Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8513783.stm

by mortenjorck • 16 years ago

72 61 16 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

This caught my eye, but it turns out it's the same old "fixed pie" thinking: the current workers are taking up all the available "working hours", so they should cut back to give the unemployed an opportunity to get some. Ridiculous. Why not be more productive and actually just create more jobs. Just like wealth, the number of jobs available is not fixed.

Androsynth• 16 years ago

It caught my eye too and I thought it might have been a meaningful study. By the end of the article I thought it was an early april fools joke.

_delirium• 16 years ago

That's not the only reason to cut work weeks, though I agree it's a bad one. This old article by Bertrand Russell starts out by pointing out that the "fixed pie" view is not a good reason to work less, but that there are others: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

The gist of it is that you can take the dividends of increasing productivity in a lot of ways. As computers get faster, you can keep paying $2k for a new computer every 3-4 years and get a better one, or you can take some of that technology-advancement dividend in cash, and buy a netbook that's still better than your old computer. He's basically arguing that you should take some of the modern era's productivity dividend in leisure time, instead of just in more income and material wealth.

ryanwaggoner2• 16 years ago

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think there could be a great case for cutting work weeks. The article caught my eye because I was hoping that they had done an actual study that indicated that working fewer hours would lead to higher overall productivity (though I think that cutting them by 50 - 70% is probably wishful thinking).

olefoo• 16 years ago

Not only that but in an era where one's productivity is directly tied to one's creativity, more downtime is more productive.

sb• 16 years ago

Thank you very much for the interesting link to Bertrand Russel's take on this issue. Some time ago, another very interesting piece of Betrand Russel was linked by another HN user, and I have to say that reading Mr. Russel's essays should be required reading for some classes; probably in addition to reading some of his mathematical work, which is highly recommended, too.

That aside, I think that the article does not address another important (probably too recent) reason/ambition for increased work load: improving ones social status. As already indicated this probably was a non-issue when the article was authored, but then again my comment would fall into the just-for-the-record category...

yummyfajitas5• 16 years ago

You can take the modern era's productivity dividend in leisure time. About 37 million Americans do.

For this group of people, the average family is supported by only 800 hours of work/year (about 16 hours/week).

This group of people has all the food they need (in fact, they typically eat vastly more than they need), a house to live in (about half own the home), most own an AC, a car, a TV, all the basic comforts.

You can read about this group of people, their lifestyle and their choices here:

http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm

codexon• 16 years ago

First, I'd like to say I agree the reasoning behind the article is unconvincing.

Now that's out of the way, I disagree with extending PG's "Pie Fallacy" like this. As PG mentions in his article repeatedly, wealth is not the same thing as money. The pie of products that people will trade money for is quite limited, and unless you have a farm and don't mind living in a shack, you will need money.

The probability that people made obsolete will then create something useful in order to barter their "wealth" for money, money for supplies, and finally supplies for a living, is exceedingly small. Think about how many of you here are making niche web-apps that would be the first things to drop off of a customer's expenses when the market declines.

It is true that overall wealth would increase if everyone just worked on something else (even if it is unlikely to be traded for currency), but that is exactly what the article is suggesting: generating wealth in the community.

In the end, all this illustrates is a power struggle. A business owner will seek to turn all productivity increases into profit. Employees will seek to maintain or increase salary per effort. These two goals are fundamentally opposed. The reason the article sounds so absurd is because it is arguing in the favor of employees at the expense of business owners.

gaius5• 16 years ago

This is the thinking that led the French to the 35-hour work week. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have occurred to them (probably because they were more-or-less interchangeable bureaucrats themselves) that an out-of-work bricklayer can't work the hours freed up by restricting the work-week of a plumber...

patio112• 16 years ago

I would be much, much more interested in hearing of how any one of you hacked life such that you work a non-traditional schedule than reading how a group thinks the workweek should be established by fiat. (Most especially for a group which does not demonstrate that it has any experience with, ahem, working for a living.)

Horse's mouth, incidentally: http://neweconomics.org/press-releases/shorter-working-week-...

maneesh2• 16 years ago

I designed my life to work 3hrs59m / week, and spend the remaining 6 days starting an NGO that teaches Indian village children how to use the computer....if you live your life non-traditionally, you can live on a lot less work than 21 hours...

andrew1• 16 years ago

That's very interesting, although without a little context, it's hard to know what to make of it. What do you do during the 3h59ms that you work? Where do you live? What do you do with the other 20h1m on the day when you work?

radu_floricica• 16 years ago

I did about 5 years of not-so-successful freelancing, mostly getting paid for about 50% of the projects I wrote specs for. Then I decided to go for very long term relationships. The turning point was when I finally got a couple of apps working as semi-passive income. Custom made, dedicated to each client, paid only as "rent" (no up-front money). Now I can work anything from 0 to 20 hours per week for living expenses.

