19 ms·

Around 10 years ago, I felt like I was burning out. I was travelling a lot (sometimes 20+ hour trips involving 3 planes, always in bloody economy...) and workin

Around 10 years ago, I felt like I was burning out. I was travelling a lot (sometimes 20+ hour trips involving 3 planes, always in bloody economy...) and working stupid hours. A few things have changed since, and I'm no longer anywhere near burnout. I stopped travelling all the time, and I started working from home 4/5 days - less time communiting meant more sleep, and it means I get to have breakfast and lunch with my family etc. Then I moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process. Work-wise, it's the best thing I ever did! I spend less hours working, but somehow I don't seem to be any less productive, so my employer is actually getting a pretty good deal TBH. And I get a 3-day weekend, which means more time for family, me, and side projects. I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work and 4-day weeks, but I really think they need to modernise here - a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees.

taurath 7y ago
I think you can take the average knowledge worker employees 5 day week and make it 4 days and they’ll get as much done. If you get the same amount of slack on a 4 day than on a 5 day it’s quite a bit more noticeable. My current co does half days for summer Fridays. The amount that gets released doesn’t change. The amount of incidents over the weekend goes down also.
- subhobroto 7y ago
  We did this at an ex-employer. It started with what they called "Summer Wednesdays" - during the Summer, the company would sponsor an outing to the beautiful beach nearby every Wednesday at lunch. Then you could come back to office or work from home. Soon, people started to go to the beach earlier and work from there unless there was a client meeting onsite. One team member (she was in sales) even did her client meeting at the beach. Team morale drastically changed. Since they would be at the beach, they wanted to have some fun while at the beach - so they shifted the work they got done to the 4 other days. No more boring meetings - only those meetings everyone really wanted to be on happened. Everyone else was busy working. Teamwork went up because they wanted to be at the beach on Wednesday and have fun instead of coming back to work later. The performance metrics were so phenomenal next month that management had an informal meeting with the team that basically allowed people to work 4 days a week. Those who agreed had to sign an addendum to their employment contract that they had taken up the offer for people to work from where-ever they wanted one day a week without needing to come to the office. I did not like this opacity so when I queried I was told that investors won't sanction this in any shape or form and this would be the only way to pull it off.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    "investors won't sanction this in any shape or form" Interesting.
thatoneuser 7y ago
They aren't modernizing because they don't want to and fuck you for asking. They have the power and corporate neuroticism wins every time.
eric_khun 7y ago
Wondering if there is any stories backed by metrics on successful businesses that switch from a 5 days work week to 4 days
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  S.M.A.R.T. goals, phony deliverables/deadlines, accountability w/o agency, bullshit KPI's and metrics... Those are the things that really grind enthusiastic people doing hard, creative work to dust. Proving to the pointy-haired that going to a 4-day week won't hurt "because metrics" only puts a band-aid on the real problem which stems from the fact that many enterprises view people as "components"-- as means a to a corporate-defined end. For many people a 4-day work week only prolongs the path to burnout, IMHO.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    And managing the JIRA queue!
    - SamuelAdams 7y ago
      Hey project managers need to justify their 6 figure salary somehow.
      - C1sc0cat 7y ago
        After those nice coloured boxes in excel don't fill them selves in :-)
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    The solution is to form cooperatively owned, democratically operated, companies.
    - tomp 7y ago
      How would that solve the freeloader problem?
harperlee 7y ago
I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most people can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult. There’s also the fact that most people I’ve known in my work need to learn to work when they graduate (I hire mostly graduates). I’d trust someone with 5 years’ experience to know what is generally expected from them if they work remotely; I’d be much more concerned about a graduate. Telling them what “working” means is much harder than them breathing it daily around them at the office. Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance, and remote work takes from you several proxies. It might make you more objective - but it might make you less accurate and force you to accept lower performance due to the “benefit of the doubt”.
- thomascgalvin 7y ago
  > I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most people can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult. I've been full-time remote for about a year now, and I'm kind of done with it. It was fantastic at first. I live in Boston, and my commute was about an hour and a half in every morning, and about two hours home every night. Being able to step over the dog and be at my office was (and is) awesome. But I never see anyone anymore, and that's starting to wear on me. My wife still commutes, so we have about two hours with each other every night before we have to go to bed and do it all again the next day. If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house, and while I'm not the most social person around, I think it's starting to have actual negative consequences for my life. I'm grumpier, I get sick more often, I'm tired ...
  - neuland 7y ago
    > If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house I think that's the biggest difference with remote. A lot of things that were seamless with physical presence need to be done with intentionality in a remote setup. You need an explicit time for a daily call / team catchup. You need to either make extra effort or explicitly schedule social chats between coworkers (I like inviting people to do coffee or show off some thing they're interested in). And you personally need to make a schedule that gets you out of the house (I go to coffee shops 3-ish times a week). I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon. Granted, there's a lot of policy- or culture-level stuff that can get in the way. If the rest of you team is co-located and isn't going to remember to bring you in on conversations, remote isn't going to work. Same if your manager equates physical presence to performance.
subhobroto 7y ago
> I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work I dont. Can you tell me your thoughts? To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation. ... and if there's already a system in place to calculate team's ability to deliver a feature, what's the apprehension? > and 4-day weeks .. again, tell me your thoughts? > a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees. Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this?
- GordonS 7y ago
  > I dont. Can you tell me your thoughts? Partially inertia, fear of change and fear of losing control. > To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation. I totally agree, this is part of what I was trying to say - performance should not be measured by the number of hours sat at a desk visible to your manager! > Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this? Well, managers are people, so some of them are certainly idiots :)
morcutt 7y ago
It is absolutely time to modernize here. The 40 hour work week dates back to the industrial revolution.
- ghaff 7y ago
  A little bit later. It was a demand of various labor movements starting in about the mid-1800s (essentially in response to the industrial revolution) and started to be broadly implemented around the turn of the century.
- GordonS 7y ago
  I would have thought working hours were much higher back then?
afpx 7y ago
"moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process." I moved to a 5-day, 35 hour work week while not taking a pay cut. I just leave early. F em. I'm not burning myself out again.

