I want based on my experience. As a result, I work for companies that don't have a culture where they believe that output is always directly proportional to number of hours spent. A company that believes working for 8 hours leads to more productivity and I may not be a good fit for each other.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Really? If you worked for 4 hours in a single day, there wouldn't be a single useful thing you could do for your company in the next 4 hours?

vacri 9y ago

Well, one issue is that any employee with customer contact generally has to be available for business hours. I can't imagine a sales or support issue being dealt with in the manner of "Sorry, you'll need to contact us between 10 and 2, except on Thursdays". Especially when you have 'clients' rather than 'customers' (~= people who generally expect some continuity in their contact points). You could argue for support to just 'simply' double the staff to cover the 8-hour day, but that has no handover time, and you also double the fixed per-employee training costs (both starting and ongoing training) and fixed HR/management costs.

mseebach 9y ago
The book specifically talks about intellectual and creative work, so it doesn't apply to customer service or any of a lot of other areas. The six-hours work day experiment in Sweden also doesn't apply (in this context, there are other interesting aspects to it) as it was for nurses etc.
ThomPete 9y ago
Well my company kind of do that. It's not a hard rule but it's definitely something that we do.

ThomPete 9y ago

I think it comes down to what industry you are working in, who you are, what kind of projects you are doing etc. As I wrote elsewhere my company is having success along those lines (working 3 days a week) but we are also not cheap so that changes our option space quite a lot. The writers industry is a pretty shitty paid one unless you are famous so you really won't find many stories there. But if you take larger companies who already have a good business you often see that they are wasting quite a lot of their time being inefficient and working long hours doesn't change that.

mseebach 9y ago
The premise is that you are as productive, or even more, in four hours than you are in eight, so how well you're paid should be irrelevant. The fact that journalists often work crazy hours would imply that they can indeed produce more in more hours than they could in fewer hours. These big corps would love to eliminate their wastefulness, and if you could tell them how, you would be a very rich man. Simply observing wastefulness and then making the leap to "oh, let's just eliminate the waste and take the time off" is exactly the kind of "not adding up" I was referring to.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  You are assuming an awful lot of things here. First off all being more productive does not mean making more money or being more successful it just means higher output. Depending on who you are that can mean a lot of different things. For one if you spend all your time writing to make money you don't have time to necessarily get new work. I.e. there are diminishing returns on working more. Anyone who have done all nighters know this for a fact. If your mind is only occupied with one thing you don't get it in perspective and thus gets slowed down. So thats just one way to show why working more doesn't give you more. Second of all I would love if you didn't put words in my mouth. I simply observed that large companies DO have a lot of waste i.e. that people work a lot but do not necessarily get work done which is an indication that it's not just heresay. But you can go into a lot of organizations and see that how some teams spend a lot of time and get very little done while others get a lot done in no time. Sometimes it's because some projects are more difficult than others but plenty of time it's not. Has nothing to do with prescribing what companies should do simply that there is some merit that time spent != productivity or perhaps a better word is useful output. Thirdly TreeHouse did it this way. Doberman is doing it, and Google is to an extent doing it plus my company do it. Just because there isn't a lot of companies who do it doesn't mean they couldn't be just as you don't judge the feasibility of remote work based on the number of companies doing it. It's more complicated than that.