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Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

635 points by uxhacker 8y ago

robertwiblin 8y ago
I took a proper look at this study and it didn't show what this article claims it showed: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15q3hdJI2SxDBcOsn2Cqk8bMgLRDV-mP3R5UOrhms5Bc/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/15q3hdJI2SxDBcOsn2Cqk8bMg...
uxhacker 8y ago
I wonder if the productivity is maintained as we can only think for so many hours a day. If you look at famous writers such as Hemingway they only worked for a few hours a day. So the question is how does this translate to work that has a less cognitive load ? Has anybody done experiments with programing and hours worked ?
- Trisell 8y ago
  I know that I feel like I really have around 4-5 good hours in me of serious deep contemplative programming a day. After that I either check out or find myself doing menial tasks that require no brain power for the rest of the day. If I do have a huge deadline and have to double or triple that in a day I find myself mentally wiped and kind of useless for several days there after.
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    Yes, from your point of view you got "4 hours" of real, valuable and productive work in you in any given day. But those nagging administrative tasks, status reports, talking to project management professionals in pro-forma meetings. THOSE are considered work and productivity for the people that set these up. There are job-roles for which meetings themselves are work-- while that might be a vision of hell for many of us, it is reality for layers of management and their minions. My concern with this concept of 4-day workweeks is that it will precipitate even more tracking of productivity and even more meetings to gauge progress at the organizations that are trying to convince themselves to switch. There's something to be said for having the slack to figure stuff out at work without being tracked constantly. A shorter work week is likely to increase "time scrutiny" for creative workers.
- snarf21 8y ago
  Plus your brain will crunch things in the background. How many time as a developer have you "solved" a problem you've been stuck on for hours or days while showering or traveling to work. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.
  - Brigadirk 8y ago
    I share your experience. But, I've recently read a book, The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater, a psychologist, wherein he argues that your brain does not crunch anything in the background, and only does what it focuses on. However, the situation you outlined still occurs because you can get stuck in a certain paradigm (e.g. "this name that I can't remember definitely starts with 's'"), which you effectively reset, in addition to simply returning re-energised. Still a good argument for breaks and less strenuous working hours.
    - jack_pp 8y ago
      There are times when you're not focusing on anything specific, hence why you get ideas / breakthroughs in the shower, or when looking out of the window of a train / car or just mindlessly walking, because you're not focusing on anything and your System1 can solve stuff. Though I feel that System1 can't work while System2 is focusing on other stuff like playing games or browsing social media so I don't think they're necessarily running in parallel.
    - jpfed 8y ago
      I call this the "attractor basin hypothesis" of problem solving- your mental state is in one attractor basin and you need to be in a different one; a break gives you another chance to enter the right one. If true, it may be possible to get the same benefit as taking a break and returning to the work by doing something that jolts you out of your current attractor basin. Maybe that just means asking the right question (c.f. oblique strategies).
      - Brigadirk 8y ago
        Interesting idea. I'm currently learning German, which is rather similar to my native Dutch. Yet I'm learning most of it through English, because that's simply the language people tend to use for instruction material. Every now and then when I'm doing English to German translation, I find myself puzzled and then have to remind myself "think about the Dutch word" only to then immediately understand/recall the German cognate. I'm sure someone talking to me in Dutch could have the same effect, and more broadly speaking, another 'attractor basin' may be activated by random chance, like the tired cliche of someone in a movie figuring out the 'case' as a result of their spouse or child mentioning something unrelated yet apparently analogous.
- Theodores 8y ago
  Programming is one of the few truly creative endeavours in the capitalist world. Every job has a creative aspect to it - if you cut hair or work in a nail bar then there is definitely scope for creative flair. In fact you can be creative even if you have the most mundane job in the world, however, in the bigger scheme of things nobody is going to listen to your song, read your book or buy your paintings but they will use your code. In answer to your question, DHH of Ruby on Rails fame used to write a lot about 37 Signals and Basecamp. They decided that the normal capitalist way of working was a load of rubbish and that they could get more out of people by making them work a lot less hours. The way our world works is a system, the capitalist system, and with it there are many things that go unquestioned. Employment is seen as good whereas in a parallel future that never happened there was this idea that we would all be working a mere handful of hours with the machines doing all the heavy lifting. We live in an era of bullshit jobs to maintain the system with something like 87% of people actually hating their job. In the conventional sense Hemingway did not have a job. As a programmer with many interesting problems to solve creatively there is no need to be part of the 87% and to be more like a Hemingway. The DHH's of this world do not hire the 87%.
- machiaweliczny 8y ago
  From my experience 6h is optimal/max in one sitting.
znq 8y ago
At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-existent (specific people that then ended up not staying very long in the company) and the advantages by far outweigh the "loss of control". In the end myself as a business owner and managers have far less stress by trusting people and empowering them to do great work. With this framework, people will take breaks whenever they feel like. They go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same. But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working. Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine. We also just released our company handbook which goes in a lot of detail on how we run a 20+ people remote business: * https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates) * https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-company-handbook.pdf https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF) EDIT: Added some more details
- xfitm3 8y ago
  Your handbook says you track work daily in Asana and have two stand ups. Along with an expectation to immediately respond to pings and vacation pre-approval is required. How does that fit into “work when you want”?
  - znq 8y ago
    With freedom, comes responsibility. There needs to be some communication and information/knowledge exchange, otherwise it's difficult to coordinate and synchronize in a team of 20 people. Therefore updating other people via Slack/Asana is the minimum anyone should do in my opinion. The two weekly stand-ups, one is actually work related (the team meeting) and people are encouraged to be there and not go surfing just during that specific hour and the other one is the MJ Weekly, where we just exchange personal and professional learnings for about 1 hour, which is a great way to get to know other people being a remote company. That said, making those things "required" is not that bad compared to requiring people sitting 8 hours in an office. Again, my personal opinion.
gexla 8y ago
How does the science on this compare to the science which got us the 40 hour work week? There seems to be a lot of anecdotes in the article. I'm not sure I could gauge my productivity well from one day to the next. There's too many variables. There's other people, luck, different issues, strengths, weaknesses, shrimp gumbo, BBQ shrimp, shrimp soup... I do know I give it my all during the week and I crash into the weekend. It's invigorating and exhausting at the same time. Getting over a rough week seems to take as long as getting over a bad hangover. Two days for sure, and sometimes I need a third.
- Voloskaya 8y ago
  What science got us the 40h work week? It seems to me we just went from making people work as much as humanly possible to less and less (to 40 today in the US) as workers got more power through unions. I don't think science was much involved here.
  - naasking 8y ago
    40h was first most widely implemented by Henry Ford, because of equal productivity with fewer mistakes than the 10-16 hour days that were then the norm. So there is some empirical evidence that it's better than more hours, and some empirical evidence that it's better than fewer hours in some cases, and plenty showing no change with fewer hours. The fairest characterisation is that there was considerable back and forth between legislation, unions and capitalists seeking better workers.
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      The 8-hour-workday and 5-day-workweek movements were largely independent in time, and while there was some overlap in terms of both implementation and in terms of the populations demanding them, they really came from different places. People first started getting into the 8-hour workday at the beginning of the 19th century, and it was largely driven by workers, tradesmen, and utopian communists who wanted life to consist of more than just working from the moment they woke to the moment they collapsed into sleep. "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours sleep" was the sort of slogan that went in to that. Working too much each day just sucks. The 5-day workweek was at the beginning of the 20th, and was much more tied into the Great Depression, automation, and managing employment as a civilization. While people have come to enjoy the quality-of-life improvements associated with the existence of a "weekend", it wasn't really the motivation for the shift so much as limiting the work done per worker to offset the decreased labor demand associated with increased productivity. (Although, practically speaking, a lot of the actual regulations that encourage employers to only work people 8 hours a day date/40 hours a week date to this time in the US.)
