The solution to (nearly) everything: working less

I really wish there were jobs out there that let you do this. My ideal work week is 32 hours, with occasional bursts of more. I&#x27;ve met very few traditional workplaces that were very open to the idea of part time schedules.<p>For me, focus is all or nothing during work hours. I&#x27;d much rather bring fire for fewer hours each day, and then recharge with some of my other pursuits.

I don&#x27;t know, did Keynes ever understood how capitalism works? Capitalism is competition. If your employees work less, your competitor&#x27;s employees will work full time and overtime, getting their product to market faster and reaping all the rewards. It works with entire countries as competitive agents (see China). &quot;Winner takes it all&quot; operation mode of modern markets amplifies the magnitude of the problem.<p>Another issue is management overhead. Managing 10 people working full-time is easier (perhaps exponentially) than managing 40 people working 1&#x2F;4 time. Easier means cheaper, which means that you are better positioned in the competition. This is why every rational company will hire 10 people full-time and leave the other 30 unemployed, instead of hiring all 40 for quarter of the time.<p>I see no solution to this problem in peacetime (Keynes&#x27; own solution famously didn&#x27;t work). In wartime, of course, there are nearly no unemployed.

And exercising more.<p>I&#x27;m fairly certain the optimal work week is ~30-35 hrs, and the optimal exercise time is 6-8 hrs&#x2F;week.<p>Imagine how low the health care costs could be if we were somehow mandated by a benevolent dictator to do some activities at work (our preferred sport for example).<p>One can dream.

Crazy that, though this is so widely known, nothing has really changed in the last 100 years. Instead, wages stay stagnant, and cost of living rises. Hours needed to survive increase. It&#x27;s all so illogical, it&#x27;s crazy.

Working fewer hours per week can actually be really hard. Fewer hours means more workers, but adding more workers means additional communication, planning, and other costs.<p>This is especially true for &quot;knowledge work&quot; since you can&#x27;t brain-dump everything you know onto a co-worker. If your job involves a service component as well (e.g. like lawyering), that probably means you have also to be on call in addition to the hours you spend working. And then there are tasks where workers need to put in 40 hour work weeks to get anything done because of how long to get up to speed (e.g. I&#x27;d personally have a very hard time getting any meaningful coding, writing, or art done if I was limited to working only two hours a day or one day a week on that project).<p>I think the solution here is probably not so much a focus on part-time work but on seasonal work or jobs where sabbaticals are a thing.

This is something I&#x27;d definitely be interested in trying. Like stated elsewhere here, the Netherlands has a culture similar to this.<p>I&#x27;ve had 3 internships so far, and the most recent one has had a lot of overtime. Maybe I&#x27;ll try to start my first full-time job in the Netherlands.