8 ms·

Average worker now logs off at 4 p.m. on Fridays

70 points by mji 3y ago

hn2x 3y ago
interesting, how about we check the stats next friday?
ricardobeat 3y ago
> Productivity dips on Fridays — especially in the afternoon — whether workers are in offices or at home, researchers at Texas A&M found The study in question is from the 2017-2018 period which kind of breaks the premise of the whole article. Also from the same study, to nobody's surprise: > The study’s findings suggest that fatigue and stress can accumulate throughout the workweek, potentially leading to decreased productivity, particularly on Fridays
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Do you think slacking off a little has changed with the massive shift to work from home?
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    Absolutely, instead of pretend-work and twiddling thumbs people simply log off at the end of their shift, or take breaks when necessary. It seems much healthier to me vs traditional power plays over working hours that result in no benefit for anyone.
    - emseetech 3y ago
      I've telecommuted for most my career, long before covid, and there's so many perks of working from home that I forget until I'm back in the office. Little things like throwing in a load of laundry while I wait for circleci or being able to knock out 20 pushups or stretch while I'm thinking about a problem. I can cook homemade meals instead of having to meal prep (or eat out if I don't get the chance). At the end of the week, I come back to a home that's been neglected and have to spend a chunk of the weekend getting things back in order before the next week starts. Working from home means I can do five minutes here, ten minutes there, and the place stays clean. And because I've been doing it so long, I'm more productive and more relaxed at home. Working from home is a skill, and if the industry could just make up their minds and commit to it, more people would develop that skill and productivity would equalize or increase.
      - willmadden 3y ago
        It works for self-motivated people.
        emseetech 3y ago
        Doesn't everything?
        sandspar 3y ago
        The self-motivated were likely a hindrance during the building of the pyramids. Scientists are still investigating what time the pyramid builders logged off.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  Also measuring productivity is difficult in many cases. I can sometimes be more productive just thinking in the shower in the morning than I am copying text from one place to another.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Anecdotally, after lunch on Friday has always been low productivity. No deploys allowed also really reduces any urgency among devs.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Fatigue and stress in the modern workplace certainly doesn’t get wiped out to zero by Sunday night. Personally I’m looking for early retirement
PessimalDecimal 3y ago
The graph shows a significant shift in behavior (not just on Fridays) in Q1 2023, i.e. when many many companies initiated mass layoffs. I'm not surprised, as this lines up with my own observations in personal life. After that, many remaining employees reevaluated their relationships with their employers and with work in general.
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  It goes both way. You may fear for your job and decide that works more, especially if it's a good job you want to keep or/and if the market is uncertain.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
ketanmaheshwari 3y ago
I was at Nvidia GTC and attended a panel about AI regulation where one of the panelist was a local congressman from bay area. He said to the effect that he is an avid supporter of the 4-day work week and that AI may just be the catalyst for the shift to go mainstream. I think it is high time the society looks into this as a way for it to be more productive as counterintuitive as it may sound.
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  I'd rather retire early. Personally, I find it hard to be productive with a 4-day workweek. I think we should push to lower the retirement age instead of shortening the workweek.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Hell no. "Put off living until you're 60" is the hypercrunch polar opposite of "live a balanced life at all times".
    - gwbas1c 3y ago
      That's retiring 10 years early. I really enjoy my career, and I'd like to enjoy my retirement with a younger body.
xyst 3y ago
the 9-5 is dead. My hours are more like 8-2 or 9-1. Sometimes I log off after lunch. Remote work is awesome. No more dealing with impatient dick heads on the road. No more contributing to the destruction of the local environment via tail pipe emissions or tire wear particles. More importantly more time to spend with family, friends, or personal projects. Overall happiness is increased. I’ll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO. Is it a hidden financial gain for CEOs to fill the offices? Is it a false flag op to “appease” stock holders (“hey guys pandemic over, we are working to returning to normal. Pardon any poor quarterly results for the year”)? Leaked Amazon doc shows reduced physical office footprint saved company billions. All data is showing forced RTO policies are counter intuitive and counter productive.
- mooreds 3y ago
  > My hours are more like 8-2 or 9-1. Sometimes I log off after lunch. > I'll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO. Uh, the first excerpt might help answer the question you pose in the second.
  - PessimalDecimal 3y ago
    Only if we assume companies can't measure employees' productivity and output, only their hours of butt-in-chair. Is that true?
  - xyst 3y ago
    I don’t understand. All work is completed for the day (or even the next couple of days…). What’s the point of staying logged into a computer staring at nothing?
    - constantcrying 3y ago
      You are literally defrauding your employer. The fact that you should be available, but aren't, alone is enough to make sure of that.
      - 3y ago
numbsafari 3y ago
