Many companies think their employees are being productive for 40 hours a week, while it's actually somewhere between 10 and 20, with the rest being a big void. If you are <i>actually</i> doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.
There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity this will bring about (by allowing recharging, preventing burnout, etc.).
I worry that this already concedes too much. This allows for just as much stressful dominance of work over the rest of life, and shame over any deviation from this script, as maximizes productivity.<p>Even if my shorter-work-hours productivity doesn't match my longer-work-hours productivity, I'd still prefer shorter-work-hours, with no guilt over having those preferences. My goal in life is not to optimize everything I do for maximum benefit of my employer; I have my own priorities and trade-offs to worry about.
Great blog post. Does Okta have a four day work week yet?<p><a href="https://www.4dayweek.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.4dayweek.com/</a><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-week-uk.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...</a><p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/four-day-workweek-is-new-standard-for-40percent-of-companies-ey-study-finds.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/four-day-workweek-is-new-sta...</a>
I've just started a new role as an EM and because of disability have been able to reduce my hours (and proportionally my pay) down to 20hrs per week. I work only 9am-3pm [minus 1hr for lunch] on Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri. It's going well for me so far. My cognitive hours are nicely compressed into those time windows, so although it's still hard (due to disability stuff) I'm still finding it so so much easier and more fulfilling than toiling behind a physical desk for 40-60hrs a week, half of which I'd be mostly whiling away time or doing performative work. I spent over ten years doing just that...<p>I look back and see so much wasted time, and saw so many colleagues who seemed drained and generally rushed to fit in 'life' things around work. Family, friends, hobbies, medical appointments, enjoying nature [...]. It should be the opposite of this. Work should come second to life, especially if we have the luxury of making it so. Otherwise, what are we all doing??
<i>4DWW</i> - Four Day Work Week is the future. So many benefits for workers <i>and</i> the company! It's a win-win for many types of companies. Even if it's not a win for all companies, society would benefit greatly by mandating 4 days of 8 hours with no loss of pay as the standard.<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/these-companies-ran-an-experiment-pay-workers-their-full-salary-to-work-fewer-da" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/the...</a>
In my early 20s when I worked as an electrician I never felt that 40 hour long weeks were too much. Working as a programmer I definitely feel that it is way too much. The head (mine at least) really needs a lot more time to recuperate.
There is so much variability in the kind of work people do it's hard to make a rule that fits everyone. For knowledge workers I think 40 hours is near the top of productive time you are able to wring from people. Certainly some individuals could work much more if engaged, but on the whole, without a strong incentive otherwise, I think 40 hours is a maximum limit.
I've always felt a bit like an alien from outer space when trying to understand the work habits of modern humans. It seems we spend enough time doing what we think we have to do to survive that it feels like the only thing we actually do. Everything else in our life feels secondary. I'm not sure this is even normal in nature. Seems like a lot of animals spend much of their time just sort of hanging out. Does it honestly take so much time to cover your bases? I think not.<p>It feels as though the modern 9-5 lifestyle is a lie that no one questions. I just can't get behind it as long as I feel like our society doesn't actually require that much constant effort to maintain or even to keep pointed in the right direction.
If I buckle down I can do 10 hours a day 3 days a week for a few months, then I burn out four a while. If I do 4 to 6 hours a day of low to medium intensity work (focused debugging with interspersed Google searches and occasional HN breaks) 4 days a week, I’m able to keep it up forever. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do 9-5x5 ever again, especially having to go into an office.
8-to-5 is 45 hours a week. I'm still in the office, even for lunch.<p>Considering travel, it bumps up to 50 hrs/week.<p>I hate how this 10-hour "work tax" is always dismissed as part of 40 hour work week.
Yes it is. I have a job like that now that I got out of school. I've been working at it for 5 years and honestly it sucks all of my life away. Basically the week is all work with evenings being too tired to enjoy life and the weekends being about recovery for the next work week.<p>Luckily it's a tech job pays well, so I saved up enough so that I can quit. I'm doing that in a couple months, and after I'll just enjoy life and support myself with freelance work that I enjoy a lot more. F** the system, I couldn't care less about the success of any company or the products they produce.
"Finally, when the 40-hour workweek was established, two-income households were rare. Only 15.2% of married women were employed in 1940. But as of 2012, 60% of households had dual incomes.