Proven 8y ago
Of course there is less stress. No cut in output? You gotta be kidding me. I would challenge anyone in the same role to compete against me with only 4 working days per week at their disposal vs. mine 6. I don't think I'd be laid off before them.
chapium 8y ago
I have a feeling this would vary depending on the person. Someone with big stressors outside of work may benefit from the shorter work week. Others may outperform them on a normal week. Just speculation.
decebalus1 8y ago
That's never going to happen. Regardless of what 'studies show'. If Jesus comes down from heaven and tells everyone we need to work less, it will still never happen. Was reading 'Bullshit jobs' by David Graeber and frankly I am starting to believe the conspiracy theory that there is an inherent interest of society to keep people busy as much as possible. Because if you give people more free time, don't keep them on their toes and stressed, they may start thinking about building guillotines.
- awakeasleep 8y ago
  I agree that Jesus stopping by and asking us wouldn't change this, but collective bargaining has already changed this in the past It's not impossible! It requires people working together.
- Nelkins 8y ago
  Don't know that I agree that it's "never going to happen." Will everyone switch to the four day week? Probably not. But experiments like this normalize the idea of it. I negotiated a four day week and examples like these definitely helped me make the case to my boss.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I was watching a video by Jeffrey Sachs a little while ago about sustainable development. He had some interesting charts that show if you add up all the figures in total we are working less than we ever have and there has been a consistent downward trend over recent years.
- epa 8y ago
  Alfred Chandler Jr notes in his book "the visible hand" how government jobs, or creation of busy work to employ people, is just 'hidden' unemployment. If they pay people to do a job that is not necessarily needed, they can provide 'welfare' via work-to-pay.
camelNotation 8y ago
It may be that they were simply paid less than optimal salaries before and increasing their wages per hour actually improved their productivity, incentivizing them to accomplish in 4 days what they previously accomplished in 5. It would be interesting to do a parallel test with the same groups, have a control group, have a 4 day group that keeps the same pay, and a 5 day group with a 20% pay increase.
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  It depends on the salary of the employee, and their personal goals. Personally, I find a 20% decrease in working hours is worth a lot more than a 25% increase in pay. The hourly wage remains the same, but getting a full day back per week is significantly more valuable than more money that I'm already not spending
  - camelNotation 8y ago
    I agree. I wish there were more jobs like that, where you could work 3-4 days, at the same rate per hour. Maybe if we solve for a lot of the additional per-worker costs around healthcare and such we would be able to see that emerge in the market.
Areading314 8y ago
This is a deeply flawed experiment. Of course the employees want a 4-day workweek, which is why they will work extra hard during the trial. I doubt this would be reproduced if employees were told the 4-day weeks were permanent no matter the outcome.
ribfeast 8y ago
We should switch, not because it raises or maintains productivity, but because it's the right thing to do. Framing the debate in terms of productivity plays into the hands of those who would maintain the status quo. If laborers were properly organized, we could dictate the 4-day or 3-day workweek,
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- combatentropy 8y ago
  > because it's the right thing to do On what principle? I had always thought that a job and its pay arose strictly from negotiation. But if you say one way is "right" and another isn't, that implies some reason that transcends anyone's preference.
printer0 8y ago
Business people should constantly be all over this, why do we have to wait decades for them to come up with anything remotely useful. All they do is invent more things for everyone to be miserable and for them to get a larger piece of the pie. Business degrees are shit, get your act together, looking at you Harvard, Yale et. al.
IshKebab 8y ago
I suspect this may only be true for jobs that have a lot of "busy work", which must be pretty common in a financial services company. There's no way I could get the same amount done in 4 days as in 5.
mettamage 8y ago
If I'm going to believe anything, I'd need a longitudinal study of about 5 years. I find 5 years to be a good hallmark to see whether something had an actual strong impact in my own life (e.g. regarding reading self-help books such as Search Inside Yourself [1] or Steve Pavlina's blog post on how to rock at university [2] -- sorry for being slightly off-topic but these two things changed my life). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-Achieving/dp/0062116932 https://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-Ach... [2] https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for-college-students/ https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for-colleg...
- btbuildem 8y ago
  Bit of a Catch-22 problem, don't you think?
  - mettamage 8y ago
    How? You experiment on something for 5 years and then report. In my case of reading books: you read books and 5 years later you know what stuck and reread it in order to get the full wisdom out of it. It helped that I studied for 8 years and reflected on these kind of things every year.
    - sideshowb 8y ago
      Because without some shorter term studies you might struggle to get enough employers on board for a sufficiently powered long term one.
      - mettamage 8y ago
        Good point. In my prior comments, I wasn't really looking at the pragmatic side of organizing studies.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Where did Steve Pavlina go to school? Not sure if some of those triaging strategies would have worked at U Chicago...
combatentropy 8y ago
This is not the first article about how people get the same amount of work done, even more, in four days instead of five. But another thing they have in common is that they never ask the question, what about three? Or what about two? One? Surely at zero, productivity will not match the old standard of 40 hours a week. But it seems like the next logical question to me. If employees are just as productive at 32 hours as 40, at what point does productivity fall? Maybe 32 just happens to be that breaking point. Or it might turn out to be 25 or even 15. But let's at least ask the question. I'm talking about averages, of course.
- data4science 8y ago
  Actually, Tim Ferris wrote a book called "The 4-Hour Workweek" with the goal of more people achieving the title. It is more oriented at breaking free of normal work habits than a scientific study of optimal productivity though.
  - paulryanrogers 8y ago
    The pills and books he sells to achieve his 4-hour work week make me suspicious of the methodology. Only so many can sell shovels to the gold miners before the market is saturated.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Something tells me Tim Ferris works a lot more than 4 hours a week himself.
    - jpttsn 8y ago
      His podcasts had him on for about six hours weekly iirc.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    I recall half of that book was about outsourcing your work. It’s only a 4-hour workweek for you. There’s still someone doing the work.
- 8y ago
jchanimal 8y ago
If you work more hours than you sleep, you are doing it wrong.
ipoopatwork 8y ago
Is there a real paper linked to this study? All I can find is this rubbish [1] which is a collection of info-graphics without any p-value. [1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3e9f3555b02cbca8b01aab/t/5c6639880d929730b229a363/1550203293110/Four-Day+Week+White+Paper+February+2019+final.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3e9f3555b02cbca8b01...
TicklishTiger 8y ago
The same might hold true for cutting down from 4 days to 3 days. Everytime we humans try something new, we are excited and energized. Since the average office worker is only productive 3 hours per day, there always is a lot of room for increasing output for some time.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is great, but 8 weeks is far too short to measure such fickle things.
lazyjones 8y ago
Obviously, even if the study is to believed, this won't work for all jobs (try callcenters or POS ...). Thorough studies would evaluate other models as well, like 6, 7 or 3-day weeks. As a former entrepreneur I can guarantee that my output would suffer greatly in a 4 day week, since I'd rediscover hobbies and other distractions.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Why wouldn’t it work for call centers? Just pay them for 4 days of work and hire More people.
  - frosted-flakes 8y ago
    Because work that call centre workers do can't be compressed. That means each person is working 32 hours each week (no gain in productivity), but still getting paid for 40. Whereas a computer programmer might still be able to complete 40 hours-worth of work in 32 hours by increasing productivity.
    - 1123581321 8y ago
      It depends on the work. A call center employee is paid for a mix of availability/responsiveness, and effectiveness on the call. Availability hours are lower effort and lower energy so can be stretched—-these are typically performed at lower levels of the call center tier structure. Effectiveness is most of the work at higher levels and in more sales-oriented call center/phone roles. Six hours of intense, non-stop problem solving and pitching on the phone is plenty and if there is some cost to allowing a less than good outcome on a call or opportunity, further hours can be detrimental and it may be better to have more people on shorter rotations.
