7 ms·
I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hou
by fleddr 4y ago
I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself.
As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically.
When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time.
There's many ways to cross this gap. An obvious one is that a typical 5 day work week has moments of slack, depending on the culture. Friday after lunch is where productivity sinks in many offices. Wednesdays are also slower as it's typically the first moment in the week where things are running (planned, prepared, on track). In a 4 day work week you sacrifice this breathing room, the 4 days become more compressed.
Another natural change is to take a more aggressive stand in rejecting non-sense. Excess meetings, unimportant emails, etc. This works very well and is extremely effective for the simple reason that you MUST. As such this time compression is a blessing, a cleansing mechanism for yourself and the organization.
You'll be amazed at how much time you can win back. Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. As if by sheer magic, what needed to be discussed gets done in 20 mins. Without this forced "budgeting", people would just fill the hour with bullshit.
Counter intuitive, but by being rigid instead of elastic, you maximize value.
- sktrdie 4y agoThis makes sense and understand what you're saying. But the idea of having a full extra day where I don't have to open the laptop and can instead concentrate totally on myself is much more important than a decompression day at work.
- fleddr 4y agoExactly, that's also why I made the change.
- rootusrootus 4y agoI'm starting to get more militant about zoom calls. Trying to avoid angering people explicitly, but still pushing back as best I can to protect to the team from incessant zoom calls to have conversations that would be faster on slack, and better documented in email. Zoom calls just invite conversation that has to repeated again because 80% of everyone on the call forgot some amount of detail.
- lkxijlewlf 4y ago> ... and better documented in email. This, so much. Let's just jump on a quick Teams meeting almost always can be taken care of in an email. And then it's documented and can be referenced and sent to all parties who may need to know that were not included in the "quick" Teams meeting.
- rhino369 4y agoQuick phone calls are often more efficient than emails. For status updates, downloads of information, sure email works. But if you want a back and forth exchange of ideas, talking is often much faster.
- heretogetout 4y agoTalking is indeed faster but if you're not recording the result in some document to share with others not on the call there's risk that valuable information will be lost.
- heretogetout 4y ago> Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. Every time I've tried this or seen it tried the meeting gets rescheduled and everyone's time is wasted. I wish it worked this way.
- dsr_ 4y agoYesterday I had a 1 hour meeting where 3 of the 7 participants needed to attend another meeting after 30 minutes. We reorganized the agenda to hit the issues that they were especially concerned about while they were available, and then did the other things in the next 20 minutes, finishing a little early. It's not impossible, it just requires a culture of consideration, communication, and prioritization.
- heretogetout 4y agoI wonder if that's the key -- maybe it's acceptable to shorten one meeting on your behalf (or at least your participation in that meeting) if the reason you'll miss this meeting is that you'll be in a different meeting. As long as you're in some time-wasting activity, they're satisfied. I say mostly tongue in cheek...
- fleddr 4y agoThat's funny if it wasn't true. "I have to get out of the meeting as I need to work on a task." A task? Ok, so you can stay? It fits right into "wow, jealous of your agenda"...when it has some blank spots. The spots you actually do work, but somehow are regarded as slack.
- hinkley 4y ago"He's out of line, but he's right."
- torvald 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- SkyPuncher 4y ago> As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. I worked as a contractor for a while with a 32 hour/week schedule. I was essentially just as productive as I was full time. Reality is for most creative jobs, there's a fraction of your work week where you're extremely productive. Everything else is just rounding out the admin work while your brain is mush.
- hinkley 4y agoNothing illustrates this quite like the task that is marked as 'half a week' and some manager doesn't understand why you can't do two of those in the same week. Like, if a marathon only takes 6 hours then why can't you do a second one on Sunday? And if I harass you enough can you do another one on Saturday afternoon as well?
- coldcode 4y agoWhen I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs of effort) and burndown charts (which is antiagile and idiotic given all the changes). The real issue is institutional insanity, assuming you can direct engineers like they were machines. Until you fix the institution you can't change the hours.
