The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.<p>The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I&#x27;m worn out with real work.<p>I&#x27;ve seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it.<p>If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A&#x2F;B test it, I&#x27;d love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.

The remote work era exposed a strange paradox: while we saved time on commutes, we often ended up working longer. Maybe it’s because our calendars became too accessible, or perhaps the &quot;out of sight, out of mind&quot; fear kicked in for managers. Either way, the true cost of this shift is still playing out.

Some of the pandemic increase in time worked may have been a net benefit to the folks working. A lot of people I know spent at least some of the time they otherwise would have spent commuting working remotely. And, since commuting sucks, ended up happier for it. Anecdotes aren’t data, but this pattern was very common among people I know.

I genuinely thought the meetings culture was out of control 10 years ago - it is way worse now. Management used to moan about sitting in meetings all day, I used to moan about it too because anytime I was in the meetings the first 20 minutes would be chit chat about the big game &#x2F; their holiday plans &#x2F; office gossip.<p>&gt; You&#x27;re Right You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings<p>But ... you are doing less work and more of your meetings are a complete waste of time.

<i>&gt; An analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent—or 48.5 minutes—during the pandemic’s early weeks.</i><p>For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.

I felt this one personally.<p>The four to six hours of 30&#x2F;45&#x2F;60 minute meetings (that always seem to go over by some unknown amount) slays me regardless of whether I&#x27;m actively participating or not.<p>It&#x27;s easier if you&#x27;re a morning person, since you can do all of your &quot;life stuff&quot; before work. However, I&#x27;m not (and not for lack of trying), so it feels like I&#x27;m confined to my very nice office chair and desk for hours on end. (Unsurprisingly, there&#x27;s a lot of pressure to work nights and weekends to catch up. This is much easier to do when work is life and life is work. I refuse to do this, even if it means I stay perpetually behind.)<p>(I could do walking meetings, and I do that sometimes when I know I&#x27;ll be a passive participant. However, what often happens is this: I finish a meeting, then spend the &quot;free&quot; time between meetings doing follow up from the previous meeting, then I join the next meeting, etc. ad nauseum.)<p>Meanwhile, I have no problems being in all-day meetings when I&#x27;m at customer sites. It feels much, much easier.<p>For me, a big part of it is environment. When I&#x27;m home, I want to do &quot;home&quot; stuff: go to the gym, clean up around the house, walk to a coffee shop or brewery, etc. Being glued to a chair inhibits all of that, and having to talk at your screen for hours at a time is extremely draining (for me). However, when I&#x27;m in an &quot;office&quot;, I&#x27;m in work mode. I&#x27;m locked in. It&#x27;s much easier for me to focus on work things this way.

I absolutely had a longer workday. But that wasn&#x27;t what I hated about the first year of the pandemic. It&#x27;s that I was doing more worthless things with my time: communicating by email, learning technology, handling administrative items related to the pandemic. None of these had value to the world. It was just a big tax on top of the stuff I was doing already, and it left me with less time to do things that had value.

In the very early days, Java was pushed into the mainstream long before it was ready. This left a foul taste as management demanded we jumped on the bandwagon while the trenches filled with frustration over many bugs in the early JVM&#x27;s and language implementations and missing quality in core features.<p>It was not that it was fundamentally bad, maybe a tad too academic, just overhyped beyond it&#x27;s maturity and capabilities at the time.<p>It did not feel as quirky as C++&#x27;s paradigm neutrality, and less esoteric (syntactically) than Lisp, so all in all in theory a welcome hi gh level language with decent perks. But if you are going to push adoption by preaching to the managerial class with half thruths, expect some pushback (remember write once, debug everywhere?).<p>Then the second wave with colsultancyware feature adoption (anyone like CORBA?) and becoming academia&#x27;s darling (I heard you like frameworks, so I put a framework in your framework so you can meta-factory your own DSl framework at runtime!) made it so that when later .NET arrived, it felt like Java, the good parts.<p>Of course, .NET would go on to become a monster in itself. But that is another story.

I worked 40 hours before and I work 40 hours now. Can&#x27;t say I have seen a change in my meetings either. I have like 2-3 a week on average.

One of my friends said his prior company (Fortune 50 size) had one of the big consulting companies come in for an assessment. The main takeaway was too much time spent in meetings. They banned afternoon meetings and put time spent in meetings as a KPI on performance reviews for managers (I think there was a 4hr daily maximum as a target)

More emails and more meetings means workdays increased? Are they adjusting for the fact the in person you don&#x27;t need as many emails and meetings and can just talk person to person?

I would like to see this after 8+ weeks as perhaps it tapered off once people adjusted?

For some people. What&#x27;s the average including the people who were running errands, walking their dogs, watching their kids, sleeping, etc during work hours?

&gt; Focus on output, not hours. It’s virtually impossible to track how employees are actually using their time. Instead, managers should focus on the quality of their work.<p>This was the most important change to the workplace since 2020, and it should have always been this way in the first place.<p>Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Many were laid off and the rest of the office is better for it.<p>The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.