In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution.
It blows my mind that 99% of jobs are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model?
It annoys me so much that I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ (Software Jobs with a better work / life balance)
I've just realized they posted the article just so they could comment, a bit lame. Maybe just post their project and have links to that The Atlantic article or whatever inside the project itself.
Good eye! It’s tough to get the Goldilocks level of self promotion and hustle. Too little and you aren’t aggressive enough. Too much and you’re slimy. HN is a picky bunch!
Ok, unless he's also running a voting ring which would be directly against HN ToS, I don't see a problem with that either. I mean, the topic is obviously interesting enough to get the upvotes. If that means his side project gets more traction and eventually leads to more 4-day jobs being available, I'd consider that a win-win situation.
I for one don't mind it. I went 4 days/week in March and it changed my life for the better. I like my job but that one day off extra gives me so much flexibility. I can do all errands on Friday and then pick up the kid from school and have the whole Friday afternoon and weekend to spend with them. That means that during the week I finish work and can spend time however I want instead of doing chores...
In my opinion this 'message' should actually be pushed more and people encouraged to try it. If that means shilling some website with 4d/week jobs...so be it.
Yep I found this annoying too since I remembered reading it 3 days ago, causing me to double check if I was accidentally reading the same comment thread again.
Whilst trying to be charitable to the poster (I guess there's no harm in pushing their side project) I would caution that carbon copying comments like this (to articles posted deliberately for the purpose of doing so) could come off as a bit insulting to the HN readership.
On the other hand, perhaps they're onto something since these articles keep rising up to the front page!
I don’t see what’s wrong with him posting his relevant side project as an advertising strategy. It’s clear what it is, and if youve seen it before you can just scroll past
Ye I'm with you. I personally would like to see all jobs offered as as a fractional % (with some lower limit e.g. 3 days for 60%) - this is quite common in Switzerland for example.
A 4 day week is a much easier "sell" in the short term though
4 days gives an immediate benefit that is not as relevant for fewer days. It gives you a regular weekday off.
That means you have a day off to go to the bank, go to the doctors, call customer service for a bunch of companies that may not otherwise be open on the weekend, etc.
Further, the weekends carry an expectation of doing something. Such an expectation would not exist for the weekday off.
If we do move to a mass 4 day workweek, this obviously implies that the 3rd day off should not be the same for everybody, so basically it shouldn’t be implemented by just making Friday another day off like Saturday and Sunday. It would be much better if that 3rd day is divided for all employees between Mon-Fri.
3 days of weekend is 50% more than 2, for just 20% less work. The trade off is more extreme as the amount of work (or of weekend) approaches zero.
Ideally, we’d have flexibility around the denominator, allowing something like 4 on/2 off as a step towards 4 on/3 off. The maybe 4 on/4 off instead of all the way to 3 on/4 off. Changing the 7 day week is probably infeasible though… but I see equally crazy schedules from friends with shift work.
Right. It's almost as if giving people freedom to choose might be a good idea.
Outrageous idea in a wage slave society of course. What? Freedom to choose, for slaves? What nonsense. Big daddy government and big daddy corporations know what's best for you - here, choose coke or pepsi every 4 years, you are free to choose, you are free.
In france, the legal norm is the 35 hours work week.
I wish there would be ways to reduce work time to reduce unemployment and "share" labor, but my guess is that it's more difficult for employers to organize under such model.
The problem isn't only overwork, but it's also the labor distribution and competition among job candidates. The more work is done by one person, the less labor is left to create jobs.
Honestly I've left this rat race of job competition a long time ago, it's depressing. I live in a country where welfare benefits allows me to eat and have a home. Money is not a problem. I'm not a merchandise.
> I live in a country where welfare benefits allows me to eat and have a home.
that just means you're living off taxation of the wealthier. It's not sustainable if everybody did this - at least not under today's technological capability.
Well there always are certain jobs that are necessary to exist, but there is a large quantity of them that has very low value and nothing would be lost if they did not exist.
People only become wealthy by capitalizing on the skills and labour of those less wealthy so I don't see any problem with taxing some of that and using it to help the less wealthy, instead of allowing them to evade paying anything with loopholes and hiding their money offshore.
To be fair, 35 hours in qualified jobs is really rare and this limit is only working for jobs that are paid hourly (when your employer counts the number of hours you work to determine your pay).
The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.
But nevertheless, we probably are amongst the countries where you work the less (and it never had a negative impact on economy).
> To be fair, 35 hours in qualified jobs is really rare and this limit is only working for jobs that are paid hourly (when your employer counts the number of hours you work to determine your pay).
Almost all white collar jobs in the UK are 35 hours
> The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.
35 hours is the expected salaried agreement, similar to 40 hours in the US. I expect most of Europe is 35 hours and that is protected by labor laws.
In Sweden, we are supposed to work 40 hours a week. However, working time includes 2x15 min daily coffee breaks and 1 weekly "wellness" hour. So ... I guess it's a 36.5 hours a week country. :)
In Germany, the official statistics for 2019 state that someone who was fully employed worked 41.0 hours per week on average, when part-time employed the number was 19.5 hours. The average over all employees was 34.8 hours.
Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit... (in German). The article also contains a table of the average for a lot of European countries, which range from 30.4 in the Netherlands to 45.4 in Turkey. The article also states that the majority of the differences in the average working hours between the countries are typically due to a different ratio of part-time to full-time jobs.
Yah definitely wrong on my part saying “almost all”, Maybe not at an IT specific company? But this is what I’ve seen in IT departments in finance (37.5, 9 - 5:30) and other large commerce (35, 9 - 5) companies, in my short career.
I know some people in France that say 35 hours is mandatory, but some work more anyway.
> In france, the legal norm is the 35 hours work week.
Except that in France, the norm for knowledge workers is to work more (38-40h is normal) and get the difference compensated in extra holidays (RTT).
Also most of them don't actually clock their hours and have contracts only stating days ("au forfait"), so the actual worked hours aren't counted at all and often exceed the theoretical amount.
I've worked 4 days a week (for 20% less pay) for years now. It's without a question the biggest positive change in standard of living and life quality I could buy with this money. Will never regularly 5 days a week again unless I have no other options, or unless the pay is so good it's ridiculous.
I'd work 5-day weeks if the pay was so well that I, say, could save up five years of expenses in one year. Unfortunately, my local tax system strongly disincentivizes this by effectively having a 62% marginal tax rate.
So, in summary, I will most likely never have a 5 days a week routine again. It's just that good. In fact, due to the marginal tax situation, it's more likely I'll downscale to something closer to 50% if I can get away with it career-wise.
