The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it. To believe otherwise is to think management fully understands the work ahead of time. This is not usually the case. To a lesser extent, even the devs might not know. Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly. Some days you can stop early. It&#x27;s not entirely in the hands of the workers. You won&#x27;t know until you start.<p>What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That&#x27;s a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it.<p>Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I&#x27;m doing tomorrow. It&#x27;s often outside the scope of what I&#x27;m being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain.<p>What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That&#x27;s where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They&#x27;re no more stressed than anyone else.

&gt;Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours<p>&gt;Slack’s Workforce Index, based on survey responses from more than 10,000 desk workers<p>Okay, so this &quot;productivity&quot; data is self-reported. How do you know that the after-hours workers aren&#x27;t simply rating their own productivity lower than actual, or that the 9-5 workers aren&#x27;t rating their productivity higher than actual? This data is useless.

&gt; “Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours.”<p>Maybe people who are less productive end up having to work more hours.

For those that only read the headline, this is an important caveat:<p>&quot;On the flip side, employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores.&quot;

Before I thought I had ADHD I would sit around the office not doing much of anything in a sort of &quot;ready&quot; state, ready to jump on the next thing someone would try to distract me with or &quot;ready&quot; for the next meeting that is sometimes more than an hour away.<p>It&#x27;s only after everyone else went home and I felt relaxed that I finally got any of my actual work done. :(

How do they control for the fact that people who are falling behind frequently work more after hours?<p>Is it that after hours works causes loss of productivity or is that slow people work after hours to try to make up for falling behind?

Big discussion from a couple of days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38579890">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38579890</a>

My strategy:<p>* Work for a small company<p>* Show up at 10am<p>* Leave at 4pm<p>If I&#x27;m really into what I&#x27;m doing I&#x27;ll happily do some work after hours, or on the weekend. No one ever expects it and honestly I try to keep the fact that I&#x27;m doing it a secret (don&#x27;t push commits, just keep changes local).

The key point here is feeling obligated to work outside regular hours. My most productive time is early in the morning or late at night. There’s just less happening at that time, both professionally and personally. There are fewer interruptions and less need to context switch, making it easier to focus and get things done.<p>Knowing that I’m more creative and productive outside normal business hours, I try to take brakes during the day because I know I’ll make up the time later. I’d much rather get out of the house and take an hour walk when the sun is up and work at night.

Less is more work posts are so trendy now. The comments invariably point out unexplored confounding variables and the posts lack sufficient substance to be interesting. At the end of the day you can reason that hours != productivity, which everyone knows by now

This is a pretty fraught area. As the comments show, there&#x27;s a lot of emotion, and cultural differences at play.<p>&quot;Cultural differences&quot; can be macro, like, in Japan, a 10-12-hour workday is <i>de rigueur</i>, and it can be &quot;micro,&quot; like individuals that have different clocks.<p>I had an employee, who is, no exaggeration, one of the best engineers I&#x27;ve ever known. But he couldn&#x27;t come in early, to save his life. He&#x27;d roll in, around noon, but would often stay until 2AM.<p>The Japanese loved him. He was often on their time zone.<p>American HR hated it, and I got called on the carpet, numerous times, as his manager.<p>But I stood up for him, and let him do his odd hours, even though it cost me. Fortunately, Japan backed me, and they were the ones in charge (that didn&#x27;t win me any friends on this side of the pond).<p>I have been &quot;retired&quot; for the last six years. In that time, I have worked harder -and far more productively- than I ever did, in the workforce.<p>The key seems to be, as has been alluded in the comments, mastery of my own schedule.

I have been there. I was working long hours because work was exciting. And also I wanted to show my boss that I put in a lot of effort. I voluntarily spent a lot of time in the office to finish tasks more early than expected. Sometimes this extra time was completely unproductive and the things I did turned out to be irrelevant a few days later. Sometimes it was very important for the business that things got finished and the extra time was therefor productive. I learned for myself, that I cannot sustain working long hours regularly without loosing interest in the job.<p>Right now my mantra is: Keep showing up.<p>For me this means get work done on a regular basis. My focus is to work on this topic for years without loosing interest, instead of prioritizing to finish the current workload as fast as possible.<p>Real productivity is achieved when you are an expert in the domain and you have built a network in the company or market segment. Expertise and personal network are the main levers to get thins done.