When I was in High School, back in the 90s, I took a “business management” class. The teacher had been an auditor on Wall Street, and still maintained some side work as a tax accountant for some wealthy clientele. Every Friday, he came in with a copy of the Wall Street Journal, wearing his usual expertly tailored suit, sat at his desk in the front of the room, and asked the class “What day is it?” The class would answer in unison, “Its Friday”. “And what happens on Friday?”, he’d ask, to which we would all dutifully chant: “Absolutely nothing.” He’d open his paper and we had the rest of period to do whatever, so long as it didn’t result in him being interrupted. White collar fucking off on Fridays is nothing new.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Was it a good class overall? I.e., was it an educational win to have him as a teacher despite his Fridays policy?
  - numbsafari 3y ago
    It was, IMO, a great class.
- hiyer 3y ago
  True. 15 years ago when I was working at a large digital storage vendor, the joke was that Friday afternoon was for discussing each others' weekend plans; and Monday morning was for discussing the outcomes of those plans.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Friday's when we all work for the government anyway (the last 20% of the workweek). ;p
  - int_19h 3y ago
    There's a Russian joke that takes it up to 11 - about a new manager who is assigned to a department, and on his first day he convenes an all-hands meeting and explains the new work schedule: Monday: recuperating after the weekend Tuesday: preparing for work Wednesday: work Thursday: recuperating after work Friday: preparing for the weekend After the presentation, he asks the audience if they have any question. The most senior employer rises and asks, "So wait, you mean we're going to toil like horses EVERY WEDNESDAY NOW???!" (As far as I can tell, this dates back to Soviet times at least, if not earlier.)
crooked-v 3y ago
That late? Wow.
- vundercind 3y ago
  You stop doing shit around lunch. 4’s just when enough other people have left or logged off that you feel like you’ve got some herd protection doing the same.
jawns 3y ago
The article doesn't say whether the tracked workers are hourly or salaried, but it makes a big difference. The article also doesn't touch on total hours worked during the week, but that makes a big difference, too. If hourly workers are logging off early on Friday, it could be because they've already put in enough hours earlier in the week that they'd be veering into overtime territory if they were to work late on Friday, and so it's their employer, rather than them, who is making the call. But if it's salaried workers who are logging off early on Friday, it's likely because they recognize that working late on a Friday isn't actually going to accomplish much (especially if others are leaving early, too) and so it's not worth putting in the extra time.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
Since WFH started I've come to find it futile to expect much of anything to happen after lunch on Fridays.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Do you want important things happening on a Friday afternoon? If a change creates a problem then something is broken all weekend or you're working Saturday. If everyone is tired by Friday then any work done won't be as good of quality as work done earlier in the week. Fridays should be used for sync up meetings, planning for the following week, and retrospectives on the last however many weeks of work. Any of those meetings should be earlier in the day. The only communication out of any of that should be latency tolerant (questions won't be answered until Monday at the earliest). This allows people to check out earlier on Fridays if they need/want. Forcing butts in seats until the quitting bell rings is a waste of everyone's time.
bluefishinit 3y ago
4 day work weeks are the way to go. When I have 3 consecutive days to relax I'm 100% more recharged then when I have two. It's not even close.
- vundercind 3y ago
  Two days isn’t even a break, it’s just necessary time to catch up on the work of maintaining a household so you at least start the work week not living in a falling-down house full of dirty clothes and garbage. Especially with kids. WFH helps a ton with that, though. Can make dinners during the week instead of prepping on the weekend as much (do most of your mise during a meeting or something), don’t lose time to a commute so there’s more time to get stuff done during the week, get a couple loads of laundry run when it’s time to stand up and stretch and look away from the screen for a few minutes anyway, et c. It saves the weekend for actual relaxation, or at least more of it for that.
  - hirvi74 3y ago
    > living in a falling-down house full of dirty clothes and garbage. This is my life, and I just accept it now. I've tried so hard to change. I've tried to balance it all. I don't/can't care anymore. My place is always a wreck and so be it. I only have two days to myself and I value other things in life more.
- prettywoman 3y ago
  [dead]
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rayxi271828 3y ago
The biggest thing about the whole commute is the delayed negative impact to health in general. This is of course worse in Asian cities with super congested traffic. When you spend 2-3 hours/day commuting, it becomes very hard to maintain a regular workout schedule. A commute time of perhaps 20 minutes one way is manageable. Anything beyond that simply eats into your quality of life, really.
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  And make it a 20-30 minute bike ride... the traffic will not delay you; only deep snow or civil disaster will stop you; you will save money on gas; you may not need a car at all; you will get fit; you will save 30-minutes of going to the gym; you will suffer less from stress; you will achieve at least 2 things every single day; you may also be in nature, go through a park, or along a beach - if you are lucky, or deliberately choose your dull jobs wisely, to get a premium commute.
tra3 3y ago
When do people log on? I know after going fully remote I started working earlier in the day.
- hirvi74 3y ago