    - b_tterc_p 8y ago
      I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hypothesize that while the quantity of work wouldn’t change, the quality would increase. I presume to pay for 32 hours if they work 32 hours.
StavrosK 8y ago
I've been working four-day workweeks for the past 4 years or so, and love it. I can't say I have the same output (nor would I want to, since I took a 20% pay cut for it). I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I don't think I'll be able to work 5-day weeks again. I tried it a few times and I found myself very unhappy, 5 days were too long and the weekend too short. The 4/3 split is ideal, four days isn't enough to get tired of work and a three-day weekend feels like ages. I can believe that there would be no cut in output if people said "okay we're going to get the same amount of tasks done, just in four days instead of five", so everyone would work 20% more each day. I don't know what side-effects that might have, but I don't find it impossible. However, it seems very unlikely to me that you'd work at the same rate for fewer days and still get the same done. I also don't know why people who work fewer days would increase their rate of work, but it's certainly plausible.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  The dirty open secret that seems to be implied whenever anyone writes about this is that no-one's actually working for those whole 40 hours, or even close. Basically, "work expands to fill the available time" (Parkinson's Law[0]). And there's only 30 or so hours' worth of actual expected work in a -- typical -- week. So, conclusion, drop the illusion and give people back the time that they'd otherwise be spending unproductively "on the clock". [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- analognoise 8y ago
  That schedule is called a 4-10 - 4, 10 hour work days, and every Friday off. 9/80 is that you work 9 hours a day, and every other Friday is off. They're both popular in defense and aerospace.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    So decreasing productivity even further, even though you could achieve the same amount of finished work with 4 8h days. Why?
ergothus 8y ago
I worked at a state govt job that allowed for 4 day weeks. Being govt, and with my manager in particular, time was closely managed. It worked, but it was HARD! The difference between an 8 hour day and a 10 hour day is having to find a second wind, on demand, 4 days in a row. Every time I would say I was going to drop, and then the three day weekend hit and I had time to get personal stuff done, time to relax without feeling like I had to prepare to start work again, and then I thought it was all worth it. Then the cycle would repeat. Now I'm in a tech job with far more flexibility. I think a similar schedule would still be hard: some 10 hour days are easy, but to do it on demand, repeatedly?
- cybwraith 8y ago
  > “We’ve been treated like adults and I think as a result everyone is behaving like adults,” said Tammy Barker, a branch manager who was part of the trial that cut the working week from from 37.5 hours to 30 I imagine most of these studies that pop up, like this one, are referring to an overall total hours cut, not just cramming 5 days worth of 'work time' into 4. 4x 10s can definitely be hard, though there are so many coding jobs out there that 'require' unpaid overtime easily pushing that to more like 5x 10s or even more.
- excalibur 8y ago
  When I was a young buck, my dream schedule was two 20s (that's a 20-hour shift, followed by a day off, followed by another 20-hour shift, followed by a 4-day weekend). That's not as appealing as it used to be, I seem to require more sleep these days. And my schedule has gotten pretty flexible, which I enjoy. But if I had to go back to something rigid, I'd still take four 10s over five 8s.
- stephen_g 8y ago
  The article is about dropping the hours to ~32 a week, not working 10 hour days to still do 40 hours in four days. Switching to 10 hour days would be a terrible idea - that’s just asking for burnout. Anyway, I find it really hard to believe more than a small percentage of workers would be able to be actually productive for even two thirds of the day when consistently working that long.
CedarHill 8y ago
Treehouse used to do 4/10s and from what I remember listening to Ryan Carson's podcast with Jason Calacanis, it didn't work out for them. So I don't think this should apply to every workplace. For more mature companies, it makes sense. For startups, I don't think so.
- moate 8y ago
  This isn't proposing 4/10s, it's 4/8s. Basically, you're probably just faffing about for 8 hours a week anyway, so do it at home instead of at work.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I'm not surprised that didn't work, your productivity is going to fall through the day as you become tired. After 10 hours it might well be negative.
- rsbrown 8y ago
  Treehouse’s abandonmnent of the 4-day work week suspiciously coincided with their taking on a Series B round of funding. I’m implying they were pressured to drop it by investors. This was followed by significant layoffs. Furthermore, no formal analysis was done of the Treehouse experience. Nothing conclusive can be inferred from the Treehouse experience until/unless they release data and a rigid analysis is done.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
b_tterc_p 8y ago
Talk of lower work hours doesn’t always come with clear expectations around pay. Ignoring the large fixed cost of providing healthcare, I bet companies would be more willing to drop hours from a schedule if compensation also dropped.
- ThaJay 8y ago
  "Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay."
  - b_tterc_p 8y ago
    That’s nice for perpetual guardian but I don’t see it happening as a mainstream movement without an incentive.
    - thirdsun 8y ago
      Sure, it will be a tough sell, but the incentive should be less stressed, healthy, happy employees that deliver the same productive output as their 5 day week counterparts. It's a competetve advantage on the job market for employers.
dalbasal 8y ago
"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done." The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impossible to measure. Some do. Customer support can be benchmarked (and prodctivity-pushed) But... customers support jobs don't lend to this 4d workweek thing. The jobs that do lend to it, don't lend to measurement. This difficulty can lead to all sorts of wierdness. Tyler Cowen claimed that office worker productivity has not been (measurably) increased by office computerization. IE, going from secretaries, fax and typwriters to Google docs hasn't produced any economic gains. Strange claim. Difficult to measure. David Graeber (anarchist that reckons most office work is pointless busy-work) quotes the same stat this white paper quotes, people spend about 2/8 hrs working and the rest procrastinating on social media. Measurement is also not incidental here. Measurablity changes everything. Once an employees job productivity is measurable, it can be optimized and already has been. It's a Shrodinger's product evangalist problem... That said, I like the jist.Lets shorten the workweek. Science-wise... well...
- have_faith 8y ago
  If my job was easy to measure I would be paid on my outcomes instead of being paid to be at work. If I was being paid for my outcomes I would manage my time entirely differently and would find ways of being more productive than I already am so that I could work less hours. I think this is a hard pill for people's bosses to swallow, that their employees do have the capacity to be more productive but they won't because we're being paid to be at work and so incentives are not aligned. My boss is very happy with my productivity and I am very productive. I don't think he could conceive of me being any more productive. But I know that if I could arrange my own days and hours I would be more productive. But this would be inconvenient to him and so he would likely rather have me predictably available than fully optimised. Which is an understandable tradeoff if frustrating from a personal perspective as you feel as though you're wasting time. It's just that your wasted time is actually valuable to someone and that's hard to grasp intuitively.
tomjohnneill 8y ago
I definitely want to believe this is a good measure of the impact of moving to a four day week. However, I wonder if this is an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect. Maybe people are being more productive each day because they're aware that the company is going to be measuring their productivity.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Good point. And/or a novelty effect. As another comment asked, a long-term study is probably required.
- notahacker 8y ago
  There's also the "do work on the day off because it's a week day and people still expect a quick reply" habit people in customer facing roles (which sounds like quite a lot of Perpetual's staff) will be tied to. I took a four day week for six month in a regular corporate sales job because it was the most practical way of using my holiday entitlement without losing sales and contact with customers in a tough market, and sure, it didn't really affect my weekly productivity, but that's because I never made many important outbound calls on a Friday and still dealt with all the customer email on my Blackberry anyway, so all I was really missing out on were internal meetings...
DigiMortal 8y ago
I could do my job in 2 of the 5 workdays (I need a new job) I spend time learning, reading, etc at work
nemesisj 8y ago