When both members of a couple work, it leaves less time for children, chores, errands, food preparation, and everything else that must occur outside of working hours."<p>40 hour workweek is fine for most people, but I think HR ought to be more flexible in working hours and salary employees choose, based on their season of life. Because we are dual-income with 3 young children, I work 32 hrs instead of 40; but it's an odd arrangement I had to ask for. I see families in a simliar situation struggling, and I think it ought to be more of the norm to offer this without a company raising questions about productivity/loyalty/laziness/benefits etc.
Quantization of work is so weird to me in the context of software engineering.<p>Most of the work I do happens passively as I think about some problem. Much of this thinking occurs outside of the traditional 9-5 window.<p>"Amount of time spent presiding over a work PC" doesn't count as a useful metric in my book. I prefer to measure the quality of work via outcomes and customer feedback. Meetings are an unhappy exception to all of this, but they are a necessary evil. Eliminate unnecessary meetings with prejudice - They will come back like zombies if they were really that important to the business.<p>Contributions still need to be mapped to outcomes, but that has nothing inherently to do with a time dimension. Non-contributors and relative performance should still be quite obvious to management, even if you can't say exactly how much time was spent by each participant.
Back in the golden age of working from home, when internet service wasn't sufficient for for the barrage of pointless meetings, I was working no more than two hours per day. My coworkers and employers, who all worked in the office at the time, used to joke that I must be an entire team of people.<p>I still only get time for no more than two hours of actual work each day, but now that so many think they should expand to consume all the capabilities of the modern network by having endless meetings for no good reason, I'm much more exhausted when it comes to getting anything done during these two hours and productivity suffers as a result.<p>It is devastating how much less productive I've become spending more time working. I <i>want</i> to get things done.
At the beginning of the pandemic, as a cost-saving measure my company did furloughs, which for most of us were mandatory unpaid days off two days a week for 6 weeks. We could take off Sun/Mon, Mon/Tues, Thurs/Fri, Fri/Sun, or Mon/Friday, depending on coverage and what made sense regionally. (Our middle east offices worked Sun-Thu normally, the Islamic weekend is Fri/Sat)<p>I have to say, only 3 days "at work" in a week felt just a bit too few, and I was often rushing to get everything done that had to get done that week.<p>On the other hand, on US holiday weeks with Monday offs, are fantastic feelings work-wise. I feel like I get basically the same amount done in the week, and the weekend is considerably more relaxing- still tired Friday night, but Sunday afternoon and night isn't a mad dash of "finish all chores that need to be done before the weekend wraps up"<p>Things would be different if my job was something more service-focused, like a doctor or dentist or hair stylist, where by definition they're going to be at 20% less productive if they're only seeing clients/patients/etc for 4 days a week instead of 5, so I'm not quite sure how as a society we balance that out, but I really wish 4 day weeks were much more the norm, and if I ever run my own company, that's what we're going to aim for.
I think people conflate "being productive" with "work."<p>The work is simply the contractual agreement between you and your employer. He or it has a notion about how long it's supposed to take, and you do too. And so on your end, you have to be willing to give up a certain amount of freedom in order to stay productive enough for the workplace to want to award you for the time spent in their service, whether that time is productive or not.<p>On their end, they of course want you to be as productive as possible, but they also know that it's not possible 100% of the time. And so that is the basis for the contract.<p>Then there are ways around it. Say you can make a hack that'll make you able to complete the job in half that time, or less. Lots of people get paid obscene amounts of money for very little "work" but the value of that work is simply that high, and so that's what they're paid for it.<p>So instead in thinking in terms of hours or work, I tend to want to think in terms of how much time I need to provide value. And the less time that is, the better - for both parties. They get better value for money, and I get more time to dream up better ways of creating value.
I never realized that Robert Owens' quote codifying eight hours of work is from 1817. Good golly.<p>Our entire industrial mental model of work comes from at least two hundred years ago.
