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Future of work will be 5-hour days, 4-day workweek, flexible staggered schedules
- lucasyvas 5y agoAt this point I'd be happy with everyone admitting how little work gets done on Friday's and at least start trimming that day.
- thrower123 5y agoI wish Friday was a day of no-work... People seem to batch up all their requests from the whole week that they didn't report and drop them in your lap like a turd in the punch-bowl on Friday mornings. "Yeah, so we'll be getting a follow-up on Monday? Thanks, have a good weekend."
- mrwh 5y agoWhere I am, Friday is a no meetings day. I.e. the day on which productive work can actually be done.
- rantwasp 5y agoyes. productive work done AND deployed to production.
- thrower123 5y agoThat's what I'd love to aim for, if I didn't have to be so responsive to enterprise customers... On the rare occasions that there isn't a teacup-hurricane blowing, doing work on a Friday is possible. Still pretty rare, just because usually all gumption has been consumed by the time I stagger into Fridays.
- rowanG077 5y agoWon't that just move the little work done day to Thursday? Maybe a low work day is necessary.
- beebeepka 5y agoI was about to ask a rhetorical question whether the people writing these articles true believers or just hired guns. But then I decided to this guy's other contributions. My conclusion is that I do not like the image of person in my head. On the other hand, who wouldn't want to have shorter work days and weeks for themselves... Than again, office work is a tiny percentage of all work. And I've spent enough time doing all kinds of stuff to notice that most office work isn't work, nor is it needed at all. I think UBI might help with that. Not necessarily though
- darkhorse13 5y agoI simply can't put in more than ~20 hours of productive work per week anyway. Yes, I used to sit at my desk in the office, but I was basically doing nothing and just wasting time. Either I'm just lazy (highly likely), or there is a cap for the number of productive hours you can spend doing creative work.
- Shaanie 5y agoFor me it depends a lot on what kind of work it is. Architecture/design/troubleshooting or other mentally taxing work I agree fully, maybe 4h after lunch per day. I can easily put in 40h+ of productive work when implementing straightforward solutions though (coding, documentation, testing etc).
- DaedPsyker 5y agoI would agree. I can easily put hours into straight programming when there is clear designs and goals. Actually designing the program though can just get exhausting. I won't discount personality differences but I've certainly seen it enough in others that I figure there is some sort of mental limit. A lot of discussion on automation is on removing the tedious, basic stuff so we can focus on the more difficult mental tasks. I do wonder though if perhaps we won't get as big a benefit as we think just due our nature.
- pvitz 5y agoDirac worked four hours in the morning and then had fun the rest of the day. He would have agreed with you and it paid off for him ;)
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y agoAll I ask is for even just a portion of available software jobs to have this schedule. And I'm perfectly happy taking a 50% paycut to get it too. My employer would likely get more productive work per hour they pay for and I would get lots more free time and a higher per-hour take home pay (a larger proportion of my income would be in lower tax brackets). Win win.
- bakuninsbart 5y agoA friend of mine had a very similar workload his entire career, although differently scheduled: He would work full-time for a couple of months, then not work for a few months afterwards. As long as the companies you work for have relatively short project cycles, this could be possible. Of course he was relatively stagnant in his position, but when we looked back on the years at his retirement, it was amazing how much travelling he did over the decades.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y agoMy current plan is to transition into such an arrangement. The downside is having to job hunt once or more per year and eventually having a lot of gaps on your resume. I'm waiting to reach a certain net worth but hopefully within another couple years.
- jon-wood 5y agoIf this is what you want to do contracting is the way to go. I know several people who do contract work through the winter months and then spend summer sailing round the Mediterranean and Caribbean off the proceeds.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y agoYeah that's definitely what I'm interested in. I don't know much about the contracting market as I've mostly worked full time jobs so if you have any tips let me know.
- brtkdotse 5y agoIn 1930 Keynes predicted we’d have a 15 hour work week “within a 100 years”. Only 9 years to go...
- seoaeu 5y agoSee, but he was smart enough to list a date so far in the future that no one could call him on it...
- mrwh 5y agoI was going to write: and that's sort of come true, if you care about having a similar standard of living to an average person in Keynes' time. But then there's housing, and that idea falls apart.