We work a 4 Day, 32 hour week, and have done so since 2015. During that time, our team grew from a small office of ~20 in Edinburgh to where we are today (3 offices in Edinburgh Scotland, Bozeman USA, and Beirut Lebanon) with about 80 people. We have consistently been one of the fastest growing tech companies in Scotland (and in the UK). When we implemented the 4 day policy, we didn’t change our financial targets, or our team metrics. Instead, we explained it was an experiment that we wanted to run, and we believed that by being more efficient and more intentional about how we worked, we could still achieve our goals. Turned out that was true. Our motivation was primarily work/life balance, but also the realisation that most startups take 10-15 years to get to where they want to go, and we have a long journey ahead of us! It’s a marathon, not a sprint. We still pay a 5 day wage, and we actually “buy” all 5 days, because we wanted to make sure that team members weren’t tempted to moonlight on the 5th day. Overall I think it’s been a really great thing for our team, and perhaps most importantly, I think we’ve proved that ambitious goals, hard work, and a strong drive to succeed is not at odds with a 4 day week. Over the last few years we’ve spent probably hundreds of hours talking with various organisations and the media about the benefits of the 4 day week, and I’m hopeful it’ll continue to catch on more and more.
- williamdclt 8y ago
  1. how did you start the experiment? Did you apply it to everybody from the start or did you run it on a small sample? 2. What do you mean "buy all 5 days" and "moonlight on the 5th day"? (not a native speaker)
  - nemesisj 8y ago
    Good questions! 1. We started by doing some research, actually - I spent some time finding studies that supported my thesis that productivity would go up (thus making sure our output would stay the same, more or less). Then I discussed with our management team, who thought I was nuts, but was supportive. Then I presented it to our board, who was also supportive. We applied it to everyone at the start, but some teams took a bit longer to get it implemented, as one of our criteria was he had to maintain 5 day coverage for our customers (ie, some have Mondays off, some have Fridays, etc.). To this day we leave the coverage patterns and rotations up to each team/department to decide. 2. In our contracts, we are paying you for 40 hours of work, 5 days a week, but we give you one of them back. Moonlighting meaning working for another company "on the side".
moeamaya 8y ago
Of all industries, you would think software companies would use some of the efficiency gains and insane profit margins to work less? This is the logic we have at Monograph (hiring engineers btw) and we've had 4 day 32-hour work weeks for over three years now. One engineer on the team likes to take Wednesdays off which we affectionately call the "mid-weekend". If you have more interest HuffPo and Lynne from Key Values wrote a bit about or working style: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-overwork-life-balance_us_5c360351e4b0f5aba7da3d5a https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-o... https://www.keyvalues.com/monograph https://www.keyvalues.com/monograph
maxxxxx 8y ago
When I worked in Germany we had a union mandated 35 hour week with no option for overtime. One thing I noticed was that back then most people actually worked most of their hours at the office and decisions were made rather quickly and decisively. Now I work with no set time limit and I feel that a lot of people are wasting time with going over the same thing multiple times, hesitating in making decisions and calling huge meetings that achieve nothing. I feel that part of it is that by working less people are fresher and think clearer. Whenever I worked 50+ hours per week for longer time I was more in a foggy state and couldn't think clearly. Also, by limiting working hours management needs to be decisive and conscious of wasting people's times with unnecessary stuff.
- mtberatwork 8y ago
  I think a big difference between the American work mentality and the Euro work mentality is that Americans often seem to relish the "I'm too busy for everything" state of mind (as if it were a badge of honor). Unfortunately, it will take huge macro-level behavioral changes to undo that kind of damage.
tzs 8y ago
I've been on a four day work week for quite a while, working Monday through Thursday [1]. It definitely makes the off days better. • If it has been a rough week at work, I can spend all day Friday relaxing, and still have a full two weekend days for my interests and hobbies. • I can do things on Friday, such as shopping, that most others have to do on the weekend, thus avoiding the weekend crowds. • With three days to work on personal projects, I can do a day of getting things going and getting productive, a day of good in the zone work, and then a day of picking a good stopping point and reaching that and setting things up for resumption next week. With a conventional two day weekend, it's that in the zone time that loses. • Three days is long enough that by Monday I'm ready and want to get back to my job. I find the lower stress thing quite plausible based on the above. It's enough time to do my stuff without it feeling rushed, meaning my relaxing things can actually be relaxing. A two day weekend is more likely to result in the classic stressing out over trying to relax. I also find the no cut in work output plausible, because of the lower stress thing. Stress should lower productivity. If your weekend is not lowering stress as much as it could, you are going to be less productive than you could be. If three days off lowers stress more, you productivity rate should be higher back at work. But a three day weekend means a shorter work week. So we have one effect trying to raise output and one trying to lower it. Given the fuzziness of productivity measures, I'm not surprised by a finding of no change in output. [1] I started taking every other Friday as a vacation day, because I had so much accumulated vacation that I had hit my employer's accumulation limit. Later, when the big recession hit the company needed to reduce expenses to avoid layoffs, and I offered to take a 5% pay cut in exchange for every other Friday off, which when combined with the every other Friday vacation gave me a four day week.
GordonS 8y ago
I switched to a 4 day working week a couple of years ago, and took a 20% pay cut in the process. I'm certain that I don't actually produce any less than I did when working 5 days, and my stress levels are definitely lower. All in all, the company got a pretty good deal, since I now have the same output, but get paid less!
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  You should ask for a raise based on the value you’re providing, and get your comp back up to where it was before.
motohagiography 8y ago
It really seems to depend on the company stage. If the answer to, "did you do everything you could?" is, "well, we could have put %20 more time and effort into it with no additional cash burn," I could see how that could be interpreted as negligence from a fiduciary perspective. On the other hand, %20 less office time could be an honest signal that you are taking risks commensurate with the return level your investors are looking for. If as a founder or leader, you are careful and incremental, I don't think that's what investors put money into VC funds for. The number of stories I read here and elsewhere about investors saying, "I don't want this money back, I want a huge return or nothing, because I don't want to learn I put it behind someone who wasn't committed enough to fail hard." Investors aren't paying you and your team to work, they are paying for the privilege of getting a piece of a massive outcome. You achieve the outcome they want exposure to the best way you know how, and if imposing a risk constraint like %20 less office time does it, great. In this view, you are not their employee, you are their dealer. I could see how it would be hard to persuade investors you were working in their best interest with an attitude like that, but on the other hand, it could be one that is necessary to enable the best possible outcome. It sounds crazy, but the investors themselves are the correlation factor in their portfolio, and the point of putting money into a diversified portfolio of startups is to hedge that correlation, so the more opinionated the investor is about your office culture or other aspects of the business, it's likely the worse they are going to do. No clear answer, but really interesting question.
arcaster 8y ago
doing work != measurable output Not to mention that the definition of what work, productivity or deliverables is varies vastly from company to company or industry to industry. Not working for an entire day per week or having sporadic / limited hours of operation could also end up being a huge pain for a client or anyone not in your company you may be working with. I'm definitely a proponent of the sentiment of this article, however, I can confirm that working with a remote team in another country where nobody seemed to work more than 25hrs per week on their technical team was annoying as hell. Not only did this make solving problems harder, they also had notably lower productivity and output of meaningful contributions...
FrankyHollywood 8y ago
Seems a bit to good to be true... working 20% less, and still have 'increased productivity'? I myself work 4 days a week, which I really enjoy. However, sometimes with a major bug I make extra hours, the work has to get done! You can do more in 6 days than in 4. For that sake, how much further can you push it, can you increase productivity 20% by working 3 days instead of 4?
therealforsen 8y ago
I wonder what the lowest limit on work-time is for productivity. That would be interesting to know. Also, companies could only pay people for that many hours.
ArtDev 8y ago
Just make a mandatory 5 weeks a year. "Unlimited" PTO is a gimmick.
ThomPete 8y ago
The hawthorne effect should be factored in here. I am a proponent of 4 day weeks but depends on the situation industry etc.
deleted 8y ago
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iaintrobot 8y ago
Well no flamin’ poo. Why do we need study after study that tells that we’re living beings that shouldn’t be consigned to a cage of guilt and shame. This is stupid. We know what feels good or not, but our barbaric system divorces our natural function from our consciousness - starting in childhood. Worst part is that we see that we have power to shape the world, but nobody believes that with same power comes the ability to create a comfortable environment for everybody where they can operate without guilt or shame or fear. What a monstrous machine we’ve created for ourselves. Love y’all. Peace out.
xiaodai 8y ago
that's cos they are slacking off anyway...
xiaodai 8y ago
written by a journalist who only wants to work four-day week.