Same - I recently switched to a 4 day week for 20% salary reduction and could never go back. I'm fine to take the pay cut as other aspects of my life have improved dramatically.
This is very attractive to me but I suspect nearly impossible to implement in my East Coast Fintech role. Assumption is everyone needs to be "on" 9-6 M-F because of markets being open.
The only day I could see plausibly doing this is Friday as there are few meetings and lots of senior people WFH/use remote offices then. Of course this also means taking the easiest day off!
How did you make this work, is it a consulting role? Individual contributor? What is the off day, Friday?
How realistic is this for most people/firms though?
I think probably 60-70% of the places I have worked, this sentence " On the occasion there's something that only he can do but he's not in.." would end in "we call his cell".
I was just on a medium-urgent outage the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and 2 teams on the call were calling their on-vacation colleagues for help.
It all comes down to how the company is run. We sell our product vs hosting some SaaS, so outages aren't a big deal. We also are not a young company who "moves fast and breaks things", so showstopping bugs are pretty rare.
Also East Coast fintech. Here's the deal: if your company can't deal without you one day a week, you are a bus accident away from killing the company.
If you're part of a team, the team should be big enough to be resilient to this change (and everyone else should do this too, and your team may need to expand by 15-20%).
If you manage a team, your team should be skilled enough to work without your direction one day a week. If they aren't, you need to step up and develop better procedures.
Well yes, should lol.
I guess my point/question is what types/sizes/percent of organizations this would be feasible.
How many of us work nights/weekends because of lack of strategy & constant fire drills.
How many people have come back from a long weekend to a 4 day week and noticed it's just 5 days of meetings/work rescheduled to fit into 4 days.
I'll always remember the stunned response years ago while moving when my wife picked up my cell phone (my hands weren't free) to what was a production trading outage at my firm.. and said we are off today, we are in the middle of moving, we have no internet or computers plugged in. On a 30 person dev team in a 20K+ person firm and we had cross team direct dev team escalation to my personal cell phone because no one could be bothered following escalation procedures/rotas/call lists/etc.
My fear would generally be taking the 20% pay cut and not really getting 20% less work/time expected.
Norway. I've only done this with a single employer over multiple years, but I've received offers from at least four others where I was clear about a 4-day week (with 20% reduced salary) being a requirement for me.
I've of course always taken care to not present this as the first thing that comes out of my mouth when interviewing, but I have always broached the subject in the first conversation I've had with decision-makers at the company in question.
Real sticking point for many who use public transport is that most pricing geared towards a 7 day, monthly, quarterly or yearly ticket. Which see's a small saving/break even by getting a 7 day travel pass over 4 single day's and no saving in costs/outlay as the 5th day was already covered still.
That does seem to be changing, but is certainly a cost factor many endure, which ironically shifts people into using their own transport and another car on the road factor plays in.
Now for a company, were before you had 4 staff to cover 20 days of work, you now have 5. That has pro's and con's, and certainly numbers of employee's will entail scaling costs. Making you hit certain numbers more easily and that can see more requirements as an employer. So suddenly you need an extra toilet, or larger kitchen, extra facilities and all becomes the number of people registered working in that location tips you into complying with such requirements. On the other hand, you have more resilience and less dependence upon individuals and the impact of loosing one member of staff is less impacting. That with fresher more focused staff due to working less hours, then it becomes a complicated equation to balance out on both sides of the employer/employee relationship.
I certainly do feel the 4 day week is a good thing, one you appreciate more in later life and does help prevent things like burn out. Also working from home has it's upsides, but also like everything, in moderation.
So if you had a choice of working in an office for 4 days a week
or working from home for 3 days and 2 days in the office. I'm not sure the choice would be an easy one for many. Personally the later has much going for it, even if working 5 days over 4.
But one of the best balances I've known somebody to use was that they would do IT contracting in the Winter and would do water ski instructing in the summer. Equally known somebody who would contract in the summer and Ski Instructor in the winter.
Which gets down to one of the key aspects in any job/work - variation, if done right can be as good as a break. Just need to look at all the options and get the balance that works for you.
I just hope more public transportation systems adjust pricing to not punish those working shorter weeks as is the case with the model used in many places today (trains, buses).
Have you tried going for walks? Play basketball? Exercise? Do chores you couldn’t catch up on that usually need to be done during the 8 to 5? Gardening (even in an apartment)? Running group? Volunteer work?
Honestly, talking to a therapist might be the best start. You shouldn't have to feel anxious all of the time, and there are lots of different ways you can work on managing and minimizing your anxiety so you can have your weekends back to yourself again!
When I had several months of 4 day weeks due to [stupid corporate vacation rollover policy change], I told my manager I wasn't coming in on Wednesdays.
It was amazing. Two-day sprints separated by a day or two of rest are really, really productive for me. I never had Monday blahs because I was never facing a long haul of 5 days of work.
Number one recommendation I have for you, regardless of your working situation: change where you are. I don't mean move to another city, I mean keep work things away from personal things physically. If you have a corner that you always work in, never do anything else there. Go get exercise -- if you aren't doing any at all now, pull up a map and find a place about a kilometer from you. Walk there, walk back. When it's raining, take an umbrella. If it's too hot, take a bottle of water and an umbrella. There's nothing shameful about hiding from the sun.
I had the same for a year, it was wonderful. I think the key was that it was Wendesday, so these 2x2 days, even though intensive, didn't really feel like work. I never had the feeling of being stuck and just getting through to the weekend, on the opposite - it felt like perfect balance. I miss these days.
For me, going for walks and listening to podcasts or audiobooks helped a lot, especially during the dark winter months. I also started learning Japanese which kept me quite busy and I started cooking more.
Well I'm also glued to screens; but not work screens.
If I think of a work problem I write it down or mail my work email and then forget about it for the rest of the weekend.
As to what to do; sigh,at this rate keep up with my backlog of home tech problems. Occasionally work on something fun and interesting.
This is a deeper philosophical question than it might seem initially, and in the HN crowd the answer might be different from me than what you'd expect.
Most people here are smart, hard-working and aspire to be high performers in whatever they do. So when you have an extra day off, you're expected to use it for an ambitious side project, self-improvement, learning new technology or whatever.
I have a part of this mindset in my identity, but it's a source of stress. So after a bit of a history of anxiety and depression in my past, I've made the deliberate decision to relegate this to the part my attention that's focused on employment and earning money. I never let it enter the part of my time that I have for myself.
This means that my three days off are spent on activities I find meaningful: Family, seeing friends, reading, playing computer games, hiking/biking/working out, philosophizing, re-filling my social introvert energy. Occasionally flying airplanes in summer, skiing or snow kiting in winter. I always say yes when opportunities to do activities with friends show up, and this never turns into a stressful thing since I always have the opportunity to recharge before work.