- rsj_hn 5y agoThe problem here is mostly office workers. I do think Americans spend "too much" time in the office, but this is because so much time is wasted, due to the costs of working in a big bureaucracy. While it's easy to say "I could work 50% less time and accomplish just as much", actually doing that in a sustainable way (e.g. without shifting mindless busywork onto other people) is a hard problem. It's a bit like all these people talking about government waste. Yes, we know there is government waste. But that doesn't mean we know how to make the government more efficient in a sustainable way. This is because the government is also a big bureaucracy, and making these structures efficient is something that we don't know how to do very well. People tend to carve out their own little empires, they sabotage each other, they create their own view of the world which differs from the view of the world of someone one level up or down, and then they spend effort on things not really explainable to those outside their view of the world, and often those efforts don't make much sense to people outside that specific bubble. What this means as that as we continue to get more bureaucratic, the situation will only get worse, not better. We will be able to accomplish less and less real work in the same unit of time. You can see this now with irreality everywhere. It's infuriating, but unclear on what to do about it. It's bubble-within-bubble with so much effort expended at completely irrelevant things to anyone outside the concern-bubble. That is why people end up working crazy long hours in the economy as a whole just to keep things going, and telling people to "work less" is a bit like treating the government waste problem by cutting all budgets by 10%. All that happens is that work piles up and the organization as a whole becomes less efficient over the long term.
- crispyambulance 5y agoNope. Don't believe it, it's another hubris-heavy article from Forbes. Sadly, for most people in the world, the future of work is more likely to be 9-9-6. Clock in at 9am, leave at 9pm. Repeat 6 days a week, for the rest of your life until you can't work and no social safety net other than your family. This is what your overlords want.
- echelon 5y agoPossible. Companies and countries that do this will have cheaper labor and lower cost of goods. TikTok has a 996 culture and is killing Facebook. The only way out of this is through automation or potentially economic protectionism.
- gsich 5y agoAutomation hasn't saved us before.
- robjan 5y agoTikTok is killing Facebook because it's a more compelling product, not because the engineers are overworked.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoIt is now. Facebook was a killer product back in 2007 (and probably until recently, it still was). The inevitable fate of TikTok is to become more like FB than different, assuming that they are successful, because of the business model commonalities.
- arrosenberg 5y agoThere's no way that they're beating Facebook because they make their employees work 72 hours a week. Any one who has worked 70+ hour weeks knows that your productivity drops off a cliff and never shows back up.
- occz 5y ago> TikTok has a 996 culture and is killing Facebook. Because of, or despite?
- emerged 5y agoI’ve been doing this for years and it has coincided with more productivity and much more life satisfaction. It has made my working hours into pure, dense, focused and organized effort. I don’t think we are really built to work 8-9 hour shifts, we just end up padding the time with distractions and lack of focus.
- efields 5y agoJust do this at your current job, especially if they have an “unlimited time off” policy, start putting in those fridays. Don’t make a big deal about it, don’t abruptly leave at 2 (every day)… spend the latter couple hours reading, working out, etc. The catch? You gotta be good at defending the work hours you do put in. Don’t lie, don’t make up excuses, but be prepared to say I did xyz as planned. This will obviously not work for everybody in every profession, but it’s your life and you can try to take some of it back on your own terms. It’s easier to fly under the radar than to ask permission.
- darkhorse22 5y agoIf you're good enough you can pretty much dictate your working conditions. But it's bad advice for most people. I've seen plenty of mediocre devs take this kind of advice, and it's sad/embarrassing to see. Anyone who's decent figures out that they can cut corners at their first job. 90% of the devs I've worked with (conservatively) should never cut corners and should've been putting in more hours to become adequate. Most feel-good self-help advice like this is worse than useless, it's harmful to anybody who finds it novel.
- rantwasp 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoI've worked at several tech companies with distributed or remote teams and flexible hours. Every one of them had a few employees who were considered so good that they could get away with working visibly fewer hours than everyone else and only being available when they wanted to work. Great for them, terrible for everyone who had to work with them. When one person has significantly less availability than everyone else, the rest of the team is forced to structure their activity around catering to that person's schedule. Superstar engineer only works a couple hours per day? Prepare to block that time off in your calendar so you can try to catch them to coordinate that work you need to do together. Rockstar coder unavailable every Friday? Better hope they're not blocking your work, otherwise you're waiting until Monday to make progress. Or more realistically, you're going to waste all Friday trying to solve something on your own that could be finished 10x faster if you could get 15 minutes of that person's time. > Don’t lie, don’t make up excuses, but be prepared to say I did xyz as planned. The fallacy is that for most tech jobs, that "xyz" is rarely the end of the story. Planning isn't perfect and we almost never know the complete scope of a task or project at the planning phase. The end result is a lot of work shifted to other team members who are forced to pick up the slack simply because they're available and reliable, unlike the person who disappears every Friday or spends every afternoon at the gym. This may work in a hypothetical workplace with perfect planning and perfectly isolated work units, but in practice it just moves the excess work burden to other teammates. You're not sticking it to the company, you're sticking it to your team. When I transitioned to management I made a point to try to balance workload and availability across teams. It often makes more sense to let go of superstar engineers who are only available 4 out of 5 days per week and only working a few hours per day, even if their work is good in isolation. A healthy team requires everyone to play by similar rules.