It's complicated. I would never want to work for 40 hours/wk (honestly 20 is about my limit) in a hierarchy, but I could easily see myself doing more than that in a partnership.<p>Yes, you get diminishing returns on work if you're working a lot of hours, but you can still get more done per day even if it's not as efficient. Also, constant immersion in a domain causes acceleration/synergies that you don't get with a more "healthy" work-life balance. That being said I think chasing this is never worth it unless you're getting the same share of the loot as everyone else. (Or if you're the one who's disproportionately set up to benefit from the group's success, but I generally consider that to be immoral)
In my stupidity, I've never understood when the 40h, or any X hour per week for that matter, became a requirement per law, instead of an upper limit for health safety.<p>For example, some different type of roads have different upper speed LIMIT. They also have a minimum required speed. Nobody is forced to drive at the upper limit constantly.<p>Today is not a good day, I'm having hard time putting my thoughts into words.<p>Moreover, I think it would be good to shift from hourly salary to daily salary. Whether you work 1h or 50hr in a particular day, it shouldn't matter, you should be paid for the day. We never say my hourly living cost when we talk about living expense, instead we say daily living cost. Which is a better metric in my opinion. One day of work should at least guarentee one day of living cost. This should be a LAW, that every employment (indipendently of hours) should guarentee per LAW the living expenses for a day. It might be hard for some kind of jobs, I understand. But I think we can do better than getting paid hourly.<p>I live with my parents, so I can save some money. Honeslty, I just need $30 to eat 2 healthy meals and $15 for rent a day. How much hours is that for a Software Engineer, 1-2hrs of work with a lot of extra money. Why should I slave away the rest 6-7hrs? This also helps with my creativity, because I cannot pre-allocate and command my brain to be creative for the allotted time, excatly from 9am to 5pm.
Future of knowledge work [0]:<p>1. 5-hour work day, not pretending busy work for 8 or even 12 full hours (eg, 996 in China tech corps)<p>Knowledge work, especially creative work, is just different from hard manual labor. More work hours won’t necessarily produce more value<p>For some people / jobs, maybe 2-hour work day is enough.<p>@tobi says it well [1]: "For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."<p>2. One or multiple part-time jobs<p>For some part-time jobs, you work for money; for others, you work for fun/impact.<p>See how @gumroad works [2]: No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees<p>3. Streaming income in real time, rather than bulk income once or twice per month<p>You have a stream of small incomes 24/7. Some are passive incomes, while others are active incomes. You get paid directly from customers you serve, not from a proxy (eg HR in big corp). Anytime during the day, you know how much you’ve made so far<p>---<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/wenbinf/status/1472356359953809409" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/wenbinf/status/1472356359953809409</a><p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433</a><p>[2] <a href="https://sahillavingia.com/work" rel="nofollow">https://sahillavingia.com/work</a>
Reasoned from an employer, the economic optimum consist of two parts:<p>1) The time you work is spent doing meaningful things.<p>2) The amount of hours equals the point where if you'd add hours, the negatives outweigh the positives.<p>In that sense it's bizarre how both parameters don't seem much of a priority. Entire armies of office workers are stuck in zoom meetings and email, seeing most of their day cut up into tiny slices where you can't do focused work. It's quite common to hear that people do about 2 hours of actual work per day.<p>Rather than obsessing over some ancient number of hours "present", shouldn't effectiveness be an absolute top priority? Not only do managers not seem to care that their employees do little real work, they actually believe that those small blanks in your calendar means you're not busy enough. Have some more meetings. Let's collaborate more!<p>Here's my "CEO for a day" solution:<p>A system will for each meeting calculate its cost, which would be the amount of participants multiplied by their hourly rate. Since a 1 hour meeting really costs about 2 hours of productivity (just before and after meetings, nobody does work), the sum would be multiplied by 2, or 1.5 at least.<p>Once per month or so, you check the aggregates, starting with the worst offenders. It looks like Tom organized about 30K worth of meetings last month. Now Tom is going to tell the company what tangible value he produced in these meetings to offset this.<p>You'll soon find that it's all power laws. A small group of people responsible for flooding people with meetings.<p>And you can do the same with email. Efficient workers sent perhaps a handful of emails per day, yet Tom seems to be sending 50-100, all day and night.<p>Perhaps Tom should shut the fuck up and not mistake his joy in communicating with people for work.
