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I think three day weekends would be undeniably good for the health of our society and everyone living in it. I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in th

I think three day weekends would be undeniably good for the health of our society and everyone living in it. I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system. While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house. I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.

meej 7y ago
> But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system. This is essentially how Tom DeMarco defines it in his book Slack. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack
drivingmenuts 7y ago
In the US, if you don't work, you don't get paid, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster for most workers here. Small to medium businesses would potentially be losing 42 days a year of production (52 days - 10 days std vacation time) and that would hurt the profits that they would need to increase wages to make up for that lost day per week just for the workers. Shareholders will still expect year-over-year increase in profits, which won't happen if you're paying people who aren't working. Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.
- kennywinker 7y ago
  1. There are very few jobs where doing them in a miserable state does not greatly reduce the quality and quantity of work you do. 2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners. 3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.
  - madengr 7y ago
    That 1/5 hit is enough to turn a +10% return to -10%.
    - kennywinker 7y ago
      If your business model requires miserable employees, your business should not exist.
      - HatchedLake721 7y ago
        So running a business and requiring your employees to work 5 days, 35-40 hours a week like the rest of the western world (excluding 966 and other countries that work even more), suddenly my business should not exist because you believe everyone working there is now miserable because they have to show up at work 5 times a week instead of 4? Are you ok?
        newen 7y ago
        If 6 day work weeks are common, you would be making the exact same bogus argument.
        necovek 7y ago
        You conveniently choose to ignore the cited research that says that employees are "happier" when they work 4 day weeks. Or are you simply being pedantic and arguing the use of "miserable"? If human civilization is to go further, we need to recognize some of our generic assumptions. Work is a means to an end, most commonly a means to support oneself and one's family. It should support us in our basic needs (shelter, food, clothing), and allow us to put our creative and intelligent side to better use. Sure, some would spend all of their time playing PS4, but by opening up opportunities for everyone in the civilization, civilization as a whole should see progress. If you don't believe in benefits of the civilization and how it has advanced through history mostly through people with spare time (usually higher classes, but with spare time becoming more accessible, through everybody in the past ~100 years), I am sure you are fine with a bigger, stronger dude walking in and taking your car keys and driving off (that was the status-quo at a distant point in history).
- this_user 7y ago
  Evidence suggests that having more time off increases productivity. And let's be honest, most people working 40+ hours/w are not working at 100% all the time. So one possibility is to slightly increase the working time (say by 1h) for each of the four days. That loses you half a day for work, but the increased productivity takes care of the balance. The caveat is that only works for businesses that are charging for output rather than time.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - listenallyall 7y ago
    "Evidence suggests" there must be a limit, after which more time off reduces productivity, yes? If your boss gives you 168 hours off per week, you won't be at maximum productivity. Instead of a generalized statement which can't possibly be true in all circumstances, perhaps your argument would have more merit if you could accurately identify the inflection point.
imran3740 7y ago
Zvi Mowshowitz put the concept of "slack" well: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/
- peatmoss 7y ago
  This is a great read. I especially appreciated “Most times are ordinary. Make an ordinary effort.“
- close04 7y ago
  Productivity has increased ~250% almost linearly over the past 70 years. Wages increased only ~100% (adjusted) and only until ~50 years ago, basically plateauing since then. Going to a 4 day work week would bring the weekly productivity to the level of a 5 day week from the early 2000s while also providing a "virtual" wage increase. I don't really see companies flocking to sign up.
  - rileymat2 7y ago
    Why would wages follow productivity? Arn’t there a ton of counteracting factors, like productivity decreasing demand for labor?
    - close04 7y ago
      I was just pointing out that companies care about productivity and workers about wage. I see no reason for shareholders to be the only ones happy at the end of the day.
  - jchw 7y ago
    This assumes that weekly productivity scales evenly with hours worked. It doesn’t. It will vary per person, profession, etc. but four day work weeks can be surprisingly effective even before considering the effects of potential mental health improvements. You could also consider 10 hour four day weeks, though I guess at 10 hours many would see fatigue affecting their work.
Swizec 7y ago
According to the theory of constraints (on which I am expert since I read 1 graphic novel, The Goal, and 1 novel, The Phoenix Project) systems without slack become exponentially slower until no work is capable of getting done anymore. The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day. You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day. You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system. But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing. What gives? Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially. Efficient systems have slack.
- tetha 7y ago
  Yup. And on top of that, my team does have slack time, but that doesn't mean we stop working when the mandatory tasks are done. We rather spend the downtime resolving time-consuming technical debt, automating some steps in the workflow. So, slack will actually make the regular tasks go faster.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  This is a very good bit of information, but most modern workplaces are not factory floors 'processing work items', so the analogy only goes so far. Also, it very well could be that reducing to 4 from 5 does nothing but simply reduce the number of hours 'the factory is operating'. Surely there'd be a bonus because people might be more relaxed, but it's hard to weight that against the lost day. For example, my local coffee shop is open 7 days a week, let's say that their staff works 5 days on, 2 off so there's a steady rate of staffers. If they just switched to 4 on 3 off ... I'm not sure anything would materially change in terms of productivity etc. - and 'all else being equal' (i.e. demand, cost of goods, wages/hour), the staffers would simply make less money and I doubt they'd chose that. But maybe '3/4 days' would be better in some industries than others.
isostatic 7y ago
I used to work 4x10 hour days, I took the Wednesday off though - no more than two days in a row was great, and having a day off in the week while most were at work was so much more efficient I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.