Posted yesterday:[0] (190pts, 128 comments). Slack either changed the URL (fooling the dupe detector?), or mods made yesterday&#x27;s title much less clickbaity.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38579890">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38579890</a>

I have alot of colleagues that avoid their actual work by taking on pet projects or some cross functional nonsense. I have a colleague that takes calls with vendors almost weekly, knowing there&#x27;s no budget for it. Someone who spends hours with HR or recruiting on some DEI stuff. Someone who wants to be a professional conference speaker. Almost anything to avoid coding. Meanwhile, those of us that simply log on to do work have to pick up their slack. Management doesn&#x27;t care. I understand this isn&#x27;t the case everywhere but happiness equates to doing less for some. I don&#x27;t engage in those projects and I&#x27;m very productive.

For me, I&#x27;m most productive after hours because during the day, I get too many pings and escalations. After hours is the only time I can focus and get deep work done myself. This is something I&#x27;d really like to improve, but I&#x27;m really not sure how. I&#x27;ve tried creating discussion groups and many other approaches to make knowledge transfer more efficient. However, the real issue is company growth. A huge recent period of growth has meant a focus on training people. This is only the kind of thing I could defend against if I were 1-2 ranks higher in the company, and honestly, this lack of longterm growth planning is one of the reasons I would leave my company.<p>One approach I&#x27;ve been thinking of experimenting with is saving everything I say, and using an LLM with my custom knowledge base to answer a question. I actually think a borg-like communication structure in a company could be really efficient. If every communication was publicly available, and we used ML to make that information consistent and to answer queries, I think you could achieve coherence with a company much faster, move as a unit much faster, and get a lot more done.<p>However, it&#x27;s still a pipe dream at this point due to the context length limits. The actual amount of important context at a company is many times what a model can keep in mind now. As models get bigger, or if a group can run multiple models many times to make the company info widely consistent, it would be much better.<p>For instance imagine now, 30 people at your company work on one project, and 50 people work on another. They might take a slightly different definition for a term, and do work which is ultimately counterproductive to each other. Usually, it takes a conflict arising to resolve this, and people are long stuck with the mutually-incorrect definition. If an ML algorithm can look at everything both groups are saying and point out inefficiencies, I think you could get more cohesion, especially before problems get big enough to be a drain.<p>That being said, this type of system is more of a pipe dream, and I don&#x27;t think it will be feasible for a few more years. In the meantime, I&#x27;m struggling how to balance communication with work. Advice appreciated.

Dupe from yesterday (128 comments): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38579890">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38579890</a>

I saw a sign in a cubicle farm one time: &quot;In every group, someone&#x27;s the weakest. If you don&#x27;t know who that is, it&#x27;s you.&quot; Fuck that.

47 here. And 20 years of dev experience. I am now hired by a big company. As far as I understand, it is to become a “manager” (==a politician). So now I spend my days having pointless meetings with bozos.<p>Because of the poor management, we have had reorganizations and budget cuts all along the year. Making proper work impossible.<p>So now, I simply code what we need, after hours. This is exhausting, as it is double days. But extremely valuable in the end.

Interesting. I found I wrote more, and better code once everyone left me alone.

&quot;employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores.&quot;<p>So, if, like alot of Hacker News readers, you&#x27;re hacking away on your next startup idea after hours, you should be fine.

The 8 hour work day: created for physical laborers, extended to paper-pushers, and forced onto creative workers along with productivity-sapping random meetings.<p>The current white collar worker paradigm is proof that capitalism is inherently inefficient. The theory that a business will naturally optimize for efficiency does not survive a meeting with human culture, which has nothing at all to do with organizational efficiency, and everything to do with repetition, imitation, resistance to change, and the easiest short-term path. If you want to get more productivity out of a human, you need to do more than just tell them what time to arrive and go home.