- thedogeye 5y agoWill companies that do this lose to the ones that work more? If so, Darwin says that this is not the future of work.
- rantwasp 5y agosome bad news for you: Darwin does not apply in this case. given a problem and enough time, mother nature will solve it. given a problem people can probably solve it in less time by actually you know designing the solution. one could argue that a lean company may actually have lower costs and will probably have comparable output.
- markus_zhang 5y agoGive me something I'm interested in and I can easily put 70 hours down. Median salary is good enough. Yeah man downvote me as you like, but let me tell you, those of us who cannot work on what we are interested in professionally are pathetic as we don't get to fulfill our calling (regardless you believe in religion or not). And nowadays most fields, I'm sorry friends, do not need more gentlemen scientists, you have to get into the field to do useful work.
- k__ 5y agoFor a few white collar jobs maybe. But I know a bunch of people who work 40h a week in retail and say it barely pays their rent.
- egypturnash 5y agoI’m sitting here staring at that headline as my tablet sssslloooowwwlllyyyy debates if it’s gonna load the rest of this article and all I can think is: for who? Is this gonna be the future of work for construction? For fast food? Store clerks? Will this 20h/wk schedule pay enough to support them and their spouse and a kid or two? I am betting the answer is “no” and that this future is only coming to Forbes’ target market, or some subset thereof. Edit: got it to load on the other tablet, the first sentence says this is only talking about white-collar workers, so... nope!
- ben_w 5y agoPerhaps, but… I suspect that rent[0] is related to how much “spare” money people have, and that land prices (and the land component of house and apartment prices) are related to rent potential, so a substantial reduction of working hours may merely reduce those costs. [0] Strongly WRT rent of real estate, weakly WRT all economic rent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
- madspindel 5y ago"In thirty years America will be a post-industrial society with a per capita income of $ 7,500. There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With weekends and holidays this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days. All this within a single generation." From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967.
- vikingerik 5y agoSurprisingly accurate, but maybe not in the way he meant. The post-industrial jobs are restaurants and other service workers. The 4x7 shifts are for the employer to stay under the threshold for providing a health coverage plan. The weeks of vacation are unpaid and occur from frictional unemployment (time between jobs), business downturns, and pandemic closures.
- andai 5y agoYeah, when I saw the headline I thought this was one of the articles published around 1900.
- genedan 5y agoPeople's insatiable wants keep them working. If people really wanted to work half time, they would.
- rantwasp 5y agolol. are you serious? most people give the choice between no/little work and a lot if work will go with no work.
- booleandilemma 5y agoI know people, today, who could stop coming into work 1/2 the time and the work would still get done. These are the people who drift from meeting to meeting without ever actually contributing anything. Every now and then they make a PowerPoint. When they're asked a hard question, they always have to conveniently drop for another meeting. These people could get away with "working" less. Maybe this article is talking about them. For people actually doing the work, or people working a job that pays hourly, I don't think a 5-hour, 4-day work week is coming any time soon. I hope I'm wrong though.
- rantwasp 5y agoyou are wrong. a lot of bs generated by the people that are “important” and “constantly in meetings” drags productivity down for everyone. take this and also apply it vertically on the reporting chain. Yeah 20hours/week is totally doable.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoMassive eyeroll at this article. It has been predicted for literally a hundred years that technological advancements would make it so we all only work a couple hours a week. Somehow it didn't turn out that way. Of course, in a competitive economy with property rights, it's impossible that we all only work a couple hours a week. If you say "I'll only work 20 hours a week, but I still want a salary that completely supports my lifestyle", chances are someone else is willing to work 40 - 60 hours a week to get ahead. These utopian seeking articles that give zero analysis to basic economics, nevermind basic human nature, are just daydreams.
- coldcode 5y agoBefore retiring recently, I worked as a lead programmer at a minimum of 10 hr/day 5 days a week and occasionally Saturdays, and some months I worked 7 days a week since we always had deadlines and our execs changed stuff every single day. I finally had enough of this madness. No way you could do my job in 5 hrs/day.
- rantwasp 5y agocan i ask you why you did it? did you ever look at reducing the amount of work / switching jobs? To me this sounds a little bit insane (but in a non-judgmental way). I hope you enjoy your retirement.
