4 ms·
I don't think 6h/day of work is particularly unreasonable, if you can avoid losing blocks of time to useless activities (unneeded meetings, or waiting for peopl
by rdl 13y ago
I don't think 6h/day of work is particularly unreasonable, if you can avoid losing blocks of time to useless activities (unneeded meetings, or waiting for people).
If you're remote, and only clock-in when actually working, spending 3-4h/day working productively can easily outdo someone spending 10h/day in an office. I've worked in places where my ultimate client billable rate was obscene, and tracked to the 6min or 15min interval, but we also had "house time" for other projects. A day where you spent 3h directly working for the customer and nothing else was perfectly fine (especially if you blocked the entire day out with "need to be available for client" so no one else could interrupt you.)
Spending the downtime doing actually interesting research (not so much 20% time as 50% time) was awesome.
- smsm42 13y agoHow shorter work day would eliminate any useless activities? Useless activities happen not because work day is too long but because work processes not organized perfectly. Shorter workday would not make processes any better, so the same percentage of time would be wasted.
- rdl 13y agoWhen the day is artificially constrained, you have a good excuse to get rid of non-critical activities. It's like YC -- "meeting with investors for coffee" (or other good but non-key activities) is always viewed as "a good thing to do", but over the 3 months of YC you have license to tell them to wait.
- smsm42 13y agoThis only works for short periods of "burst" activities, if it is routine then the waste is distributed more or less equally so you get the same percentage of waste unless you work for very short periods. I.e. if somebody goes to smoke for 10 mins every 2 hours (just an example), then he would be out for 1/12 of time regardless of how many hours he works, as long as its substantially more than 2. If he really-really needs to finish something in 3 hours, he may forgo the smoke break once or twice, but if we take a period of a year, it will revert to regular schedule soon.
- spaboleo 13y agoI agree and this kind of work day contraint is by far not suitable for everyone. If you'd tell average Joe, working in retail in some DIY market filling the shelves (just an example for a rather simple job, no implications, judgement or anything) that he from now on would have to work just 6h instead of 8h a day for the same paycheck...would this make him do the work more deliberately? I highly doubt it.
- rdl 13y agoPaying for piecework (or sales commission) does work in that kind of environment, though.
- danohuiginn 13y agoIt can also be worse. Some useless activities aren't fixed amounts, rather than proportional to the number of hours worked.
- antjanus 13y agoAt my old job we had a saying. "If you get a solid 4 hours of coding done a day, you've had a productive day"