The only people surprised would be the “MBA class” of management. Anyone who has ever worked any job would gladly tell you how productivity decreases if you work after hours. It’s not a revolutionary idea.

&gt; Employees who feel obligated to work after-hours register 20% lower productivity scores<p>Very notably, this excludes people who <i>want</i> to work after-hours. A rare person but they do exist in some fields.

What is this &quot;productivity score&quot;? Did they just ask people if they feel productive and call that a &quot;score&quot;?<p>I couldn&#x27;t find that info in the article.

Simplest explanation: the lowest performing employees feel the need to work after hours to keep up. Few people start out working more hours than necessary.

People who feel obligated to work after work hours also are probably in a poor work culture company.<p>I log off when I went to log off and if I have an idea or a reason to work at night I do it. If I feel it&#x27;s not productive I sleep early and do it in the morning.<p>Those who feel obligated could also be doing it to look good to their boss.

There is no way that climbing the stairs to the 10th floor will be as fast as climbing to the 1st or 8th floor, let alone the 10th floor. The same applies to working hours. There&#x27;s no way you&#x27;ll be as productive in the 10th hour as you were in your first hour.

Seems this is very cultural, eg in Japan there is an expectation that you must always work back late, so people don&#x27;t give 100% for 8 hrs as they know regardless of performance they will need to put in more hours of overtime.

Two factors:<p>Scrum and its idiotic sprints, especially two weeks sprints. Sometimes things are more complicated than what they seemed, and maybe they just need a couple more days. In the overall scheme of things, no big deal, yeah, from time to time, things take more time than expected, the world is not going to end because of one or two days in 99% of the circumstances. Sometimes you win, sometimes lose and all that jazz. But, then the sprint is over tomorrow, a one day delay becomes a two week delay, demoralization and demotivation ensue, trust is fucked, and it is all downhill from that point.<p>Second point, closely related to this one, is the strange idea that some managers have that any delay can be solved by the copious administration of more overhead. Let&#x27;s schedule more meetings! Let&#x27;s micromanage more! Of course, the developers are slacking! Beatings to rescue. And this is related to the first one, because this kind of manager is usually a True Believer in Scrum.<p>Over time, developers, like any other animal, is mentally geared towards avoiding pain. Shortcuts will be taken, and one of the most obvious is overtime. And at first it works, overtime actually works a lot of time, until it is chronical.

The subtitle of this piece:<p>&gt; Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximize employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction<p>The base assumption of the employer structuring and managing the employee&#x27;s well-being and satisfaction feels so 19th century. I know it&#x27;s still the prevalent paradigm in HR in most places, but it&#x27;s crazy how hard that idea persists.

Those who feel on top of their work don&#x27;t feel they have to catch up on work after hours?<p>Where is the surprise?

We all know that working your ass off is the way to get things done. The problem is, in most companies, no one can tell the difference between hard working people and folks who take it easy. If a project takes 6 months it must have been hard if it takes 6 weeks on the other hand it must have been easy. No one is going to run the experiment twice.

&quot;surprising&quot;? It&#x27;s very well known and nowadays well proven by neuroscience.

High performers don&#x27;t need to put in extra hours, in other words. Big surprise.

Seldom has the &quot;surprised Pikachu&quot; emoticon been more appropriate.

How is that still surprising?

Surprising huh?<p>If the wording and subjects presented in the &quot;article&quot; sound a bit like Bill Lumbergh with a polo shirt was the author, don&#x27;t forget Slack is Salesforce now.

Have they considered how Slack contributes to decreased productivity?

Anyone have a link to the wordings of the original questions asked?

Is that really surprising to anyone?

&gt; working less is good &gt; blog by “Slack”<p>True or false, the jokes write themselves sometimes

Wow, slaves perform worse when tired! What a discovery... Fck any employer with required &quot;off hours&quot; and wage formulas for compensation. Actually ... fck off hours.