- danaris 5y ago
- vadym909 5y agoI have a sneaking suspicion that if you are a knowledge worker you are already probably doing this unconciously. Online research, entertainment and shopping for non-work related stuff, errands, stock trading, etc. Working from home makes this easier because you can have a non-work computer right next to your work laptop so no chance of the company snooping into what you are doing. Ofcourse if you work where every hour counts- construction, nursing, waitressing, driving for uber- it'll be a while till people figure out they need to be paid more or work less for the same $
- rubyfan 5y agoLet’s face it, most corporate jobs are bullshit and we know it. The reality of the balance of work is that in order to justify better than living wages in corporations you need to be good at high-school skills, e.g. cliches (organizational leadership), and looking cool (followership, executive presence). Meritocracy is unfortunately a myth at a management level. It’s hard to keep the perception of value up when you can’t show face and flex your high school skills. This is why the 40 hour work week will not die in corporate America at least.
- rantwasp 5y agohow dare you! it you don’t work more than 60hours/week you don’t have any work ethic and you should probably not be able to afford basic stuff like living indoors and eating. /s
- orthecreedence 5y ago> Future of Work Will Be 5-Hour Days, 4-Day Workweek, Flexible Staggered Schedules Yes, exactly, once capitalism is abolished.
- Proven 5y agoNo it won't, because there will be always be people who want to make extra money or win more than others. Keep dreaming, socialists.
- mrfusion 5y agoThat really sounds like the ideal schedule to me.
- villgax 5y agoAnother Jack Kelly article...however cool the title sounds the author is by no means sane. Below excerpt is from previous article of his- """ The pandemic, coupled with calls to defund the police, has left New York a little dirtier and scarier. There have been reports of questionable characters committing heinous violent acts on the streets and in the train stations."""
- zackmorris 5y agoTo achieve this, we'll need buy-in from the experienced. I'm a contractor who has programmed for just over 30 years (20 professionally) and my current employer doesn't mind what hours I work, as long as I get my work done. They like having me onsite for reassurance, and I appreciate their positive energy since I can be hard on myself and set unrealistic expectations and take it hard when I miss the boat. So a schedule that optimizes bang for the buck and prevents work-halting burnouts could work for us. But see, the key there is that the people I'm working with are a bit older than me and they get it. They've seen downturns but had the discipline to persevere. There's no gnashing of teeth when I explain the realities of what we're up against. We just buckle down and form a plan and do the work, whatever it takes. In the past, I've worked for people who never noticed merit or achievement. Find a solution and pull a rabbit out of your hat one day, they want you to come into work early the next and maybe even work on the weekend. I realize now that they had personal problems that were never addressed. Maybe they were workaholics due to troubles in their home lives. Maybe they lived in areas that were too expensive for them or were in debt or just needed the money to live. What I'm saying is that we imagine our employers to be these impeccable titans of industry, when really they're just people trying to make a way in the world too. Maybe they have someone above pressuring them to have a better month or quarter. Maybe they've never had a raise either, due to structural problems in our economy that have been reaching the boiling point over the last 40 years. They're in the midst of dysfunction just like us but have to reach even further to see a way out of it because their livelihoods depend on things outside their control, like having to rely on the people they employ. The anxiety for them must be crushing sometimes. If we want to manifest a real change in the world like a 20 hour workweek, I think that we need to step back and see the situation from all sides and recognize that this is a local maximum. We can see how much better things are just across the way, but it feels like an impossible dream. It's a leap of faith. To make it a reality, we need a plan. We need savings to have leverage. We need access to capital. We need connections. We need examples of where shorter hours lead to higher productivity, morale and sustainability. We need drop-in business tools that find tax advantages when 2 people work for half the hours that 1 would, which already happened in fast food and retail in their race to the bottom. But we need to do better than them. Identify risk that leads to long hours/low wages and find concrete solutions to that risk. Provide ourselves real vision and leadership to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. Create a repeatable process that others can copy and build from.
- Black101 5y agomy previous boss started 4 day weeks 10 years ago
- enteeentee 5y agoI worked at a company where I turned up late for work, left super early. Did some work in the evening, worked from home when I felt like it. Want to talk employee engagement, its the happiest Ive ever been working, and Id put a lot more effort in just to have that flexibility. I worked a lot more productively this way, and also it fitted well with eg senior people that work 10 hours a day or whatever, as Id respond "out of hours". Forcing 9-5 attendance on people who can be more productive working to their own schedule just seems stupid.