If I feel like doing something more structured and ambitious, something creative, I'll do it. But it has to come from the heart. Generally, I don't have a lot of excess creative energy even when working 4 days a week, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
I always have a lot of excess energy for handling stuff that might otherwise get low priority: Getting enough sleep, seeing enough friends, handling any physical or mental health issues that want attention. That's a big difference.
I've noticed that I only start to unwind when I'm on week 3 of a holiday. On weekends I just feel like the clock is ticking until weekend is over. I logged into work today (Sunday) and that eased my usual Sunday "fear".
Ah, I just mean that usually by Sunday i start getting tense about work on the Monday. Logging in today and getting my Monday todo list sorted out and doing a couple of hours of work has put my mind at ease. The Sunday "fear" seems to be a bit of an Irish / UK saying, or maybe it's just me and my friends that say it.
Ok got it. I figured that might be what you were getting at. I definitely experience the same thing. Isn’t it crazy though that in order to feel more relaxed on our day off, we need to actually spend that chunk of time in work mode.
The weekends are short enough as it is!
I’m in the UK, and while I haven’t really heard that particular term used as a common saying, I intuitively knew what you meant! (Sadly)
Yes, it's completely insane. Also a few hours after writing this I heard my friend's older brother, dropped dead of a heart attack at 41 years old last week. This has me seriously considering requesting a four day work week plus a 20 percent pay cut
I recently reduced my working hours (so I now have the freedom to work 3-4 days if I like or more if desired/needed) and I would say if you can make it work it’s 100% worth it.
It’s worth bearing in mind it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can suggest a “trial” to your employer to see if it works for both parties.
From my own experience I think it’s more likely that an employer will agree to this request than not.
Thanks. It seems that everyone one who's tried it says it's totally worth it. My concern is saving enough for retirement. But that guy dying of natural causes at 41 really hit home that I may not get a retirement!!
> I've worked 4 days a week (for 20% less pay) for years now. It's without a question the biggest positive change in standard of living and life quality I could buy with this money
I agree with the benefits of a 4 day workweek but personally going 80% will have disproportionately higher marginal costs. This is one of the occasions where a collective solution (4-day workweeks for all) outperforms individual initiatives.
First, if some of the total compensation is through stocks, usually they reduce both the vesting amount and vesting frequency by 20%, which could translate to some 25% cut in total comp. New stock grants are also prorated, just as your bonus will be prorated by that amount.
You vacation days are also reduced by 20%, a typical figure would amount to being deprived of another week of paid time off. In other words, you could have used one day of that paid time off every week to simulate your 80% work, but now you take a pay cut for it.
The cost of work side of things are not linear either. For example certain fixed costs like weekly meetings do not reduce by 20%, which means your available heads down work time reduces more than 20%. Unless you do overtime to compensate for that (which beats the purpose of part time), that means you also get an additional productivity hit.
Without any WFH arrangement, cost of being housed in a commute distance of work is also constant. If you don't move to a 20% cheaper place while going part time, your rent to paycheck ratio increases, which matters especially for HCOL areas because it hits your disposable income rate disproportionately.
The cost function of going to 80% personally is horribly non-linear. Pushing for a 4-day workweek for all avoids that.
> You vacation days are also reduced by 20%, a typical figure would amount to being deprived of another week of paid time off.
When you need only 4 days of vacation to take one week off, 20 paid vacation days will let you go on vacation for 5 weeks per year, just like like a full-time employee with 25 vacation days.
In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
So my employer has a cap of 240 hours of vacation, and after (I think) 9 years of working there, caps the number of days of vacation to 21. So I accrue 6.5 hours of vacation every two weeks at this point.
My intention (which I'll reach in October) is to get sufficiently close to that 240-hours cap that I will have to take off one day every fortnight to keep under it, for almost every fortnight in the year.
My wife was offered a 9/80 schedule at her job, where she worked 10 hours per day for 9 days, and got the 2nd Friday off. I'm looking forward to my own version, except it'll only be the 8-hour nominal work day...
> When you need only 4 days of vacation to take one week off, 20 paid vacation days will let you go on vacation for 5 weeks per year, just like like a full-time employee with 25 vacation days.
Sure, but it is contingent on using your vacation allotments at full week increments, which is not the only way vacation days are used. In your hypothetical scenario, since we're in the realm of managerial approvals, you could as well ask for a 1 month unpaid time off which amounts to a nominal %8 pay cut for 20 some days (which is actually less because stock vesting tend not to stop), whereas a 20% time cut only gets you 45 extra non-workdays with more than 20% paycut due to the non-linearities I explained above. Marginal cost of non-workdays are much higher in the latter scenario.
> In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
If your employer is flexible you could work 5 days for 4 weeks and take the next week off without vacation days too. It runs through every person's own objective function for sure. I am not saying costs can never outweigh the benefits, but I am trying to draw attention to the cost function which is not usually as well thought through.
Of course, everyone will differ. And while Americans don't get the same vacation allotment as Europeans, reducing vacation but 20% isn't the worst. Some cases you will lose and in some cases you will gain. You don't have to use any vacation days to have a three day weekend. If you wanted a four day weekend you now only have to take one day off instead of two. That is a huge win. About the only time you lose is if you want to take a day off in the middle of the week. I'm sure there are a couple of other examples were you are worse off. But I think generally things will pretty much even out.
Now, reducing pay by 20% is a different story
Same here, I went down to a 4-day week around 5 years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process - one of the best decisions I ever made! Also, somehow, by compressing the working week I still get done in 4 days what I previously did in 5, so it's been pretty good for the company (I presume I'm procrastinating less, and spending less time on HN etc).
A 3-day weekend feels like proper time off - you have time to do all the chores and stuff that needs doing, and you have time for self and/or family.
My other great move was going almost fully remote around 10 years ago. Because of the pandemic, the benefits are now well known by many, so I won't bore you by detailing them again here :)
Through these 2 decisions, work and life feels well in balance.
Same here, except for the tax stuff (I’m a Californian! Take my money!). I work maybe 30 hours a week and it’s the best retention policy I could imagine. It just means I screw around less online during work hours. I’m happier and more we’ll rounded.
I’m convinced it’s nothing but positive for most workers who aren’t constrained by the hours available for meetings, meaning ICs.
I've heard some people in the Netherlands work 4 days a week but 9 hours a day. Would you consider this OK? I doubt one can be mentally productive working 9 hours unless their job is very simple or unless they have an a sleeping break. I work 7 hours but already feel stupid and demotivated during the final 2-3 hours.
I would love to have a holiday every Wednesday though. Never working more than 2-3 days in a row would rid me of the feeling of living in the office.