  I log on later... like often to the point of being late. Some days, I log in and go back to sleep for an hour or so. I'm not built for a "career." I'm a night-owl kind of person, and I just can't make myself function any differently. Remote work greatly benefits me with a relaxed time schedule, since no matter when I log on/go to work, my brain doesn't start working until about 1:00pm/13:00.
jnaina 3y ago
Hmm...In this new era of mostly WFH, the boundaries between work and life are blurring, at least for me. My work day starts at 8AM and goes all the way to around 12PM, with my other daily life chores/activities interleaved throughout the day. Even during weekends, I put aside hours replying to lower priority emails and completing other work commitments that may have piled up from the week before. If anything, this WFH movement has led to more hours worked/higher productivity for me (and my immediate colleagues).
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  What do you do with all of your free time?
kkfx 3y ago
Few random notes to help me through a discussion (if happen) trying to form a coherent picture: - observation 1 :: it's nothing new we tend to work less, there are studies divided by cohort of age for instance stating newer generations do work less, engage less than older ones for instances (sorry I do not have a link at hand) and it's not new the sentiment "we work to live, not live to work", I generally add that before people know they can get more working more, for the entire life, i.e. people know they can slowly improve their lives working hard. With the declared WEF agenda "in 2030 you'll own nothing", with evident push toward smart-cities populated of evident de-facto slaves who are bound in an assembly line, earning to live, consuming all they earn in services they need, no heritage, no ownership, anything is decided outside the smart-city/forced labor camp and those inside are just obedient slaves those who think this will happen feel NO REASON to work since their work can't improve their condition for their life and get passed to newer generations; - observation 2 :: despite a very obscene business-driven digital evolution against the civil society, tailored to reach the no-ownership, no-competence, no-future slaves model, a real Fordlandia, not Telosa, Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, tomorrow NY, SF, ... things start to be digital a little bit, meaning a gazillion of classic tasks that classically demand much work to be done now are quick or even automated, in other terms we need to work much less in various fields, and managers cray in tears that less enslaved workers start to care about their life as people not they work-life as life; - observation 3 :: there is a dichotomy in our society between "those from the old generation" who reject the digital world, generally oppressed by those who rightly push digitization BUT for their own economical and political agendas against all the others and those who feel the potential power of the digital model but cry against the "old generation" who fighting it allow it's evolution in a way AGAINST the most instead of unite and pretend a good evolution for all, this create an immense amount of stress between two cohort and as a result fatigue, those from "the old generation" are tired of the modern life, those from the "digital" one are tired of a slow and bad evolution due to a small cohort of kleptocrats and a large cohort of luddites, and both cohorts can't fight their enemies, giving up instead "in the end we will all be dead" or "pulvis sumus et in pulverem reverteris"; To solve this issue the recipe for me is clear: we need to envisage a good future. We need to own our life, so we need deurbanization not in the USA model of suburbs but in the "Riviera model" of the EU, meaning spread homes AND workspace intermixed, with a string push to the home office, meaning homes where most people work and live in the same place, NOT just from remote, meaning a dentist have a home at II floor and it's cabinet at I floor, customers came from one side, personal life on the other, laundry have the working area in the basement, the residential area upstairs and so on, for eligible professions, while small buildings at short distance do the rest and only few districts exists, heading as much as possible to the dark factory model for the rest we can't do otherwise so far. This model is a nightmare for the 1% because service and enslavement industry plunge on it, no one buy the sharing economy, no one choose Uber or JustEat in this model and so on, people understand the value of ownership and do not want to came back, while terrifies the most because they fear the change and the responsibility of ownership, being slaves means having nothing to think, not feeling the pressure of the commandment and most aren't really adult enough to self-organize their lives. But that's is. This is the best model, potentially very easy to adapt to a changing world IMVHO. Keeping up today trends we will end up in a broken dystopi than can't last longer.
xtiansimon 3y ago
And what about M, T, W, and/or Th work to 8 or 9?
mikhailfranco 3y ago
When I worked in the UK in the 1980s, lunchtimes were occupied with one of two activities... Monday-Thursday, we would go for a run, often alone on our individual schedules, but sometimes in a group. The target was a pub a few miles away. We would sprint down the hill, touch the pub, and run back up to the site. It was a serious pursuit, there was a fiercely contested leader-board maintained in the office. New junior hires were challenged to beat the old-beards - many of which were ex-military, very proud, and very hard to beat. Friday, we would would drive to a pub (occasionally the same hallowed turn, but often some other local hostelry), have a long lunch, drink a few beers (most of us did not have to drive home), and discuss old times, new technology, big projects, legendary deadlines that were beaten, and stories about sport or running. What was left of Friday afternoon was just tidying-up work and a some admin, combined with a little chit-chat about the venues and parties that would occupy the weekend.

