I always wondered what a company with a 20 hour work week would look like (either five 4 hour days or four 5 hour days, to take every Friday off). I think the p

I always wondered what a company with a 20 hour work week would look like (either five 4 hour days or four 5 hour days, to take every Friday off). I think the productivity gains would be massive per hour of time spent because there is true focus during that time and not idle chitchat. Communication would be entirely asynchronous, and so this model would work best for a distributed remote company. I read a book about this model, called Five Hour Workday which helped solidify this model in my mind [0]. There's also an article if you don't want to read the entire book [1]. The benefits are manifold. As stated above, and as the author had discovered, productivity did indeed go up, more than the 8 hour workday had. Communication, being asynchronous, codifies the company's history, progress, values, and other useful pieces and creates an internal wiki structure which any employee can reference back to. This is to say, not only should the communication be asynchronous, but it should also be long-form. If there are discussions about new features, employees should submit suggestions of a few pages or so outlining everything they think about it, including how the feature would work, what its benefits are, and so on. All of this does not of course discount the benefits of remote work, or barring that, only needing to work half the normal workday. [0] http://www.fivehourworkday.com/book-intro.html http://www.fivehourworkday.com/book-intro.html [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3063262/what-happened-when-i-moved-my-company-to-a-5-hour-workday https://www.fastcompany.com/3063262/what-happened-when-i-mov...