AFAIK the optimal is known to be 5 hours. I can't recall the sources but I believe this is backed with some recent neuroscience or empirical productivity experiments.
I had a company that allowed half day Fridays if we worked 9 hours a day M-Thu. I only chose to do that once. Staying in the office twiddling your thumbs for an extra hour felt more excruciating for me.
I would prefer we adapt a flex schedule type of work. If you’re done for the day you should be able to leave instead of acting like you’re busy.
I'm from the Netherlands and its an option that's quite common for companies that have 36 hour work weeks; 1) take Friday afternoon off (or Wednesday if you're children are off from school) 2) have a full day off once every other week, 3) have an extra day off every week but work 9 hours the other four.
Personally 9 hours per day wouldn't work, after a solid day of programming I tend to loose focus too much after about 7 hours, but some of the alternatives work fine.
Why though? As I pointed out in my other comment — based on actual historical data — productivity went UP when people switched to a 40 hour workweek. We need to get passed this idea that the literal number of hours are somehow sacrosanct. When we switched to a 40 hour workweek, productivity went up for a whole host of reasons, not least because of health and safety. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and people aren’t literal cogs despite the Taylorism still prevalent in so much of our thinking around “work”.
No, not at all. I’m pointing out that people fought against limiting the workweek to 40 hours but productivity ended up rising. Point being: fewer hours doesn’t mean productivity will necessarily go down. So if we’re gonna go to a four day week, why make the days longer?
What is work exactly? Is studying on my spare time (often during work hours) work? It's focused and productive, but it's to no advantage of my employer. Humans will always naturally do the bare minimum for others, while maximizing benefit for themselves.
How is you getting more competent not advantageous to your employer? Perhaps if the subject is completely irrelevant, but even then, I think it's nice to stay sharp and be ready to pick up new skills as our jobs evolve.
I still think getting some jobs you really want to do boosts way more happiness and productivity. Problem is few gets to do what they want, and many people change what they "want" every few years :S
Not really sure why 4-day workweek is as popular compared to alternatives. If i could choose between 4-day 7.5h workweek and 5 day 6h workweek, i would definitely chosen the later. I wonder how many computer programmers can really work for 8 hours in a day.
Having entire days off is so much more freedom than having two extra hours in the evening. Three day weekend every weekend means me and my girlfriend could go on little escapes more frequently.
Yeah, as a programmer I often don't program 8 hours a day and when I do it is wildly exhausting. I still absolutely work for 8 hours a day, most days.
I would choose 4 days. You said it yourself, actual hours are less but more days mean more extra hours you need to commit, not to mention commute and lunch and other hassles
I'm with you. But we're probably in the minority. I notice that my after-work hours are vastly improved if I work 1-2hours less than my usual 8 hours just because those last hours are the most draining, somehow, mentally. So cutting those would improve 5/7 days instead of the 1/7 day improvement with another free day. But anyway, I think in the modern office environment both options should be available. It's available where I live (Germany) but I think most bosses don't really like people exercising these options (I'm waiting for my next promotion before I do it ;)).
From experience, it's not too hard to not work Wednesdays (like some others, I had to burn a lot of PTO because corporate changed the accrual cap), but managing work hours is harder. It's easy to slip and then you're working (or in the office anyway) 8 hour days and paid for 6 hour days.
* kids, depending on their age: shorter work days to be around when they're not at school, or shorter work week to spend one more day with your baby instead of leaving it at day care
* whether you count your working time: 4-day workweek means nobody expects you to be there one day per week, expectations are less clear with a reduced-time 5-day workweek
* what you do in your free-time, compare hiking weekends vs going to bars and restaurants
Obviously, the best alternative is to be able to choose depending on your personal plans for the week!
A 3-day workweek can even better, especially if you get paid as if you work 5 days a week.
But either or 4-way workweek at full pay will be a problem, so now we just need higher taxes, minimum corporate tax globally, and some MMT to go with that and we'll enter nirvana!
It's so funny to see work conversations framed around time rather than something tangible, measurable.
A cabinetmaker who spends fifty fewer days per year building cabinets isn't more productive (and maybe not even happier). Fifty days spent not building cabinets could mean he produces 6 fewer cabinets per year. Imagine the absurdity of a salary man advising a cabinetmaker to work one day less per week, "You'll make more cabinets!".
And this is why the types of jobs that are the subject of these conversations are those that provide abstract, non-measurable, questionable value:
>Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools...
The company that manufactured your shirt understands real value, real output, real productivity. That's why their workers are at it 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week (as unhappy as they may be, but cheap labor is cheap, what can you do).
People are not machines. This is the argument presented when the 40 hour workweek was proposed. Instead, productivity went up! Because people had fewer injuries and illness.
(1: Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to know more about productivity.)
Whose? Mine? Yours? Everyone's? Not all jobs are equal, not all people.
It takes me one day (about eight hours, plus or minus one - I'm no machine after all) to build a widget. Some weeks I'll take a few days off. The weeks I work two days, I only produce two widgets. The weeks I work three days, I only produce three widgets. I'm not more productive those two-day weeks.
Point is, it's important to think of jobs in terms of what was done rather than how many hours were spent doing it. In this way, why 35? Why not 30? Why not 25? If you can do your job in just 5, then do that. Do your job however long you need to do it. I need a day to make a widget, and I like to make five widgets per week, so I work five.
Again, this is why the conversation only ever surrounds people who sell their time rather than something more real; people who don't own what they do, but whose time is owned by their employer.
The cabinetmaker laughs when this conversation pops up.
I used to frame pictures in a former life. It’s a very delicate and meticulous craft. While it’s not the same as a cabinet maker, I can tell you some insights related to something with tangible, finished objects.
There are days when you do negative work in framing. The most obvious is when you damage artwork. The less obvious is when you mismeasure something. That one act can destroy not just work time, but also calendar time since you may need to wait a week to get replacment materials. Same problem if you mar the product something very easy to do with delicate finishes. And then there’s injuries, cutting oneself can not only end the day, but may also end up with lifelong reduction in capabilities. Oh, and blood can ruin material.
So, it’s very important to have a good frame of mind when doing certain kinds of physical tasks. There were some days I worked, where the first sign I was mentally impaired I backed off and stopped making things. Those days you do the low risk things like cleaning and taking stock. But at some point you’ve done all the things of value and working more hours when you can’t do the thing that pays the bills doesn’t make sense. I can tell you from personal experience that you can easily hit a wall long before 40 hours and the odds of negative work go up quickly when tired or overworked.