70 points by mji 3y ago

hn2x 3y ago

interesting, how about we check the stats next friday?

> Productivity dips on Fridays — especially in the afternoon — whether workers are in offices or at home, researchers at Texas A&M found The study in question is from the 2017-2018 period which kind of breaks the premise of the whole article. Also from the same study, to nobody's surprise: > The study’s findings suggest that fatigue and stress can accumulate throughout the workweek, potentially leading to decreased productivity, particularly on Fridays

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Do you think slacking off a little has changed with the massive shift to work from home?
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  Absolutely, instead of pretend-work and twiddling thumbs people simply log off at the end of their shift, or take breaks when necessary. It seems much healthier to me vs traditional power plays over working hours that result in no benefit for anyone.
  - emseetech 3y ago
    I've telecommuted for most my career, long before covid, and there's so many perks of working from home that I forget until I'm back in the office. Little things like throwing in a load of laundry while I wait for circleci or being able to knock out 20 pushups or stretch while I'm thinking about a problem. I can cook homemade meals instead of having to meal prep (or eat out if I don't get the chance). At the end of the week, I come back to a home that's been neglected and have to spend a chunk of the weekend getting things back in order before the next week starts. Working from home means I can do five minutes here, ten minutes there, and the place stays clean. And because I've been doing it so long, I'm more productive and more relaxed at home. Working from home is a skill, and if the industry could just make up their minds and commit to it, more people would develop that skill and productivity would equalize or increase.
    - willmadden 3y ago
      It works for self-motivated people.
      - emseetech 3y ago
        Doesn't everything?
        sandspar 3y ago
        The self-motivated were likely a hindrance during the building of the pyramids. Scientists are still investigating what time the pyramid builders logged off.
jimbob45 3y ago
Also measuring productivity is difficult in many cases. I can sometimes be more productive just thinking in the shower in the morning than I am copying text from one place to another.
MattGaiser 3y ago
Anecdotally, after lunch on Friday has always been low productivity. No deploys allowed also really reduces any urgency among devs.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Fatigue and stress in the modern workplace certainly doesn’t get wiped out to zero by Sunday night. Personally I’m looking for early retirement