meej 7y ago

> But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system. This is essentially how Tom DeMarco defines it in his book Slack. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack

drivingmenuts 7y ago

In the US, if you don't work, you don't get paid, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster for most workers here. Small to medium businesses would potentially be losing 42 days a year of production (52 days - 10 days std vacation time) and that would hurt the profits that they would need to increase wages to make up for that lost day per week just for the workers. Shareholders will still expect year-over-year increase in profits, which won't happen if you're paying people who aren't working. Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.

kennywinker 7y ago
1. There are very few jobs where doing them in a miserable state does not greatly reduce the quality and quantity of work you do. 2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners. 3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.
- madengr 7y ago
  That 1/5 hit is enough to turn a +10% return to -10%.
  - kennywinker 7y ago
    If your business model requires miserable employees, your business should not exist.
    - HatchedLake721 7y ago
      So running a business and requiring your employees to work 5 days, 35-40 hours a week like the rest of the western world (excluding 966 and other countries that work even more), suddenly my business should not exist because you believe everyone working there is now miserable because they have to show up at work 5 times a week instead of 4? Are you ok?
      - newen 7y ago
        If 6 day work weeks are common, you would be making the exact same bogus argument.
      - necovek 7y ago
        You conveniently choose to ignore the cited research that says that employees are "happier" when they work 4 day weeks. Or are you simply being pedantic and arguing the use of "miserable"? If human civilization is to go further, we need to recognize some of our generic assumptions. Work is a means to an end, most commonly a means to support oneself and one's family. It should support us in our basic needs (shelter, food, clothing), and allow us to put our creative and intelligent side to better use. Sure, some would spend all of their time playing PS4, but by opening up opportunities for everyone in the civilization, civilization as a whole should see progress. If you don't believe in benefits of the civilization and how it has advanced through history mostly through people with spare time (usually higher classes, but with spare time becoming more accessible, through everybody in the past ~100 years), I am sure you are fine with a bigger, stronger dude walking in and taking your car keys and driving off (that was the status-quo at a distant point in history).
this_user 7y ago
Evidence suggests that having more time off increases productivity. And let's be honest, most people working 40+ hours/w are not working at 100% all the time. So one possibility is to slightly increase the working time (say by 1h) for each of the four days. That loses you half a day for work, but the increased productivity takes care of the balance. The caveat is that only works for businesses that are charging for output rather than time.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- listenallyall 7y ago
  "Evidence suggests" there must be a limit, after which more time off reduces productivity, yes? If your boss gives you 168 hours off per week, you won't be at maximum productivity. Instead of a generalized statement which can't possibly be true in all circumstances, perhaps your argument would have more merit if you could accurately identify the inflection point.

imran3740 7y ago

Zvi Mowshowitz put the concept of "slack" well: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/

peatmoss 7y ago
This is a great read. I especially appreciated “Most times are ordinary. Make an ordinary effort.“
close04 7y ago
Productivity has increased ~250% almost linearly over the past 70 years. Wages increased only ~100% (adjusted) and only until ~50 years ago, basically plateauing since then. Going to a 4 day work week would bring the weekly productivity to the level of a 5 day week from the early 2000s while also providing a "virtual" wage increase. I don't really see companies flocking to sign up.
- rileymat2 7y ago
  Why would wages follow productivity? Arn’t there a ton of counteracting factors, like productivity decreasing demand for labor?
  - close04 7y ago
    I was just pointing out that companies care about productivity and workers about wage. I see no reason for shareholders to be the only ones happy at the end of the day.
- jchw 7y ago
  This assumes that weekly productivity scales evenly with hours worked. It doesn’t. It will vary per person, profession, etc. but four day work weeks can be surprisingly effective even before considering the effects of potential mental health improvements. You could also consider 10 hour four day weeks, though I guess at 10 hours many would see fatigue affecting their work.

Swizec 7y ago

According to the theory of constraints (on which I am expert since I read 1 graphic novel, The Goal, and 1 novel, The Phoenix Project) systems without slack become exponentially slower until no work is capable of getting done anymore. The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day. You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day. You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system. But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing. What gives? Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially. Efficient systems have slack.

tetha 7y ago
Yup. And on top of that, my team does have slack time, but that doesn't mean we stop working when the mandatory tasks are done. We rather spend the downtime resolving time-consuming technical debt, automating some steps in the workflow. So, slack will actually make the regular tasks go faster.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
This is a very good bit of information, but most modern workplaces are not factory floors 'processing work items', so the analogy only goes so far. Also, it very well could be that reducing to 4 from 5 does nothing but simply reduce the number of hours 'the factory is operating'. Surely there'd be a bonus because people might be more relaxed, but it's hard to weight that against the lost day. For example, my local coffee shop is open 7 days a week, let's say that their staff works 5 days on, 2 off so there's a steady rate of staffers. If they just switched to 4 on 3 off ... I'm not sure anything would materially change in terms of productivity etc. - and 'all else being equal' (i.e. demand, cost of goods, wages/hour), the staffers would simply make less money and I doubt they'd chose that. But maybe '3/4 days' would be better in some industries than others.

isostatic 7y ago

I used to work 4x10 hour days, I took the Wednesday off though - no more than two days in a row was great, and having a day off in the week while most were at work was so much more efficient I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.