Now, if your cabinetmaker is essentially a factory worker, then some of my advice is not as applicable, you can build processes and tooling to minimize mistakes and also to help preserve mental energy, which makes it much easier to work longer hours. But never underestimate the cost of stupid, and stupid goes up quickly as hours worked increases.
I submit that doing a job that you like is already enough to make you happy and productive. Trying to boost both with a day less of work is pretty obviously just trying to cure a symptom. I always liked to go to work, even after 22 years of doing basically the same job. I even missed going to work during the pandemic. Just a thought...
I would step in and do the work you are not doing on the 5th day. We will see how employers deal with this. "I want to work from home, and I want to work less", lets see if this works out for you people...
Why not on 6th and 7th as well? Or after hours? Where will you stop?
Look, it works for me. I work Mon-Thu and work from home. My employer deals with it just fine. They have a happy employee and pay a day less a week as well. It's all about communication and organisation at the end. I see a lot of jobs that could be optimised to be done in less than 9-5 five days a week.
Here in the states, maybe with that extra day people have they could rally for the rest of the working class to get fair pay and benefits.
As I’ve watched my non-software friends (with degrees!) struggle, I’ve grown increasingly disgusted by how much money there is in the software industry. The majority of workers will never have money for a house and/or real retirement, while my only reason for not buying a second house is that I don’t feel like vacationing in the same spot all the time.
I fully expect to get downvoted to hell by all the financially comfortable libertarians that lurk here.
My position (like many in tech) doesn’t track my hours. I often don’t work one day a week so I can get some chores done or simply do something fun instead. Hasn’t affected my career at all, I’m making high six figures now.
Whenever I take a random weekday off I realize how quick I can run errands on that day. Going to Costco on a weekday? Much shorter lines. Going to USPS? No lines at all. Getting an oil change done? Barely any wait. I wish more companies adapted this 4-day workweek.
The benefits wouldn’t disappear, people’s errand running would be spread throughout the week rather then crammed into the weekend. I would rather have a weekday free to run errands with much fewer lines than the weekend even if the lines are slightly worse in this scenario than weekdays are today.
But someone's still working full hours at Costco or the post office or the barber or the gas station still. If those places closed for an extra day so that everyone gets a 3 day weekend, the benefits you outlined disappear.
All the upper middle class white collar professionals are the main beneficiaries.
Thought experiment: Would you rather work 4 days a week, so you have one to run errands; or work 5 days and have someone run errands for you. Let's assume the net income would stay the same.
Even if someone else runs the errands for me for free, i would rather have 4 day work week and run the errands myself. When i go to the shops by myself i might purchase something I wasn’t planning on purchasing or check out a new ramen shop that just opened up near the grocery store or make an impromptu stop at the movie theater.
I don't believe it's gonna happen until some Big Co follows through to set an example. And they won't because they're going to get slaughtered by Wall Street. The whole point here is to extract value from workers. Even if you make stuff super efficient using technology, which was always advertised as something which creates leisure time for society, what actually happens is extra time for extracting value from workers to feed capital. I (strongly) don't believe we will have mainstream 4 day workweeks in our lifetime. It is just not compatible with our economic system. Doesn't matter what 'studies say'. 'Studies also say' open offices are bad for engineers and yet here we are..
My biggest worry is the effects of "4 days for me, but not for thee". A lot of workers in many industries can't afford to only work 4 days, and what kind of social divisions will standards like this create?
I don't really see how this can work in any kind of project/sprint based working environment. I work in a position where our clients contract us to complete a parcel of work over a period of several months with a hard deadline at the end (maybe a 1-2 week extension, but the end release date is well known early on).
It is expected that in the last 1-2 months we're not just working 40hrs/5 days but probably 60,70, even 80hrs a week and likely 6 day weeks (the last project was 7 day weeks and I worked 71 days in a row without a day off). I'm not proud of this in the slightest and indeed will be refusing to do this again.
But - my situation isn't unique or even uncommon in many tech jobs that involve delivering projects to a (small) pool of paying clients. Our profit margins are also slim - there is no way my company is going to hire another person who can share jobs with me and have say 2-3 of us on the same 2-3 different projects in parallel to cover the lack of cover 20% of the time. We need to be really zoomed in on the problems to solve and tasks to do - not being there 20% of the time couldn't possibly work.
The dream of a 4 day week is for many, many workers just that - a dream.
I think the idea is that a 4-day workweek would come along with a broader cultural shift.
Imagine a world where Saturday was a workday, it shouldn't be hard as this was the case for many only a few generations ago.
We could say that it is expected that you will not only work 48hrs/6 days a week, but probably 70, 80, 90 hours likely 7 days a week!
Fortunately, a cultural shift occurred along the way, and the work week is now commonly accepted to be 5 days. Expectations of clients, managers, and employees are based around this standard.
So why can't the standard change again? Why couldn't a broad cultural shift occur in which expectations are better managed towards the productivity of a 4-day work week?
Do you think there would be a perception that I (a client) paying 100% rate for a project where people only 80% switched on will lead to a feeling that I'm only getting 80% "quality" or 80% of what it could be. (I work in a creative industry).
More hours don't translate directly to higher quality or higher output in creative fields. You might actually produce higher quality stuff if you work less. This is pretty well documented at this point
Employees working 80% does not mean that the company output has to be reduced to 80%. With the salary reduction, for every 4 employees there would be roughly enough cost reduction to hire another employee, bringing the output to approximately what it was before.
Project deadlines like this are pretty bad for protect quality. Asking people to grind 80 hour work weeks is honestly stupid. It's bad for your employees, it's awful for productivity (your productivity per hour massively dives), and it's bad for quality because you're over worked and stressed and tired, which is bad for your clients. So if you want to do thing exactly the wrong way, yeah do 80 hour work weeks and serve your clients rushed half baked garbage. If you take your time and do it right, everyone will be happier. People have limits and you can't just push them passed those limits when it's convenient or when someone gives you unreasonable deadlines.
It's understandable that the client schedule seems like an immovable object, but in truth it simply is not. Of course, I recognize that it is immovable by you. But imagine they applied the same mentality shift that we're discussing for the work week. Asking "why does it have to be this way? maybe we could try something different".
Is the deadline it tied to something else that truly can't be changed, like a holiday? Then what if the project was started earlier? Or if not, then what if we were in the world where it takes N+3 weeks instead of N, but the people doing it are happier and more productive?
I agree that it's not a small step to get to that reality, but I wouldn't say it's a dream; more a vision.
I suspect once everyone is having a 4 day work week they’d get used to that, complain, and then want more. The problem isn’t a 5 day work week, but the world is pretty much designed for that in mind. Once a 4 day is normal, the world will again design around that to make it inadequate again.