PessimalDecimal 3y ago

The graph shows a significant shift in behavior (not just on Fridays) in Q1 2023, i.e. when many many companies initiated mass layoffs. I'm not surprised, as this lines up with my own observations in personal life. After that, many remaining employees reevaluated their relationships with their employers and with work in general.

yodsanklai 3y ago
It goes both way. You may fear for your job and decide that works more, especially if it's a good job you want to keep or/and if the market is uncertain.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

ketanmaheshwari 3y ago

I was at Nvidia GTC and attended a panel about AI regulation where one of the panelist was a local congressman from bay area. He said to the effect that he is an avid supporter of the 4-day work week and that AI may just be the catalyst for the shift to go mainstream. I think it is high time the society looks into this as a way for it to be more productive as counterintuitive as it may sound.

gwbas1c 3y ago
I'd rather retire early. Personally, I find it hard to be productive with a 4-day workweek. I think we should push to lower the retirement age instead of shortening the workweek.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Hell no. "Put off living until you're 60" is the hypercrunch polar opposite of "live a balanced life at all times".
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    That's retiring 10 years early. I really enjoy my career, and I'd like to enjoy my retirement with a younger body.

xyst 3y ago

the 9-5 is dead. My hours are more like 8-2 or 9-1. Sometimes I log off after lunch. Remote work is awesome. No more dealing with impatient dick heads on the road. No more contributing to the destruction of the local environment via tail pipe emissions or tire wear particles. More importantly more time to spend with family, friends, or personal projects. Overall happiness is increased. I’ll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO. Is it a hidden financial gain for CEOs to fill the offices? Is it a false flag op to “appease” stock holders (“hey guys pandemic over, we are working to returning to normal. Pardon any poor quarterly results for the year”)? Leaked Amazon doc shows reduced physical office footprint saved company billions. All data is showing forced RTO policies are counter intuitive and counter productive.

mooreds 3y ago
> My hours are more like 8-2 or 9-1. Sometimes I log off after lunch. > I'll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO. Uh, the first excerpt might help answer the question you pose in the second.
- PessimalDecimal 3y ago
  Only if we assume companies can't measure employees' productivity and output, only their hours of butt-in-chair. Is that true?
- xyst 3y ago
  I don’t understand. All work is completed for the day (or even the next couple of days…). What’s the point of staying logged into a computer staring at nothing?
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    You are literally defrauding your employer. The fact that you should be available, but aren't, alone is enough to make sure of that.
    - 3y ago

numbsafari 3y ago

When I was in High School, back in the 90s, I took a “business management” class. The teacher had been an auditor on Wall Street, and still maintained some side work as a tax accountant for some wealthy clientele. Every Friday, he came in with a copy of the Wall Street Journal, wearing his usual expertly tailored suit, sat at his desk in the front of the room, and asked the class “What day is it?” The class would answer in unison, “Its Friday”. “And what happens on Friday?”, he’d ask, to which we would all dutifully chant: “Absolutely nothing.” He’d open his paper and we had the rest of period to do whatever, so long as it didn’t result in him being interrupted. White collar fucking off on Fridays is nothing new.

CoastalCoder 3y ago
Was it a good class overall? I.e., was it an educational win to have him as a teacher despite his Fridays policy?
- numbsafari 3y ago
  It was, IMO, a great class.
hiyer 3y ago
True. 15 years ago when I was working at a large digital storage vendor, the joke was that Friday afternoon was for discussing each others' weekend plans; and Monday morning was for discussing the outcomes of those plans.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Friday's when we all work for the government anyway (the last 20% of the workweek). ;p
- int_19h 3y ago
  There's a Russian joke that takes it up to 11 - about a new manager who is assigned to a department, and on his first day he convenes an all-hands meeting and explains the new work schedule: Monday: recuperating after the weekend Tuesday: preparing for work Wednesday: work Thursday: recuperating after work Friday: preparing for the weekend After the presentation, he asks the audience if they have any question. The most senior employer rises and asks, "So wait, you mean we're going to toil like horses EVERY WEDNESDAY NOW???!" (As far as I can tell, this dates back to Soviet times at least, if not earlier.)