To add my anecdata to the pile, if I "live right"[1] and ignore the pressure to work work work, I naturally have about 6hrs "bum on seat" work time per day, give or take. And that's without a commute. Or kids.<p>I haven't personally noticed being at the computer for 2hrs less a day causing me to be less productive.<p>What noticably makes me more productive:<p>- Not feeling exhausted, depressed, shitty, or feeling like I never have time for anything<p>- Working bum on seat until I feel like I'm not productive, then taking a break (go for a walk, empty the dishwasher) and let my brain solve the problem for me.<p>- If I really want to get more done and focus, and I have a clear goal, rounds of pomodoros<p>[1] get enough sleep; exercise each day; cook healthy meals; spend time with my partner; have time to myself; have time to perform daily chores and errands, etc
Figure Little's law may be a bit applicable to the discussion :)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law</a><p>You never really want "100% utilization" (something I feel a lot of managers don't quite understand).<p>The answers here are very interesting. I work more than 40 hrs (my own business stuff) and I always wish there was more time in the day, lol. Never worked at a big company but I do imagine if people are only "working" 20 hrs that's a sign that they could "work-less." IMO as long as stuff gets done (in a timely manner) that's all that should matter.
Usually when there is a question in the title, the answer is no. Not this time. But 35h is also ridiculously too much. It needs to be 20h max, just because households are dual income, and personal work needed to be done did not disappear.
40 hours is just a handy figure, like eight hours is a third of a day, third you spend on sleeping, third you spend on life, third you spend on work. I believe it was established due to these equal ratios. We kinda all work in manufacturing still, just the goods we manufacture have changed, yet we still spend about equal part of our life on it, probably due to strong tradition. Some are seeing 20 hour "void" in their third, cause really they want to spend 20 more hours on something else.
Too much for whom? For businesses, definitely not too much; if you're awake you could be working. For workers? We worked less when we were hunter-gatherers, and even peasants up to the industrial revolution worked seasonally and thus had an average of 20 hours a week. Now we work 40 hours a week for 44-48 weeks a year. And for what? To pay too much for health care, be stressed out constantly, sit in traffic commuting, and waste away sitting in a chair ruining our eyes staring at screens.
Keynes Predicted We Would Be Working 15-Hour Weeks.<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...</a><p>Keynes is right, we should be at around 15 hours per week right now. It's not even a nostradamus prediction, it should have happened. The division of labour, specialization of production and dexterity, and technology has greatly increased productivity.<p>The answer is globalization, something Keynes didn't think could happen due to diplomacy of his time. So the 'western' world could be at 15 hour weeks but globalization has kept us up high. As these other countries have developed and are starting to industrialize. Pulling people out of poverty and greatly increasing quality of life has been great. It's making us wealthier than ever. We live in a time of abundance.<p>Shouldn't it be possible to live a life on fewer hours?
For me, the 40 hour work week is okay but I think the problem at least for development is getting non-technical people to be responsive or provide the necessary input to keep me busy. When I'm support duty for a sprint, I find myself twiddling my thumbs sometimes awaiting a response to a question on a ticket from a user to confirm or get more context for the issue so I can do my work as there's only so much looking at logs, source code, and the like to tease out the cause of the issue.<p>If anything, I think companies who have more knowledge and process based workers should look to use the free time for learning/studying. Maybe give funds to take courses whether they're online or offline to help such workers (myself included) improve our skill set. I'm not against more free time off for the same pay but I just think there can be more uses of the time than just being off the clock is what I guess I'm saying.
Employee? Sure, aim to get your workweek as close to 0 hours as possible unless you genuinely love what you are doing, then clamp it at 40.<p>Startup/founder/significant equity holder? Sorry, no -- at least in the first year or three. Working 50 hours a week vs. 40 can be the difference between success and failure in the first few years of a company. I work anywhere between 40 and 60 hours depending on how critical a looming deadline is. No platitudes about "oh you're more productive < 40" are remotely true. My extra effort has translated directly into dodging <i>many</i> snares that would have screwed us hard. I do however place 60 as my soft limit, beyond that I will pay for it hard after a week or two.<p>Contrary to the cliches that abound around this topic, I am in good shape, healthy, have a rich-enough social life, and am a great dad.
Personally, I feel that it's too little.<p>No one is perfectly productive. If you devote 40 hours to something, you're going to spend at least 10-15 hours out of that on non-productive busywork.<p>There are also some tasks that just require extended periods of focus before something "clicks". No way I could write or code if I was told to pack up and leave after a fixed amount of time.<p>Also, I've always found that when I'm working hard, I'm more creative in my hobbies as well. I make music as a hobby and whenever I've taken a break from work, the music just doesn't flow.<p>Caveat: I work for myself so the work is both important and enjoyable to me, and I don't have to deal with office bureaucracies. If I was working for someone else, I might have different views.