taurath 7y ago

I think you can take the average knowledge worker employees 5 day week and make it 4 days and they’ll get as much done. If you get the same amount of slack on a 4 day than on a 5 day it’s quite a bit more noticeable. My current co does half days for summer Fridays. The amount that gets released doesn’t change. The amount of incidents over the weekend goes down also.

subhobroto 7y ago
We did this at an ex-employer. It started with what they called "Summer Wednesdays" - during the Summer, the company would sponsor an outing to the beautiful beach nearby every Wednesday at lunch. Then you could come back to office or work from home. Soon, people started to go to the beach earlier and work from there unless there was a client meeting onsite. One team member (she was in sales) even did her client meeting at the beach. Team morale drastically changed. Since they would be at the beach, they wanted to have some fun while at the beach - so they shifted the work they got done to the 4 other days. No more boring meetings - only those meetings everyone really wanted to be on happened. Everyone else was busy working. Teamwork went up because they wanted to be at the beach on Wednesday and have fun instead of coming back to work later. The performance metrics were so phenomenal next month that management had an informal meeting with the team that basically allowed people to work 4 days a week. Those who agreed had to sign an addendum to their employment contract that they had taken up the offer for people to work from where-ever they wanted one day a week without needing to come to the office. I did not like this opacity so when I queried I was told that investors won't sanction this in any shape or form and this would be the only way to pull it off.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  "investors won't sanction this in any shape or form" Interesting.

thatoneuser 7y ago

They aren't modernizing because they don't want to and fuck you for asking. They have the power and corporate neuroticism wins every time.

eric_khun 7y ago

Wondering if there is any stories backed by metrics on successful businesses that switch from a 5 days work week to 4 days

crispyambulance 7y ago
S.M.A.R.T. goals, phony deliverables/deadlines, accountability w/o agency, bullshit KPI's and metrics... Those are the things that really grind enthusiastic people doing hard, creative work to dust. Proving to the pointy-haired that going to a 4-day week won't hurt "because metrics" only puts a band-aid on the real problem which stems from the fact that many enterprises view people as "components"-- as means a to a corporate-defined end. For many people a 4-day work week only prolongs the path to burnout, IMHO.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  And managing the JIRA queue!
  - SamuelAdams 7y ago
    Hey project managers need to justify their 6 figure salary somehow.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      After those nice coloured boxes in excel don't fill them selves in :-)
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  The solution is to form cooperatively owned, democratically operated, companies.
  - tomp 7y ago
    How would that solve the freeloader problem?

harperlee 7y ago

I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most people can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult. There’s also the fact that most people I’ve known in my work need to learn to work when they graduate (I hire mostly graduates). I’d trust someone with 5 years’ experience to know what is generally expected from them if they work remotely; I’d be much more concerned about a graduate. Telling them what “working” means is much harder than them breathing it daily around them at the office. Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance, and remote work takes from you several proxies. It might make you more objective - but it might make you less accurate and force you to accept lower performance due to the “benefit of the doubt”.

thomascgalvin 7y ago
> I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most people can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult. I've been full-time remote for about a year now, and I'm kind of done with it. It was fantastic at first. I live in Boston, and my commute was about an hour and a half in every morning, and about two hours home every night. Being able to step over the dog and be at my office was (and is) awesome. But I never see anyone anymore, and that's starting to wear on me. My wife still commutes, so we have about two hours with each other every night before we have to go to bed and do it all again the next day. If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house, and while I'm not the most social person around, I think it's starting to have actual negative consequences for my life. I'm grumpier, I get sick more often, I'm tired ...
- neuland 7y ago
  > If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house I think that's the biggest difference with remote. A lot of things that were seamless with physical presence need to be done with intentionality in a remote setup. You need an explicit time for a daily call / team catchup. You need to either make extra effort or explicitly schedule social chats between coworkers (I like inviting people to do coffee or show off some thing they're interested in). And you personally need to make a schedule that gets you out of the house (I go to coffee shops 3-ish times a week). I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon. Granted, there's a lot of policy- or culture-level stuff that can get in the way. If the rest of you team is co-located and isn't going to remember to bring you in on conversations, remote isn't going to work. Same if your manager equates physical presence to performance.

subhobroto 7y ago

> I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work I dont. Can you tell me your thoughts? To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation. ... and if there's already a system in place to calculate team's ability to deliver a feature, what's the apprehension? > and 4-day weeks .. again, tell me your thoughts? > a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees. Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this?

GordonS 7y ago
> I dont. Can you tell me your thoughts? Partially inertia, fear of change and fear of losing control. > To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation. I totally agree, this is part of what I was trying to say - performance should not be measured by the number of hours sat at a desk visible to your manager! > Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this? Well, managers are people, so some of them are certainly idiots :)

morcutt 7y ago

It is absolutely time to modernize here. The 40 hour work week dates back to the industrial revolution.

ghaff 7y ago
A little bit later. It was a demand of various labor movements starting in about the mid-1800s (essentially in response to the industrial revolution) and started to be broadly implemented around the turn of the century.
GordonS 7y ago
I would have thought working hours were much higher back then?

afpx 7y ago

"moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process." I moved to a 5-day, 35 hour work week while not taking a pay cut. I just leave early. F em. I'm not burning myself out again.