crooked-v 3y ago

That late? Wow.

vundercind 3y ago
You stop doing shit around lunch. 4’s just when enough other people have left or logged off that you feel like you’ve got some herd protection doing the same.

jawns 3y ago

The article doesn't say whether the tracked workers are hourly or salaried, but it makes a big difference. The article also doesn't touch on total hours worked during the week, but that makes a big difference, too. If hourly workers are logging off early on Friday, it could be because they've already put in enough hours earlier in the week that they'd be veering into overtime territory if they were to work late on Friday, and so it's their employer, rather than them, who is making the call. But if it's salaried workers who are logging off early on Friday, it's likely because they recognize that working late on a Friday isn't actually going to accomplish much (especially if others are leaving early, too) and so it's not worth putting in the extra time.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

Since WFH started I've come to find it futile to expect much of anything to happen after lunch on Fridays.

giantrobot 3y ago
Do you want important things happening on a Friday afternoon? If a change creates a problem then something is broken all weekend or you're working Saturday. If everyone is tired by Friday then any work done won't be as good of quality as work done earlier in the week. Fridays should be used for sync up meetings, planning for the following week, and retrospectives on the last however many weeks of work. Any of those meetings should be earlier in the day. The only communication out of any of that should be latency tolerant (questions won't be answered until Monday at the earliest). This allows people to check out earlier on Fridays if they need/want. Forcing butts in seats until the quitting bell rings is a waste of everyone's time.

bluefishinit 3y ago

4 day work weeks are the way to go. When I have 3 consecutive days to relax I'm 100% more recharged then when I have two. It's not even close.

vundercind 3y ago
Two days isn’t even a break, it’s just necessary time to catch up on the work of maintaining a household so you at least start the work week not living in a falling-down house full of dirty clothes and garbage. Especially with kids. WFH helps a ton with that, though. Can make dinners during the week instead of prepping on the weekend as much (do most of your mise during a meeting or something), don’t lose time to a commute so there’s more time to get stuff done during the week, get a couple loads of laundry run when it’s time to stand up and stretch and look away from the screen for a few minutes anyway, et c. It saves the weekend for actual relaxation, or at least more of it for that.
- hirvi74 3y ago
  > living in a falling-down house full of dirty clothes and garbage. This is my life, and I just accept it now. I've tried so hard to change. I've tried to balance it all. I don't/can't care anymore. My place is always a wreck and so be it. I only have two days to myself and I value other things in life more.
prettywoman 3y ago
[dead]

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rayxi271828 3y ago

The biggest thing about the whole commute is the delayed negative impact to health in general. This is of course worse in Asian cities with super congested traffic. When you spend 2-3 hours/day commuting, it becomes very hard to maintain a regular workout schedule. A commute time of perhaps 20 minutes one way is manageable. Anything beyond that simply eats into your quality of life, really.

mikhailfranco 3y ago
And make it a 20-30 minute bike ride... the traffic will not delay you; only deep snow or civil disaster will stop you; you will save money on gas; you may not need a car at all; you will get fit; you will save 30-minutes of going to the gym; you will suffer less from stress; you will achieve at least 2 things every single day; you may also be in nature, go through a park, or along a beach - if you are lucky, or deliberately choose your dull jobs wisely, to get a premium commute.

tra3 3y ago

When do people log on? I know after going fully remote I started working earlier in the day.

hirvi74 3y ago
I log on later... like often to the point of being late. Some days, I log in and go back to sleep for an hour or so. I'm not built for a "career." I'm a night-owl kind of person, and I just can't make myself function any differently. Remote work greatly benefits me with a relaxed time schedule, since no matter when I log on/go to work, my brain doesn't start working until about 1:00pm/13:00.

jnaina 3y ago

Hmm...In this new era of mostly WFH, the boundaries between work and life are blurring, at least for me. My work day starts at 8AM and goes all the way to around 12PM, with my other daily life chores/activities interleaved throughout the day. Even during weekends, I put aside hours replying to lower priority emails and completing other work commitments that may have piled up from the week before. If anything, this WFH movement has led to more hours worked/higher productivity for me (and my immediate colleagues).