635 points by uxhacker 8y ago

I took a proper look at this study and it didn't show what this article claims it showed: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15q3hdJI2SxDBcOsn2Cqk8bMgLRDV-mP3R5UOrhms5Bc/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/15q3hdJI2SxDBcOsn2Cqk8bMg...

uxhacker 8y ago

I wonder if the productivity is maintained as we can only think for so many hours a day. If you look at famous writers such as Hemingway they only worked for a few hours a day. So the question is how does this translate to work that has a less cognitive load ? Has anybody done experiments with programing and hours worked ?

Trisell 8y ago
I know that I feel like I really have around 4-5 good hours in me of serious deep contemplative programming a day. After that I either check out or find myself doing menial tasks that require no brain power for the rest of the day. If I do have a huge deadline and have to double or triple that in a day I find myself mentally wiped and kind of useless for several days there after.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  Yes, from your point of view you got "4 hours" of real, valuable and productive work in you in any given day. But those nagging administrative tasks, status reports, talking to project management professionals in pro-forma meetings. THOSE are considered work and productivity for the people that set these up. There are job-roles for which meetings themselves are work-- while that might be a vision of hell for many of us, it is reality for layers of management and their minions. My concern with this concept of 4-day workweeks is that it will precipitate even more tracking of productivity and even more meetings to gauge progress at the organizations that are trying to convince themselves to switch. There's something to be said for having the slack to figure stuff out at work without being tracked constantly. A shorter work week is likely to increase "time scrutiny" for creative workers.
snarf21 8y ago
Plus your brain will crunch things in the background. How many time as a developer have you "solved" a problem you've been stuck on for hours or days while showering or traveling to work. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.
- Brigadirk 8y ago
  I share your experience. But, I've recently read a book, The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater, a psychologist, wherein he argues that your brain does not crunch anything in the background, and only does what it focuses on. However, the situation you outlined still occurs because you can get stuck in a certain paradigm (e.g. "this name that I can't remember definitely starts with 's'"), which you effectively reset, in addition to simply returning re-energised. Still a good argument for breaks and less strenuous working hours.
  - jack_pp 8y ago
    There are times when you're not focusing on anything specific, hence why you get ideas / breakthroughs in the shower, or when looking out of the window of a train / car or just mindlessly walking, because you're not focusing on anything and your System1 can solve stuff. Though I feel that System1 can't work while System2 is focusing on other stuff like playing games or browsing social media so I don't think they're necessarily running in parallel.
  - jpfed 8y ago
    I call this the "attractor basin hypothesis" of problem solving- your mental state is in one attractor basin and you need to be in a different one; a break gives you another chance to enter the right one. If true, it may be possible to get the same benefit as taking a break and returning to the work by doing something that jolts you out of your current attractor basin. Maybe that just means asking the right question (c.f. oblique strategies).
    - Brigadirk 8y ago
      Interesting idea. I'm currently learning German, which is rather similar to my native Dutch. Yet I'm learning most of it through English, because that's simply the language people tend to use for instruction material. Every now and then when I'm doing English to German translation, I find myself puzzled and then have to remind myself "think about the Dutch word" only to then immediately understand/recall the German cognate. I'm sure someone talking to me in Dutch could have the same effect, and more broadly speaking, another 'attractor basin' may be activated by random chance, like the tired cliche of someone in a movie figuring out the 'case' as a result of their spouse or child mentioning something unrelated yet apparently analogous.
Theodores 8y ago
Programming is one of the few truly creative endeavours in the capitalist world. Every job has a creative aspect to it - if you cut hair or work in a nail bar then there is definitely scope for creative flair. In fact you can be creative even if you have the most mundane job in the world, however, in the bigger scheme of things nobody is going to listen to your song, read your book or buy your paintings but they will use your code. In answer to your question, DHH of Ruby on Rails fame used to write a lot about 37 Signals and Basecamp. They decided that the normal capitalist way of working was a load of rubbish and that they could get more out of people by making them work a lot less hours. The way our world works is a system, the capitalist system, and with it there are many things that go unquestioned. Employment is seen as good whereas in a parallel future that never happened there was this idea that we would all be working a mere handful of hours with the machines doing all the heavy lifting. We live in an era of bullshit jobs to maintain the system with something like 87% of people actually hating their job. In the conventional sense Hemingway did not have a job. As a programmer with many interesting problems to solve creatively there is no need to be part of the 87% and to be more like a Hemingway. The DHH's of this world do not hire the 87%.
machiaweliczny 8y ago
From my experience 6h is optimal/max in one sitting.

znq 8y ago

At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-existent (specific people that then ended up not staying very long in the company) and the advantages by far outweigh the "loss of control". In the end myself as a business owner and managers have far less stress by trusting people and empowering them to do great work. With this framework, people will take breaks whenever they feel like. They go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same. But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working. Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine. We also just released our company handbook which goes in a lot of detail on how we run a 20+ people remote business: * https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates) * https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-company-handbook.pdf https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF) EDIT: Added some more details

xfitm3 8y ago
Your handbook says you track work daily in Asana and have two stand ups. Along with an expectation to immediately respond to pings and vacation pre-approval is required. How does that fit into “work when you want”?
- znq 8y ago
  With freedom, comes responsibility. There needs to be some communication and information/knowledge exchange, otherwise it's difficult to coordinate and synchronize in a team of 20 people. Therefore updating other people via Slack/Asana is the minimum anyone should do in my opinion. The two weekly stand-ups, one is actually work related (the team meeting) and people are encouraged to be there and not go surfing just during that specific hour and the other one is the MJ Weekly, where we just exchange personal and professional learnings for about 1 hour, which is a great way to get to know other people being a remote company. That said, making those things "required" is not that bad compared to requiring people sitting 8 hours in an office. Again, my personal opinion.

gexla 8y ago

How does the science on this compare to the science which got us the 40 hour work week? There seems to be a lot of anecdotes in the article. I'm not sure I could gauge my productivity well from one day to the next. There's too many variables. There's other people, luck, different issues, strengths, weaknesses, shrimp gumbo, BBQ shrimp, shrimp soup... I do know I give it my all during the week and I crash into the weekend. It's invigorating and exhausting at the same time. Getting over a rough week seems to take as long as getting over a bad hangover. Two days for sure, and sometimes I need a third.

Voloskaya 8y ago
What science got us the 40h work week? It seems to me we just went from making people work as much as humanly possible to less and less (to 40 today in the US) as workers got more power through unions. I don't think science was much involved here.
- naasking 8y ago
  40h was first most widely implemented by Henry Ford, because of equal productivity with fewer mistakes than the 10-16 hour days that were then the norm. So there is some empirical evidence that it's better than more hours, and some empirical evidence that it's better than fewer hours in some cases, and plenty showing no change with fewer hours. The fairest characterisation is that there was considerable back and forth between legislation, unions and capitalists seeking better workers.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    The 8-hour-workday and 5-day-workweek movements were largely independent in time, and while there was some overlap in terms of both implementation and in terms of the populations demanding them, they really came from different places. People first started getting into the 8-hour workday at the beginning of the 19th century, and it was largely driven by workers, tradesmen, and utopian communists who wanted life to consist of more than just working from the moment they woke to the moment they collapsed into sleep. "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours sleep" was the sort of slogan that went in to that. Working too much each day just sucks. The 5-day workweek was at the beginning of the 20th, and was much more tied into the Great Depression, automation, and managing employment as a civilization. While people have come to enjoy the quality-of-life improvements associated with the existence of a "weekend", it wasn't really the motivation for the shift so much as limiting the work done per worker to offset the decreased labor demand associated with increased productivity. (Although, practically speaking, a lot of the actual regulations that encourage employers to only work people 8 hours a day date/40 hours a week date to this time in the US.)