And what's wrong with that? But seems like a 4 day work week is a no brainer. Basically no loss of work productivity and a lot more free time. It's more than an extra 8 hours, you'd get more energy for the whole rest of that day and be able to do much more with that day. It would bump your free time that day from like 3 hours to 11 hours - that's pretty huge.
In the remote work era, I would propose 4 hour work days 6 days a week. More focused days and more time each day. it works when your travel overhead is removed.
Wouldn't 52 holiday days make more sense than 4 day workweeks? Would give flexibility for people who prefer either 5 day or 4 workweeks. Allows people to actually have real time off. Personally I'd rather 2.5 months off the year to go travel/really focus on a side project, than 4 day work weeks.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadIt blows my mind that 99% of jobs are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model?
It annoys me so much that I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ (Software Jobs with a better work / life balance)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Ple....
Maybe we should be the ones submitting and talking about the 4 day work week more often.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534517 (3 days ago; exactly the same (well... I guess they added "absolutely"))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468882 (3 months ago; exactly the same)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114570 (4 months ago; exactly the same (except for the last sentence))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26015969 (4 months ago; mostly the same)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25765787 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25674756 (both 5 months ago; both exactly the same as each other and only slightly modified from today's posting)
In my opinion this 'message' should actually be pushed more and people encouraged to try it. If that means shilling some website with 4d/week jobs...so be it.
Whilst trying to be charitable to the poster (I guess there's no harm in pushing their side project) I would caution that carbon copying comments like this (to articles posted deliberately for the purpose of doing so) could come off as a bit insulting to the HN readership.
On the other hand, perhaps they're onto something since these articles keep rising up to the front page!
A 4 day week is a much easier "sell" in the short term though
That means you have a day off to go to the bank, go to the doctors, call customer service for a bunch of companies that may not otherwise be open on the weekend, etc.
Further, the weekends carry an expectation of doing something. Such an expectation would not exist for the weekday off.
If we do move to a mass 4 day workweek, this obviously implies that the 3rd day off should not be the same for everybody, so basically it shouldn’t be implemented by just making Friday another day off like Saturday and Sunday. It would be much better if that 3rd day is divided for all employees between Mon-Fri.
Ideally, we’d have flexibility around the denominator, allowing something like 4 on/2 off as a step towards 4 on/3 off. The maybe 4 on/4 off instead of all the way to 3 on/4 off. Changing the 7 day week is probably infeasible though… but I see equally crazy schedules from friends with shift work.
Outrageous idea in a wage slave society of course. What? Freedom to choose, for slaves? What nonsense. Big daddy government and big daddy corporations know what's best for you - here, choose coke or pepsi every 4 years, you are free to choose, you are free.
I wish there would be ways to reduce work time to reduce unemployment and "share" labor, but my guess is that it's more difficult for employers to organize under such model.
The problem isn't only overwork, but it's also the labor distribution and competition among job candidates. The more work is done by one person, the less labor is left to create jobs.
Honestly I've left this rat race of job competition a long time ago, it's depressing. I live in a country where welfare benefits allows me to eat and have a home. Money is not a problem. I'm not a merchandise.
that just means you're living off taxation of the wealthier. It's not sustainable if everybody did this - at least not under today's technological capability.
Well there always are certain jobs that are necessary to exist, but there is a large quantity of them that has very low value and nothing would be lost if they did not exist.
People don't eat money.
The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.
But nevertheless, we probably are amongst the countries where you work the less (and it never had a negative impact on economy).
Almost all white collar jobs in the UK are 35 hours
> The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.
35 hours is the expected salaried agreement, similar to 40 hours in the US. I expect most of Europe is 35 hours and that is protected by labor laws.
Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit... (in German). The article also contains a table of the average for a lot of European countries, which range from 30.4 in the Netherlands to 45.4 in Turkey. The article also states that the majority of the differences in the average working hours between the countries are typically due to a different ratio of part-time to full-time jobs.
Are they really? I'm British, and I don't think I've ever seen an IT-based job contracted at only 35h per week. 37.5h or 40h seem to be the norm.
The shortest "standard working hours" I'm aware of is 9.00-5.30 with 1 hour for lunch in places with formal time. That's 37.5 working hours.
I know some people in France that say 35 hours is mandatory, but some work more anyway.
Except that in France, the norm for knowledge workers is to work more (38-40h is normal) and get the difference compensated in extra holidays (RTT).
Also most of them don't actually clock their hours and have contracts only stating days ("au forfait"), so the actual worked hours aren't counted at all and often exceed the theoretical amount.
I'd work 5-day weeks if the pay was so well that I, say, could save up five years of expenses in one year. Unfortunately, my local tax system strongly disincentivizes this by effectively having a 62% marginal tax rate.
So, in summary, I will most likely never have a 5 days a week routine again. It's just that good. In fact, due to the marginal tax situation, it's more likely I'll downscale to something closer to 50% if I can get away with it career-wise.
The only day I could see plausibly doing this is Friday as there are few meetings and lots of senior people WFH/use remote offices then. Of course this also means taking the easiest day off!
How did you make this work, is it a consulting role? Individual contributor? What is the off day, Friday?
My company treats it the same as vacation time. On the occasion there's something that only he can do but he's not in, it'll have to wait.
He is a "regular" salaried dev on a medium sized team.
I think probably 60-70% of the places I have worked, this sentence " On the occasion there's something that only he can do but he's not in.." would end in "we call his cell".
I was just on a medium-urgent outage the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and 2 teams on the call were calling their on-vacation colleagues for help.
If you're part of a team, the team should be big enough to be resilient to this change (and everyone else should do this too, and your team may need to expand by 15-20%).
If you manage a team, your team should be skilled enough to work without your direction one day a week. If they aren't, you need to step up and develop better procedures.
How many people have come back from a long weekend to a 4 day week and noticed it's just 5 days of meetings/work rescheduled to fit into 4 days.
I'll always remember the stunned response years ago while moving when my wife picked up my cell phone (my hands weren't free) to what was a production trading outage at my firm.. and said we are off today, we are in the middle of moving, we have no internet or computers plugged in. On a 30 person dev team in a 20K+ person firm and we had cross team direct dev team escalation to my personal cell phone because no one could be bothered following escalation procedures/rotas/call lists/etc.
My fear would generally be taking the 20% pay cut and not really getting 20% less work/time expected.
I've of course always taken care to not present this as the first thing that comes out of my mouth when interviewing, but I have always broached the subject in the first conversation I've had with decision-makers at the company in question.
That does seem to be changing, but is certainly a cost factor many endure, which ironically shifts people into using their own transport and another car on the road factor plays in.