Great article on this, advocating for 40+ hours a week of <i>real</i> work:<p><a href="http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html" rel="nofollow">http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivit...</a>
The question is with all these trial projects where organisations and even apparently entire countries experimented with shorter working weeks, is that despite the results consistently demonstrating the benefits, why in no case did it stick? (*) How long did it take for the 40-hour week to become almost universally established after the initial trials?
I'm definitely in favour of a trend towards a 4 day week (or even a 9 day fortnight), but I don't think I could ever be totally comfortable being the only guy in the office to do so (esp. if I expected to be paid the same amount!).<p>(*) I'm similarly curious about UBI pilots!
For creative positions I don't see hours/week as a useful metric for anything. Most of my time 'working' is not sitting at my computer typing or whatever.. it's thinking about things while laying in bed while I can't sleep or when sitting on the can or when taking a walk (etc.). Often my subconscious comes up with something while I'm not even thinking about it. So I'm working when playing games or reading as well. Working isn't labor, it isn't something you do. It is all about how much value you create.
I think the most important step towards flexible work hours in the US is decoupling health benefits from employers. Currently these benefits are essentially a flat cost per worker, and an incentive to squeeze the most out of each person.<p>If the two were decoupled, employees would more easily be able to adjust their work hours to their personal desires. If you want to work 20 hours per half pay, great. If you want to work 60 hours for 50% more, great.<p>Individual desires and needs very greatly among people, so such a system would allow a wider variety of people too meet their needs
>In the 1800s, it was common for people in manufacturing to work nearly 100 hours per week: between 10- and 16-hour shifts over six-day workweeks.
>By the early 1900s, many industries had adopted the eight-hour workday, but most people were still working six days a week.<p>If these figures are true, it helps me to understand why so many people in the 19th and early 20th century were huge advocates of socialism and communism. Even though, having read about the history of the last 100 or so years, I think that communism is a relatively inefficient and often brutally murderous form of government, even I feel that it might be better to launch a revolution to overthrow the rich and take their stuff than to put up with working so much that there is essentially no time in one's life to do anything other than work, all just to be able to live in some cramped apartment in a dirty industrial city.
Here's what I believe : the fraternizing and huddling around the break room during coffee breaks and distracting leisurely talks with coworkers at their desk, which all contribute to wasted time at the office would still happen in a 30 hour work week.<p>Except, Workers would be demanding overtime pay to finish the work they have normally been doing in a 40 hour work week and employers would have to pay premium compensation for the same level of work they used to be getting at 40 hours a week.
Shouldn’t it just really be contextual? Sometimes work a lot, sometimes a little. Depending on the project, time to relax and gain clarity, burnout—lots of other variables?
No, but I think it should be 40 hrs including transit, and overhead time; yes I would even include walking around, if it's a large facility. For whatever reason I have to walk pretty far for drinks and bathrooms... so it counts.<p>It goes with out saying that there's some flexibility for appointments and personal matters. You don't have work extra hours after going to your doctor for cancer (extreme example there are smaller).
Interesting to see such articles, when I heard from some people on HN that it's ok and healthy to have two contracts at the same time. Which one is it then?
"Cut the workweek back to 35 hours"<p>I feel like that's been the standard in a lot of industries - 9-5 with an hour for lunch - for a long time.
I don't think businesses benefit from a 4 day work week but who cares, I don't think they benefit necessarily from a weekend either and we still do it.
Reading the comments it seems like we need a recession. The job market of the last few years is not normal, people's expectations are way too high.
It's far more than anyone worked before the industrial revolution who wasn't enslaved. Subsistence farming or hunting and gathering don't take 40 hours a week.<p>The reason there's a 40 hour workweek is because socialists, anarchists, and communists fought for one. It was marketed as splitting the day into three even parts, and getting weekends off. There's nothing special about it other than it is a round number, and far more work than is necessary to produce enough to support a family, so it offers ample excess for the owners of capital.<p>The optimal number of hours is the least necessary to have a comfortable life.
If you want to find the optimal number look at how many hours startup founders put in. Incentives are 100% aligned in how they benefit from their work. They have no incentive to work less or more than the optimal number of hours.