Proven 8y ago

Of course there is less stress. No cut in output? You gotta be kidding me. I would challenge anyone in the same role to compete against me with only 4 working days per week at their disposal vs. mine 6. I don't think I'd be laid off before them.

chapium 8y ago

I have a feeling this would vary depending on the person. Someone with big stressors outside of work may benefit from the shorter work week. Others may outperform them on a normal week. Just speculation.

decebalus1 8y ago

That's never going to happen. Regardless of what 'studies show'. If Jesus comes down from heaven and tells everyone we need to work less, it will still never happen. Was reading 'Bullshit jobs' by David Graeber and frankly I am starting to believe the conspiracy theory that there is an inherent interest of society to keep people busy as much as possible. Because if you give people more free time, don't keep them on their toes and stressed, they may start thinking about building guillotines.

awakeasleep 8y ago
I agree that Jesus stopping by and asking us wouldn't change this, but collective bargaining has already changed this in the past It's not impossible! It requires people working together.
Nelkins 8y ago
Don't know that I agree that it's "never going to happen." Will everyone switch to the four day week? Probably not. But experiments like this normalize the idea of it. I negotiated a four day week and examples like these definitely helped me make the case to my boss.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
I was watching a video by Jeffrey Sachs a little while ago about sustainable development. He had some interesting charts that show if you add up all the figures in total we are working less than we ever have and there has been a consistent downward trend over recent years.
epa 8y ago
Alfred Chandler Jr notes in his book "the visible hand" how government jobs, or creation of busy work to employ people, is just 'hidden' unemployment. If they pay people to do a job that is not necessarily needed, they can provide 'welfare' via work-to-pay.

camelNotation 8y ago

It may be that they were simply paid less than optimal salaries before and increasing their wages per hour actually improved their productivity, incentivizing them to accomplish in 4 days what they previously accomplished in 5. It would be interesting to do a parallel test with the same groups, have a control group, have a 4 day group that keeps the same pay, and a 5 day group with a 20% pay increase.

oarsinsync 8y ago
It depends on the salary of the employee, and their personal goals. Personally, I find a 20% decrease in working hours is worth a lot more than a 25% increase in pay. The hourly wage remains the same, but getting a full day back per week is significantly more valuable than more money that I'm already not spending
- camelNotation 8y ago
  I agree. I wish there were more jobs like that, where you could work 3-4 days, at the same rate per hour. Maybe if we solve for a lot of the additional per-worker costs around healthcare and such we would be able to see that emerge in the market.

Areading314 8y ago

This is a deeply flawed experiment. Of course the employees want a 4-day workweek, which is why they will work extra hard during the trial. I doubt this would be reproduced if employees were told the 4-day weeks were permanent no matter the outcome.

ribfeast 8y ago

We should switch, not because it raises or maintains productivity, but because it's the right thing to do. Framing the debate in terms of productivity plays into the hands of those who would maintain the status quo. If laborers were properly organized, we could dictate the 4-day or 3-day workweek,

deleted 8y ago
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combatentropy 8y ago
> because it's the right thing to do On what principle? I had always thought that a job and its pay arose strictly from negotiation. But if you say one way is "right" and another isn't, that implies some reason that transcends anyone's preference.

printer0 8y ago

Business people should constantly be all over this, why do we have to wait decades for them to come up with anything remotely useful. All they do is invent more things for everyone to be miserable and for them to get a larger piece of the pie. Business degrees are shit, get your act together, looking at you Harvard, Yale et. al.

IshKebab 8y ago

I suspect this may only be true for jobs that have a lot of "busy work", which must be pretty common in a financial services company. There's no way I could get the same amount done in 4 days as in 5.

mettamage 8y ago

If I'm going to believe anything, I'd need a longitudinal study of about 5 years. I find 5 years to be a good hallmark to see whether something had an actual strong impact in my own life (e.g. regarding reading self-help books such as Search Inside Yourself [1] or Steve Pavlina's blog post on how to rock at university [2] -- sorry for being slightly off-topic but these two things changed my life). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-Achieving/dp/0062116932 https://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-Ach... [2] https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for-college-students/ https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for-colleg...

btbuildem 8y ago
Bit of a Catch-22 problem, don't you think?
- mettamage 8y ago
  How? You experiment on something for 5 years and then report. In my case of reading books: you read books and 5 years later you know what stuck and reread it in order to get the full wisdom out of it. It helped that I studied for 8 years and reflected on these kind of things every year.
  - sideshowb 8y ago
    Because without some shorter term studies you might struggle to get enough employers on board for a sufficiently powered long term one.
    - mettamage 8y ago
      Good point. In my prior comments, I wasn't really looking at the pragmatic side of organizing studies.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Where did Steve Pavlina go to school? Not sure if some of those triaging strategies would have worked at U Chicago...

combatentropy 8y ago

This is not the first article about how people get the same amount of work done, even more, in four days instead of five. But another thing they have in common is that they never ask the question, what about three? Or what about two? One? Surely at zero, productivity will not match the old standard of 40 hours a week. But it seems like the next logical question to me. If employees are just as productive at 32 hours as 40, at what point does productivity fall? Maybe 32 just happens to be that breaking point. Or it might turn out to be 25 or even 15. But let's at least ask the question. I'm talking about averages, of course.

data4science 8y ago
Actually, Tim Ferris wrote a book called "The 4-Hour Workweek" with the goal of more people achieving the title. It is more oriented at breaking free of normal work habits than a scientific study of optimal productivity though.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  The pills and books he sells to achieve his 4-hour work week make me suspicious of the methodology. Only so many can sell shovels to the gold miners before the market is saturated.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Something tells me Tim Ferris works a lot more than 4 hours a week himself.
  - jpttsn 8y ago
    His podcasts had him on for about six hours weekly iirc.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I recall half of that book was about outsourcing your work. It’s only a 4-hour workweek for you. There’s still someone doing the work.
8y ago

jchanimal 8y ago

If you work more hours than you sleep, you are doing it wrong.

ipoopatwork 8y ago

Is there a real paper linked to this study? All I can find is this rubbish [1] which is a collection of info-graphics without any p-value. [1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3e9f3555b02cbca8b01aab/t/5c6639880d929730b229a363/1550203293110/Four-Day+Week+White+Paper+February+2019+final.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3e9f3555b02cbca8b01...

TicklishTiger 8y ago

The same might hold true for cutting down from 4 days to 3 days. Everytime we humans try something new, we are excited and energized. Since the average office worker is only productive 3 hours per day, there always is a lot of room for increasing output for some time.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

This is great, but 8 weeks is far too short to measure such fickle things.

lazyjones 8y ago

Obviously, even if the study is to believed, this won't work for all jobs (try callcenters or POS ...). Thorough studies would evaluate other models as well, like 6, 7 or 3-day weeks. As a former entrepreneur I can guarantee that my output would suffer greatly in a 4 day week, since I'd rediscover hobbies and other distractions.

b_tterc_p 8y ago
Why wouldn’t it work for call centers? Just pay them for 4 days of work and hire More people.
- frosted-flakes 8y ago
  Because work that call centre workers do can't be compressed. That means each person is working 32 hours each week (no gain in productivity), but still getting paid for 40. Whereas a computer programmer might still be able to complete 40 hours-worth of work in 32 hours by increasing productivity.
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    It depends on the work. A call center employee is paid for a mix of availability/responsiveness, and effectiveness on the call. Availability hours are lower effort and lower energy so can be stretched—-these are typically performed at lower levels of the call center tier structure. Effectiveness is most of the work at higher levels and in more sales-oriented call center/phone roles. Six hours of intense, non-stop problem solving and pitching on the phone is plenty and if there is some cost to allowing a less than good outcome on a call or opportunity, further hours can be detrimental and it may be better to have more people on shorter rotations.
  - b_tterc_p 8y ago
    I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hypothesize that while the quantity of work wouldn’t change, the quality would increase. I presume to pay for 32 hours if they work 32 hours.