- jelling 4y agoThe only thing I support more than WFH is my competitors working 20% less. If they're doing this to compete for talent, go ahead by all means. I suspect they need to do something like this also because they're a UK SaaS company (so lower wages to start) serving the low-end of the non-profit market (price sensitive buyers). And they don't have the enterprise features to compete with Salesforce and CRM for the high-end segment.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoThe goal is to keep expanding these trials until labor law ratchets the work week down for everyone to 4 days. It will take time, but it will happen. If you as a freelancer want to work five days a week (or more), by all means, spend your life in such a manner. The rest of us work to live, not live to work.
- ako 4y agoLaws mostly do not apply across borders, and many of your competitors are in other countries. How do you think you can compete if your competitor's employees work 25% more?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoYou disadvantage foreign firms with cross border financial/policy mechanisms, in the same way you encourage better labor and environmental practices for work outsourced abroad. This is a well worn policy path. A race to the bottom can avoided with laws and regulation.
- cecilpl2 4y agoMy company does max 30 minute meetings. It's great and somehow everything still gets discussed. Occasionally we run a bit long but everyone knows you can only rely on people to be there for the first 30 minutes. I'm in a Staff role with my fingers in multiple projects across several teams, and I still only have 2-3 hours of meetings a day.
- fleddr 4y agoGreat practice. We're doing a similar thing and although these meetings sometimes run late, it's now culturally accepted that invitees just type "need to drop" and leave. When this is normalized, people learn to get to the point.
- adamsmith143 4y ago>only have 2-3 hours of meetings a day. Only?? It's surprising you tolerate even that much.
- cecilpl2 4y agoMaybe you are not aware of what Staff Engineer roles tend to involve. There's lots of technical direction, scoping, working with other teams, etc.
- chaostheory 4y agoYes, there’s only so much work that you can get done in one day. A lot of time is also spent on things like social interaction. What a 4 day work week offers is more flexibility. ie it’ll allow for either more quiet days of work or allow people to compress their work week and have more time to relax
- paxys 4y agoI'd argue that the majority of office settings don't have moments of slack, but rather moments of productivity. This same productivity can be achieved in wayy less time than the standard 40 hours/week.
- fleddr 4y agoI can only agree, depending on what you include in "productivity". I'd say it's incredibly common for a modern office worker to be engaged in email, meetings and chat for some 4-6 hours per day. Not only does this leave little time to do actual tasks, that little time is also highly fragmented across the day. It's a point I've made repeatedly on similar threads: the problem with modern office work is too much collaboration. Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it.
- sdeframond 4y ago> Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it. One could argue that we virtually never do actual work. Machines or remote workers do. All we are doing is defining, communicating and controlling others' work.
- Mo3 4y agoThat's arguably also work.
- sdeframond 4y agoTrue. Figuring out what to do is work. My point is collaboration (aka "figuring out what to do when") is pretty much the essence of our work. It is machines or remote workers that are "actually doing it", as I believe GP means it.
- al_borland 4y agoGive me a project to work on by myself and it will be done in 2 days. Give me the same project with a team of people to help and it will take months, it might never get done. Just recently I had to migrate a website to some new servers with a new OS. Server build, fully automating the post-build and deployment, code changes, and testing… done in 2 days. Working with other teams around networking, change management, etc…. 9 months of waiting and hell.
- missedthecue 4y agoIf you can do your work week in 4 days without losing productivity, you don't have anywhere near enough responsibilities.
- fleddr 4y agoThat makes no sense. I have exactly the same responsibilities as before my switch. I also have exactly the same responsibilities as my peers working 5 days. And yet I successfully squeeze those 5 days into 4, and it wasn't even that hard. Magic? No, modern office work is incredibly ineffective. Most of the day is spent collaborating with almost no part of the day spent on actually doing things.
- missedthecue 4y agoThat's what I'm saying. If you put 5 days of work into 4, you didn't have enough work before the switch.
- hinkley 4y agoI had a boss who was very sensitive to the fact that most meetings have several agendas, that half of the team doesn't give a shit about a third of the agenda, and so if you let the wrong people start talking first, then the entire team sits there for an hour when they are only interested in 15 minutes out of that hour (often at the end). So you start with the things everyone cares about and work your way down the list. The upside/downside to this is that you can't filibuster on something that matters to you but nobody else cares about, because they already left the room before you started. But of course neither can any of the other people who think their hill is as valuable as yours.
- hardware2win 4y ago>When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time. So why pay cut
- Termitiono 4y agoI'm quite surprised how much I can do in my spare time on my small startup than often enough in my day to day job.