Now for a company, were before you had 4 staff to cover 20 days of work, you now have 5. That has pro's and con's, and certainly numbers of employee's will entail scaling costs. Making you hit certain numbers more easily and that can see more requirements as an employer. So suddenly you need an extra toilet, or larger kitchen, extra facilities and all becomes the number of people registered working in that location tips you into complying with such requirements. On the other hand, you have more resilience and less dependence upon individuals and the impact of loosing one member of staff is less impacting. That with fresher more focused staff due to working less hours, then it becomes a complicated equation to balance out on both sides of the employer/employee relationship.
I certainly do feel the 4 day week is a good thing, one you appreciate more in later life and does help prevent things like burn out. Also working from home has it's upsides, but also like everything, in moderation.
So if you had a choice of working in an office for 4 days a week or working from home for 3 days and 2 days in the office. I'm not sure the choice would be an easy one for many. Personally the later has much going for it, even if working 5 days over 4.
But one of the best balances I've known somebody to use was that they would do IT contracting in the Winter and would do water ski instructing in the summer. Equally known somebody who would contract in the summer and Ski Instructor in the winter. Which gets down to one of the key aspects in any job/work - variation, if done right can be as good as a break. Just need to look at all the options and get the balance that works for you.
I just hope more public transportation systems adjust pricing to not punish those working shorter weeks as is the case with the model used in many places today (trains, buses).
I am anxious throughout the weekend. It may have to do with the lockdown we have.
But I am glued to mobile anyways or some sort of screen.
How can I work on this mindset?
It was amazing. Two-day sprints separated by a day or two of rest are really, really productive for me. I never had Monday blahs because I was never facing a long haul of 5 days of work.
Number one recommendation I have for you, regardless of your working situation: change where you are. I don't mean move to another city, I mean keep work things away from personal things physically. If you have a corner that you always work in, never do anything else there. Go get exercise -- if you aren't doing any at all now, pull up a map and find a place about a kilometer from you. Walk there, walk back. When it's raining, take an umbrella. If it's too hot, take a bottle of water and an umbrella. There's nothing shameful about hiding from the sun.
Most people here are smart, hard-working and aspire to be high performers in whatever they do. So when you have an extra day off, you're expected to use it for an ambitious side project, self-improvement, learning new technology or whatever.
I have a part of this mindset in my identity, but it's a source of stress. So after a bit of a history of anxiety and depression in my past, I've made the deliberate decision to relegate this to the part my attention that's focused on employment and earning money. I never let it enter the part of my time that I have for myself.
This means that my three days off are spent on activities I find meaningful: Family, seeing friends, reading, playing computer games, hiking/biking/working out, philosophizing, re-filling my social introvert energy. Occasionally flying airplanes in summer, skiing or snow kiting in winter. I always say yes when opportunities to do activities with friends show up, and this never turns into a stressful thing since I always have the opportunity to recharge before work.
If I feel like doing something more structured and ambitious, something creative, I'll do it. But it has to come from the heart. Generally, I don't have a lot of excess creative energy even when working 4 days a week, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
I always have a lot of excess energy for handling stuff that might otherwise get low priority: Getting enough sleep, seeing enough friends, handling any physical or mental health issues that want attention. That's a big difference.
> I logged into work today (Sunday) and that eased my usual Sunday "fear".
The weekends are short enough as it is!
I’m in the UK, and while I haven’t really heard that particular term used as a common saying, I intuitively knew what you meant! (Sadly)
I recently reduced my working hours (so I now have the freedom to work 3-4 days if I like or more if desired/needed) and I would say if you can make it work it’s 100% worth it.
It’s worth bearing in mind it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can suggest a “trial” to your employer to see if it works for both parties.
From my own experience I think it’s more likely that an employer will agree to this request than not.
Good luck if you decide to go for it.
So high tax rates can be an incentive to work less...
I agree with the benefits of a 4 day workweek but personally going 80% will have disproportionately higher marginal costs. This is one of the occasions where a collective solution (4-day workweeks for all) outperforms individual initiatives.
First, if some of the total compensation is through stocks, usually they reduce both the vesting amount and vesting frequency by 20%, which could translate to some 25% cut in total comp. New stock grants are also prorated, just as your bonus will be prorated by that amount.
You vacation days are also reduced by 20%, a typical figure would amount to being deprived of another week of paid time off. In other words, you could have used one day of that paid time off every week to simulate your 80% work, but now you take a pay cut for it.
The cost of work side of things are not linear either. For example certain fixed costs like weekly meetings do not reduce by 20%, which means your available heads down work time reduces more than 20%. Unless you do overtime to compensate for that (which beats the purpose of part time), that means you also get an additional productivity hit.
Without any WFH arrangement, cost of being housed in a commute distance of work is also constant. If you don't move to a 20% cheaper place while going part time, your rent to paycheck ratio increases, which matters especially for HCOL areas because it hits your disposable income rate disproportionately.
The cost function of going to 80% personally is horribly non-linear. Pushing for a 4-day workweek for all avoids that.
Compensation through stocks applies to a tiny proportion of workers in the US, and a miniscule proportion elsewhere.
And to a substantial portion of the tech workers in the Bay Area.
As an aside, it would be interesting to know what proportion of HN users was actually based in SV; I imagine many times fewer than those who are not.
When you need only 4 days of vacation to take one week off, 20 paid vacation days will let you go on vacation for 5 weeks per year, just like like a full-time employee with 25 vacation days.
In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
My intention (which I'll reach in October) is to get sufficiently close to that 240-hours cap that I will have to take off one day every fortnight to keep under it, for almost every fortnight in the year.
My wife was offered a 9/80 schedule at her job, where she worked 10 hours per day for 9 days, and got the 2nd Friday off. I'm looking forward to my own version, except it'll only be the 8-hour nominal work day...
Sure, but it is contingent on using your vacation allotments at full week increments, which is not the only way vacation days are used. In your hypothetical scenario, since we're in the realm of managerial approvals, you could as well ask for a 1 month unpaid time off which amounts to a nominal %8 pay cut for 20 some days (which is actually less because stock vesting tend not to stop), whereas a 20% time cut only gets you 45 extra non-workdays with more than 20% paycut due to the non-linearities I explained above. Marginal cost of non-workdays are much higher in the latter scenario.
> In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
If your employer is flexible you could work 5 days for 4 weeks and take the next week off without vacation days too. It runs through every person's own objective function for sure. I am not saying costs can never outweigh the benefits, but I am trying to draw attention to the cost function which is not usually as well thought through.
A 3-day weekend feels like proper time off - you have time to do all the chores and stuff that needs doing, and you have time for self and/or family.