StavrosK 8y ago

I've been working four-day workweeks for the past 4 years or so, and love it. I can't say I have the same output (nor would I want to, since I took a 20% pay cut for it). I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I don't think I'll be able to work 5-day weeks again. I tried it a few times and I found myself very unhappy, 5 days were too long and the weekend too short. The 4/3 split is ideal, four days isn't enough to get tired of work and a three-day weekend feels like ages. I can believe that there would be no cut in output if people said "okay we're going to get the same amount of tasks done, just in four days instead of five", so everyone would work 20% more each day. I don't know what side-effects that might have, but I don't find it impossible. However, it seems very unlikely to me that you'd work at the same rate for fewer days and still get the same done. I also don't know why people who work fewer days would increase their rate of work, but it's certainly plausible.

wool_gather 8y ago
The dirty open secret that seems to be implied whenever anyone writes about this is that no-one's actually working for those whole 40 hours, or even close. Basically, "work expands to fill the available time" (Parkinson's Law[0]). And there's only 30 or so hours' worth of actual expected work in a -- typical -- week. So, conclusion, drop the illusion and give people back the time that they'd otherwise be spending unproductively "on the clock". [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
analognoise 8y ago
That schedule is called a 4-10 - 4, 10 hour work days, and every Friday off. 9/80 is that you work 9 hours a day, and every other Friday is off. They're both popular in defense and aerospace.
- thecatspaw 8y ago
  So decreasing productivity even further, even though you could achieve the same amount of finished work with 4 8h days. Why?

ergothus 8y ago

I worked at a state govt job that allowed for 4 day weeks. Being govt, and with my manager in particular, time was closely managed. It worked, but it was HARD! The difference between an 8 hour day and a 10 hour day is having to find a second wind, on demand, 4 days in a row. Every time I would say I was going to drop, and then the three day weekend hit and I had time to get personal stuff done, time to relax without feeling like I had to prepare to start work again, and then I thought it was all worth it. Then the cycle would repeat. Now I'm in a tech job with far more flexibility. I think a similar schedule would still be hard: some 10 hour days are easy, but to do it on demand, repeatedly?

cybwraith 8y ago
> “We’ve been treated like adults and I think as a result everyone is behaving like adults,” said Tammy Barker, a branch manager who was part of the trial that cut the working week from from 37.5 hours to 30 I imagine most of these studies that pop up, like this one, are referring to an overall total hours cut, not just cramming 5 days worth of 'work time' into 4. 4x 10s can definitely be hard, though there are so many coding jobs out there that 'require' unpaid overtime easily pushing that to more like 5x 10s or even more.
excalibur 8y ago
When I was a young buck, my dream schedule was two 20s (that's a 20-hour shift, followed by a day off, followed by another 20-hour shift, followed by a 4-day weekend). That's not as appealing as it used to be, I seem to require more sleep these days. And my schedule has gotten pretty flexible, which I enjoy. But if I had to go back to something rigid, I'd still take four 10s over five 8s.
stephen_g 8y ago
The article is about dropping the hours to ~32 a week, not working 10 hour days to still do 40 hours in four days. Switching to 10 hour days would be a terrible idea - that’s just asking for burnout. Anyway, I find it really hard to believe more than a small percentage of workers would be able to be actually productive for even two thirds of the day when consistently working that long.

CedarHill 8y ago

Treehouse used to do 4/10s and from what I remember listening to Ryan Carson's podcast with Jason Calacanis, it didn't work out for them. So I don't think this should apply to every workplace. For more mature companies, it makes sense. For startups, I don't think so.

moate 8y ago
This isn't proposing 4/10s, it's 4/8s. Basically, you're probably just faffing about for 8 hours a week anyway, so do it at home instead of at work.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
I'm not surprised that didn't work, your productivity is going to fall through the day as you become tired. After 10 hours it might well be negative.
rsbrown 8y ago
Treehouse’s abandonmnent of the 4-day work week suspiciously coincided with their taking on a Series B round of funding. I’m implying they were pressured to drop it by investors. This was followed by significant layoffs. Furthermore, no formal analysis was done of the Treehouse experience. Nothing conclusive can be inferred from the Treehouse experience until/unless they release data and a rigid analysis is done.

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b_tterc_p 8y ago

Talk of lower work hours doesn’t always come with clear expectations around pay. Ignoring the large fixed cost of providing healthcare, I bet companies would be more willing to drop hours from a schedule if compensation also dropped.

ThaJay 8y ago
"Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay."
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  That’s nice for perpetual guardian but I don’t see it happening as a mainstream movement without an incentive.
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    Sure, it will be a tough sell, but the incentive should be less stressed, healthy, happy employees that deliver the same productive output as their 5 day week counterparts. It's a competetve advantage on the job market for employers.

dalbasal 8y ago

"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done." The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impossible to measure. Some do. Customer support can be benchmarked (and prodctivity-pushed) But... customers support jobs don't lend to this 4d workweek thing. The jobs that do lend to it, don't lend to measurement. This difficulty can lead to all sorts of wierdness. Tyler Cowen claimed that office worker productivity has not been (measurably) increased by office computerization. IE, going from secretaries, fax and typwriters to Google docs hasn't produced any economic gains. Strange claim. Difficult to measure. David Graeber (anarchist that reckons most office work is pointless busy-work) quotes the same stat this white paper quotes, people spend about 2/8 hrs working and the rest procrastinating on social media. Measurement is also not incidental here. Measurablity changes everything. Once an employees job productivity is measurable, it can be optimized and already has been. It's a Shrodinger's product evangalist problem... That said, I like the jist.Lets shorten the workweek. Science-wise... well...

have_faith 8y ago
If my job was easy to measure I would be paid on my outcomes instead of being paid to be at work. If I was being paid for my outcomes I would manage my time entirely differently and would find ways of being more productive than I already am so that I could work less hours. I think this is a hard pill for people's bosses to swallow, that their employees do have the capacity to be more productive but they won't because we're being paid to be at work and so incentives are not aligned. My boss is very happy with my productivity and I am very productive. I don't think he could conceive of me being any more productive. But I know that if I could arrange my own days and hours I would be more productive. But this would be inconvenient to him and so he would likely rather have me predictably available than fully optimised. Which is an understandable tradeoff if frustrating from a personal perspective as you feel as though you're wasting time. It's just that your wasted time is actually valuable to someone and that's hard to grasp intuitively.

tomjohnneill 8y ago

I definitely want to believe this is a good measure of the impact of moving to a four day week. However, I wonder if this is an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect. Maybe people are being more productive each day because they're aware that the company is going to be measuring their productivity.

wool_gather 8y ago
Good point. And/or a novelty effect. As another comment asked, a long-term study is probably required.
notahacker 8y ago
There's also the "do work on the day off because it's a week day and people still expect a quick reply" habit people in customer facing roles (which sounds like quite a lot of Perpetual's staff) will be tied to. I took a four day week for six month in a regular corporate sales job because it was the most practical way of using my holiday entitlement without losing sales and contact with customers in a tough market, and sure, it didn't really affect my weekly productivity, but that's because I never made many important outbound calls on a Friday and still dealt with all the customer email on my Blackberry anyway, so all I was really missing out on were internal meetings...