shepherdjerred 3y ago
What do you do with all of your free time?

kkfx 3y ago

Few random notes to help me through a discussion (if happen) trying to form a coherent picture: - observation 1 :: it's nothing new we tend to work less, there are studies divided by cohort of age for instance stating newer generations do work less, engage less than older ones for instances (sorry I do not have a link at hand) and it's not new the sentiment "we work to live, not live to work", I generally add that before people know they can get more working more, for the entire life, i.e. people know they can slowly improve their lives working hard. With the declared WEF agenda "in 2030 you'll own nothing", with evident push toward smart-cities populated of evident de-facto slaves who are bound in an assembly line, earning to live, consuming all they earn in services they need, no heritage, no ownership, anything is decided outside the smart-city/forced labor camp and those inside are just obedient slaves those who think this will happen feel NO REASON to work since their work can't improve their condition for their life and get passed to newer generations; - observation 2 :: despite a very obscene business-driven digital evolution against the civil society, tailored to reach the no-ownership, no-competence, no-future slaves model, a real Fordlandia, not Telosa, Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, tomorrow NY, SF, ... things start to be digital a little bit, meaning a gazillion of classic tasks that classically demand much work to be done now are quick or even automated, in other terms we need to work much less in various fields, and managers cray in tears that less enslaved workers start to care about their life as people not they work-life as life; - observation 3 :: there is a dichotomy in our society between "those from the old generation" who reject the digital world, generally oppressed by those who rightly push digitization BUT for their own economical and political agendas against all the others and those who feel the potential power of the digital model but cry against the "old generation" who fighting it allow it's evolution in a way AGAINST the most instead of unite and pretend a good evolution for all, this create an immense amount of stress between two cohort and as a result fatigue, those from "the old generation" are tired of the modern life, those from the "digital" one are tired of a slow and bad evolution due to a small cohort of kleptocrats and a large cohort of luddites, and both cohorts can't fight their enemies, giving up instead "in the end we will all be dead" or "pulvis sumus et in pulverem reverteris"; To solve this issue the recipe for me is clear: we need to envisage a good future. We need to own our life, so we need deurbanization not in the USA model of suburbs but in the "Riviera model" of the EU, meaning spread homes AND workspace intermixed, with a string push to the home office, meaning homes where most people work and live in the same place, NOT just from remote, meaning a dentist have a home at II floor and it's cabinet at I floor, customers came from one side, personal life on the other, laundry have the working area in the basement, the residential area upstairs and so on, for eligible professions, while small buildings at short distance do the rest and only few districts exists, heading as much as possible to the dark factory model for the rest we can't do otherwise so far. This model is a nightmare for the 1% because service and enslavement industry plunge on it, no one buy the sharing economy, no one choose Uber or JustEat in this model and so on, people understand the value of ownership and do not want to came back, while terrifies the most because they fear the change and the responsibility of ownership, being slaves means having nothing to think, not feeling the pressure of the commandment and most aren't really adult enough to self-organize their lives. But that's is. This is the best model, potentially very easy to adapt to a changing world IMVHO. Keeping up today trends we will end up in a broken dystopi than can't last longer.

xtiansimon 3y ago

And what about M, T, W, and/or Th work to 8 or 9?

mikhailfranco 3y ago

When I worked in the UK in the 1980s, lunchtimes were occupied with one of two activities... Monday-Thursday, we would go for a run, often alone on our individual schedules, but sometimes in a group. The target was a pub a few miles away. We would sprint down the hill, touch the pub, and run back up to the site. It was a serious pursuit, there was a fiercely contested leader-board maintained in the office. New junior hires were challenged to beat the old-beards - many of which were ex-military, very proud, and very hard to beat. Friday, we would would drive to a pub (occasionally the same hallowed turn, but often some other local hostelry), have a long lunch, drink a few beers (most of us did not have to drive home), and discuss old times, new technology, big projects, legendary deadlines that were beaten, and stories about sport or running. What was left of Friday afternoon was just tidying-up work and a some admin, combined with a little chit-chat about the venues and parties that would occupy the weekend.