This is partly untrue.<p>PM Marin has proposed this idea as "utopia" in August 2019. When she presented this vision, she was not yet PM.<p>Additionally, she proposed 6 hour work-day OR 4 work-day week, not AND.<p>It is kind of weird that here in Finland this was "nice idea, but probably problematic to implement" when this was on the news in August. And now it pops out in not-so-respected news media like this.
When I was a nerdy teenager I imagined that by a date like 2020 humankind would have cured cancer, built a base on the Moon or Mars, eradicated infectious diseases and taken control over climate and weather. It turns out that in the real world progress is a lot slower than in the imagination of a sci-fi-imbued teenager. It turns out that solving problems takes work. A lot of it.<p>If people work less, especially if engineers, scientists, doctors etc work less, then technological progress will be taking place slower than it is currently. The disappointment of my teenage self with 2030 will then be even greater than that with 2020.<p>I'm genuinely puzzled by the general anti-work sentiment I perceive on HN (maybe my perception is simply incorrect). I'd expect that most folks here work as engineers or in a similar field that rewards with interesting and meaningful problems and that a substantial fraction had once been sci-fi-imbued teenagers like myself and possibly feel the same disappointment with the pace of technological progress.<p>I'm very worried that the anti-work movement is (inadvertently?) pushing on the breaks of technological progress :-(
A six hour day is plenty if you actually work and if you have a bit of discipline. Most people don't. They spend much of their day just goofing off - wasting their own time and often the time of their coworkers.<p>I bet most of you reading this do not spend 8-10-12 or whatever number of hours you claim to be at work actually working productively. You goof off often as much as half the time. Possibly more if you work for someone else.<p>_Work_ when you are at work.<p>If you are not actually working or if you are tired and unfocused: go home. If you are disciplined about this you will outperform those who spend more hours at work _easily_.
I wonder what a plausible model for productivity by hours work is, and whether it varies by occupation.<p>Especially for piecemeal labor, after getting to the point where you maintain your baseline level of skill (say, 10 hours/week?), it seems like each marginal hour will have less productivity than the previous. It probably never drops to negative, unless we're talking 80 hour weeks.<p>It's less clear to me that the same is true of so-called knowledge workers. Or, at least, the baseline is much higher. My bet would be that an engineer who only works 10 hours/week is going to be less productive, on an hourly basis, than one who works 20 hours/week. I'm not sure what the inflection point would be, though.<p>I think a better model would be having a year or two of relatively long workweeks (40 hours a week) to be followed by a year or two of vacation and education, instead of 20 hours/week consistently.<p>Another approach would be decreasing the retirement age. I'm less a fan of this, as too many people end up depressed and lost after they leave the workforce. Plus, it's a raw deal for people who die before they retire.
I'm possibly going to go against the grain here but I'll speak my truth...6 hours honestly feels like too little time and isn't necessarily something to celebrate.<p>If I only worked for 6 hours and 4 days I'd lose my mind. I've tried it and I didn't like it one bit. May be that's just me but I enjoy my work so much I wish there were 25 hours.
I wasn’t alive when the work week was shortened to 5 days from 6 but it is my understanding that the conversation this sort of a proposal Sparks is the exact same as that proposal back then did. It’s kind of amusing.
I don't think it should be assumed that less time at work is necessarily preferable. What will people do with all their additional spare time? Sure, they might spend their days learning art, history, philosophy. They might take up writing poetry, painting or learning the piano. Or, they might vegetate in front of the TV, take up drinking as a hobby, argue with strangers online and slowly decay into existential nihilism.<p>The devil will make work for idle hands.