DigiMortal 8y ago

I could do my job in 2 of the 5 workdays (I need a new job) I spend time learning, reading, etc at work

nemesisj 8y ago

We work a 4 Day, 32 hour week, and have done so since 2015. During that time, our team grew from a small office of ~20 in Edinburgh to where we are today (3 offices in Edinburgh Scotland, Bozeman USA, and Beirut Lebanon) with about 80 people. We have consistently been one of the fastest growing tech companies in Scotland (and in the UK). When we implemented the 4 day policy, we didn’t change our financial targets, or our team metrics. Instead, we explained it was an experiment that we wanted to run, and we believed that by being more efficient and more intentional about how we worked, we could still achieve our goals. Turned out that was true. Our motivation was primarily work/life balance, but also the realisation that most startups take 10-15 years to get to where they want to go, and we have a long journey ahead of us! It’s a marathon, not a sprint. We still pay a 5 day wage, and we actually “buy” all 5 days, because we wanted to make sure that team members weren’t tempted to moonlight on the 5th day. Overall I think it’s been a really great thing for our team, and perhaps most importantly, I think we’ve proved that ambitious goals, hard work, and a strong drive to succeed is not at odds with a 4 day week. Over the last few years we’ve spent probably hundreds of hours talking with various organisations and the media about the benefits of the 4 day week, and I’m hopeful it’ll continue to catch on more and more.

williamdclt 8y ago
1. how did you start the experiment? Did you apply it to everybody from the start or did you run it on a small sample? 2. What do you mean "buy all 5 days" and "moonlight on the 5th day"? (not a native speaker)
- nemesisj 8y ago
  Good questions! 1. We started by doing some research, actually - I spent some time finding studies that supported my thesis that productivity would go up (thus making sure our output would stay the same, more or less). Then I discussed with our management team, who thought I was nuts, but was supportive. Then I presented it to our board, who was also supportive. We applied it to everyone at the start, but some teams took a bit longer to get it implemented, as one of our criteria was he had to maintain 5 day coverage for our customers (ie, some have Mondays off, some have Fridays, etc.). To this day we leave the coverage patterns and rotations up to each team/department to decide. 2. In our contracts, we are paying you for 40 hours of work, 5 days a week, but we give you one of them back. Moonlighting meaning working for another company "on the side".

moeamaya 8y ago

Of all industries, you would think software companies would use some of the efficiency gains and insane profit margins to work less? This is the logic we have at Monograph (hiring engineers btw) and we've had 4 day 32-hour work weeks for over three years now. One engineer on the team likes to take Wednesdays off which we affectionately call the "mid-weekend". If you have more interest HuffPo and Lynne from Key Values wrote a bit about or working style: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-overwork-life-balance_us_5c360351e4b0f5aba7da3d5a https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-o... https://www.keyvalues.com/monograph https://www.keyvalues.com/monograph

maxxxxx 8y ago

When I worked in Germany we had a union mandated 35 hour week with no option for overtime. One thing I noticed was that back then most people actually worked most of their hours at the office and decisions were made rather quickly and decisively. Now I work with no set time limit and I feel that a lot of people are wasting time with going over the same thing multiple times, hesitating in making decisions and calling huge meetings that achieve nothing. I feel that part of it is that by working less people are fresher and think clearer. Whenever I worked 50+ hours per week for longer time I was more in a foggy state and couldn't think clearly. Also, by limiting working hours management needs to be decisive and conscious of wasting people's times with unnecessary stuff.

mtberatwork 8y ago
I think a big difference between the American work mentality and the Euro work mentality is that Americans often seem to relish the "I'm too busy for everything" state of mind (as if it were a badge of honor). Unfortunately, it will take huge macro-level behavioral changes to undo that kind of damage.

tzs 8y ago

I've been on a four day work week for quite a while, working Monday through Thursday [1]. It definitely makes the off days better. • If it has been a rough week at work, I can spend all day Friday relaxing, and still have a full two weekend days for my interests and hobbies. • I can do things on Friday, such as shopping, that most others have to do on the weekend, thus avoiding the weekend crowds. • With three days to work on personal projects, I can do a day of getting things going and getting productive, a day of good in the zone work, and then a day of picking a good stopping point and reaching that and setting things up for resumption next week. With a conventional two day weekend, it's that in the zone time that loses. • Three days is long enough that by Monday I'm ready and want to get back to my job. I find the lower stress thing quite plausible based on the above. It's enough time to do my stuff without it feeling rushed, meaning my relaxing things can actually be relaxing. A two day weekend is more likely to result in the classic stressing out over trying to relax. I also find the no cut in work output plausible, because of the lower stress thing. Stress should lower productivity. If your weekend is not lowering stress as much as it could, you are going to be less productive than you could be. If three days off lowers stress more, you productivity rate should be higher back at work. But a three day weekend means a shorter work week. So we have one effect trying to raise output and one trying to lower it. Given the fuzziness of productivity measures, I'm not surprised by a finding of no change in output. [1] I started taking every other Friday as a vacation day, because I had so much accumulated vacation that I had hit my employer's accumulation limit. Later, when the big recession hit the company needed to reduce expenses to avoid layoffs, and I offered to take a 5% pay cut in exchange for every other Friday off, which when combined with the every other Friday vacation gave me a four day week.

GordonS 8y ago

I switched to a 4 day working week a couple of years ago, and took a 20% pay cut in the process. I'm certain that I don't actually produce any less than I did when working 5 days, and my stress levels are definitely lower. All in all, the company got a pretty good deal, since I now have the same output, but get paid less!

toomuchtodo 8y ago
You should ask for a raise based on the value you’re providing, and get your comp back up to where it was before.

motohagiography 8y ago

It really seems to depend on the company stage. If the answer to, "did you do everything you could?" is, "well, we could have put %20 more time and effort into it with no additional cash burn," I could see how that could be interpreted as negligence from a fiduciary perspective. On the other hand, %20 less office time could be an honest signal that you are taking risks commensurate with the return level your investors are looking for. If as a founder or leader, you are careful and incremental, I don't think that's what investors put money into VC funds for. The number of stories I read here and elsewhere about investors saying, "I don't want this money back, I want a huge return or nothing, because I don't want to learn I put it behind someone who wasn't committed enough to fail hard." Investors aren't paying you and your team to work, they are paying for the privilege of getting a piece of a massive outcome. You achieve the outcome they want exposure to the best way you know how, and if imposing a risk constraint like %20 less office time does it, great. In this view, you are not their employee, you are their dealer. I could see how it would be hard to persuade investors you were working in their best interest with an attitude like that, but on the other hand, it could be one that is necessary to enable the best possible outcome. It sounds crazy, but the investors themselves are the correlation factor in their portfolio, and the point of putting money into a diversified portfolio of startups is to hedge that correlation, so the more opinionated the investor is about your office culture or other aspects of the business, it's likely the worse they are going to do. No clear answer, but really interesting question.

arcaster 8y ago

doing work != measurable output Not to mention that the definition of what work, productivity or deliverables is varies vastly from company to company or industry to industry. Not working for an entire day per week or having sporadic / limited hours of operation could also end up being a huge pain for a client or anyone not in your company you may be working with. I'm definitely a proponent of the sentiment of this article, however, I can confirm that working with a remote team in another country where nobody seemed to work more than 25hrs per week on their technical team was annoying as hell. Not only did this make solving problems harder, they also had notably lower productivity and output of meaningful contributions...

FrankyHollywood 8y ago

Seems a bit to good to be true... working 20% less, and still have 'increased productivity'? I myself work 4 days a week, which I really enjoy. However, sometimes with a major bug I make extra hours, the work has to get done! You can do more in 6 days than in 4. For that sake, how much further can you push it, can you increase productivity 20% by working 3 days instead of 4?

therealforsen 8y ago

I wonder what the lowest limit on work-time is for productivity. That would be interesting to know. Also, companies could only pay people for that many hours.

ArtDev 8y ago

Just make a mandatory 5 weeks a year. "Unlimited" PTO is a gimmick.

ThomPete 8y ago

The hawthorne effect should be factored in here. I am a proponent of 4 day weeks but depends on the situation industry etc.

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iaintrobot 8y ago

Well no flamin’ poo. Why do we need study after study that tells that we’re living beings that shouldn’t be consigned to a cage of guilt and shame. This is stupid. We know what feels good or not, but our barbaric system divorces our natural function from our consciousness - starting in childhood. Worst part is that we see that we have power to shape the world, but nobody believes that with same power comes the ability to create a comfortable environment for everybody where they can operate without guilt or shame or fear. What a monstrous machine we’ve created for ourselves. Love y’all. Peace out.

xiaodai 8y ago

that's cos they are slacking off anyway...

xiaodai 8y ago

written by a journalist who only wants to work four-day week.