My other great move was going almost fully remote around 10 years ago. Because of the pandemic, the benefits are now well known by many, so I won't bore you by detailing them again here :)
Through these 2 decisions, work and life feels well in balance.
I’m convinced it’s nothing but positive for most workers who aren’t constrained by the hours available for meetings, meaning ICs.
I would love to have a holiday every Wednesday though. Never working more than 2-3 days in a row would rid me of the feeling of living in the office.
I would prefer we adapt a flex schedule type of work. If you’re done for the day you should be able to leave instead of acting like you’re busy.
Personally 9 hours per day wouldn't work, after a solid day of programming I tend to loose focus too much after about 7 hours, but some of the alternatives work fine.
Having entire days off is so much more freedom than having two extra hours in the evening. Three day weekend every weekend means me and my girlfriend could go on little escapes more frequently.
Yeah, as a programmer I often don't program 8 hours a day and when I do it is wildly exhausting. I still absolutely work for 8 hours a day, most days.
* long commute
* kids, depending on their age: shorter work days to be around when they're not at school, or shorter work week to spend one more day with your baby instead of leaving it at day care
* whether you count your working time: 4-day workweek means nobody expects you to be there one day per week, expectations are less clear with a reduced-time 5-day workweek
* what you do in your free-time, compare hiking weekends vs going to bars and restaurants
Obviously, the best alternative is to be able to choose depending on your personal plans for the week!
In most jobs, you don't have to work all the time while you're on the job - and most people take copious advantage of that.
But either or 4-way workweek at full pay will be a problem, so now we just need higher taxes, minimum corporate tax globally, and some MMT to go with that and we'll enter nirvana!
Ridiculous socialist fake news and psyops.
A cabinetmaker who spends fifty fewer days per year building cabinets isn't more productive (and maybe not even happier). Fifty days spent not building cabinets could mean he produces 6 fewer cabinets per year. Imagine the absurdity of a salary man advising a cabinetmaker to work one day less per week, "You'll make more cabinets!".
And this is why the types of jobs that are the subject of these conversations are those that provide abstract, non-measurable, questionable value:
>Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools...
The company that manufactured your shirt understands real value, real output, real productivity. That's why their workers are at it 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week (as unhappy as they may be, but cheap labor is cheap, what can you do).
(1: Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to know more about productivity.)
Whose? Mine? Yours? Everyone's? Not all jobs are equal, not all people.
It takes me one day (about eight hours, plus or minus one - I'm no machine after all) to build a widget. Some weeks I'll take a few days off. The weeks I work two days, I only produce two widgets. The weeks I work three days, I only produce three widgets. I'm not more productive those two-day weeks.
Point is, it's important to think of jobs in terms of what was done rather than how many hours were spent doing it. In this way, why 35? Why not 30? Why not 25? If you can do your job in just 5, then do that. Do your job however long you need to do it. I need a day to make a widget, and I like to make five widgets per week, so I work five.
Again, this is why the conversation only ever surrounds people who sell their time rather than something more real; people who don't own what they do, but whose time is owned by their employer.
The cabinetmaker laughs when this conversation pops up.
There are days when you do negative work in framing. The most obvious is when you damage artwork. The less obvious is when you mismeasure something. That one act can destroy not just work time, but also calendar time since you may need to wait a week to get replacment materials. Same problem if you mar the product something very easy to do with delicate finishes. And then there’s injuries, cutting oneself can not only end the day, but may also end up with lifelong reduction in capabilities. Oh, and blood can ruin material.
So, it’s very important to have a good frame of mind when doing certain kinds of physical tasks. There were some days I worked, where the first sign I was mentally impaired I backed off and stopped making things. Those days you do the low risk things like cleaning and taking stock. But at some point you’ve done all the things of value and working more hours when you can’t do the thing that pays the bills doesn’t make sense. I can tell you from personal experience that you can easily hit a wall long before 40 hours and the odds of negative work go up quickly when tired or overworked.
Now, if your cabinetmaker is essentially a factory worker, then some of my advice is not as applicable, you can build processes and tooling to minimize mistakes and also to help preserve mental energy, which makes it much easier to work longer hours. But never underestimate the cost of stupid, and stupid goes up quickly as hours worked increases.
If I missed any that you know of let me know or make a pull request!
Look, it works for me. I work Mon-Thu and work from home. My employer deals with it just fine. They have a happy employee and pay a day less a week as well. It's all about communication and organisation at the end. I see a lot of jobs that could be optimised to be done in less than 9-5 five days a week.
As I’ve watched my non-software friends (with degrees!) struggle, I’ve grown increasingly disgusted by how much money there is in the software industry. The majority of workers will never have money for a house and/or real retirement, while my only reason for not buying a second house is that I don’t feel like vacationing in the same spot all the time.
I fully expect to get downvoted to hell by all the financially comfortable libertarians that lurk here.
Whether it's four ninety-minute shifts (six hours) per day, four days per week, or one intense all-nighter, that should be enough.
That's more like 30 hours.
All the upper middle class white collar professionals are the main beneficiaries.
It is expected that in the last 1-2 months we're not just working 40hrs/5 days but probably 60,70, even 80hrs a week and likely 6 day weeks (the last project was 7 day weeks and I worked 71 days in a row without a day off). I'm not proud of this in the slightest and indeed will be refusing to do this again.
But - my situation isn't unique or even uncommon in many tech jobs that involve delivering projects to a (small) pool of paying clients. Our profit margins are also slim - there is no way my company is going to hire another person who can share jobs with me and have say 2-3 of us on the same 2-3 different projects in parallel to cover the lack of cover 20% of the time. We need to be really zoomed in on the problems to solve and tasks to do - not being there 20% of the time couldn't possibly work.
The dream of a 4 day week is for many, many workers just that - a dream.
Imagine a world where Saturday was a workday, it shouldn't be hard as this was the case for many only a few generations ago.
We could say that it is expected that you will not only work 48hrs/6 days a week, but probably 70, 80, 90 hours likely 7 days a week!
Fortunately, a cultural shift occurred along the way, and the work week is now commonly accepted to be 5 days. Expectations of clients, managers, and employees are based around this standard.
So why can't the standard change again? Why couldn't a broad cultural shift occur in which expectations are better managed towards the productivity of a 4-day work week?
Is the deadline it tied to something else that truly can't be changed, like a holiday? Then what if the project was started earlier? Or if not, then what if we were in the world where it takes N+3 weeks instead of N, but the people doing it are happier and more productive?
I agree that it's not a small step to get to that reality, but I wouldn't say it's a dream; more a vision.
Your work environment does sound pretty crazy, but that has nothing to do with sprints or project based work.
Agreed it would be great for individuals, but having a more predictable schedule would be less disruptive.