With the rest of the time I do wildly different things. Last year I simply wasted it, learned Clojure, did social stuff, read a whole lot. The year before it was two startups at once. Which was predictably very fun and unsuccessful.

mattm• 16 years ago

This is my goal that I'm working towards.

zackattack• 16 years ago

I need $1300/month for rent, and $700/month for expenses like groceries and incidentals. That means I need to be making $445/week. I freelance whenever I feel like working. I'm currently working a charity gig at $42/hr, which means I need to work 11h/week.

breck2• 16 years ago

Nice, another data point:

$850/rent, $550/food,utilities, etc.

$1400/month total to live. (in San Francisco, no less)

Consult at $100/hr. Need to work ~ 4hrs/week.

However, I work more than that to raise money for our startup, and the time I'm not "working" I'm often spending reading, learning, practicing.

larrykubin• 16 years ago

Here are my stats for Austin, TX for the past three years. Just sharing that life can be really good here in Austin, and that there's no magic involved in working less. There's no "hack", you just have to have a valuable skill that you are able to charge a high hourly rate for (programming, accounting, lawyer, therapist). My wife is a speech therapist and I am a programmer. So my suggestions: live in a city that costs less money, see if you can live without a fancy car or smart phone, and find a good partner.

rent - wife pays $450, I pay $450

For this amount in Texas, you get a duplex with backyard in a nice neighborhood, a coffee shop and bus stop around the corner, 2 bedrooms, a garage, and 1200 square feet.

utilities - 150

student loan - 100

monthly unlimited bus pass - $25 (used to be $10 until recently)

shared office in downtown austin - $150 (optional, but has already paid for itself many times over due to bringing in extra work)

t-mobile prepaid phone - $100 per 1000 minutes, refill this every 4 months or so.

food costs - never calculated

insurance - on my wife's

jasonkester• 16 years ago

A few years back, I spent half a year living on the beach in Thailand, climbing rocks and supporting myself with the odd consulting job. I was renting a little shack in the trees on a monthly basis, eating well every day, and sipping a healthy collection of Beer Changs every sunset.

I calculated that I needed to work one 8 hour day per month to maintain that lifestyle indefinitely.

Naturally, a guy with a laptop and unlimited free time will find something to keep busy, so that was also the trip that launched my first couple entrepreneurial sites.

Silhouette• 16 years ago

I'm not entirely convinced by the presentation here, but I certainly agree with the general view that we spend too much time working (often unproductively, because of the paid-seat-warmer effect) and not enough time on the genuinely valuable things in life.

This has been brought home to me over the past few months, since I switched to contracting and mostly working from home. I had originally hoped to gain more independence and perhaps increase my income a bit, but not particularly aimed to reduce my working time. In practice, I worked a much lower number of hours for several months, due to some third party problems reducing the pace of the project below what my clients and I had wanted. Of course, this hit my income pretty hard on an hourly rate. However, it also gave me a lot of spare time to relax and offload the past few years of work stress, learn about new things, get back into some hobbies I'd been missing, spend more time with family and friends, and so on. Last year was probably the most enjoyable time I've had since I started full-time work, and many friends and family have commented on how much happier I seem these days.

I'm happy to be pushing he hours and income back up again now, so I can consider things like buying a nice house and supporting a family, because those things matter to me too. But we did just fine on a lower financial income but with more free time for a while, and I'd happily do it again from time to time rather than be the live-to-work guy for my whole life.

houseabsolute2• 16 years ago

I've seen some other reports from this group and they have about as much to do with economics as a fifteen year old's emo "poetry" blog has to do with high literature. Consider this publication where they troll the world with a claim that janitors are more valuable to the world on average than bankers, supported by nothing more than poorly thought out back-of-the-envelope calculations.

http://neweconomics.org/press-releases/hospital-cleaners-wor...

Groxx• 16 years ago

Reading through this and the thread's link, and scanning a couple others, I completely agree with you. They're trolls, and little else.

jff• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

shaayak• 16 years ago

This might actually be a reasonable idea, but I can't see something like this taking off with the current conditions. And more than that, I don't think the American philosophy is to work less, I think that's something a lot more likely to take off in Europe.

hartror• 16 years ago

"The foundation admitted people would earn less, but said they would have more time to carry out worthy tasks."

Like starving?

patio112• 16 years ago

That is, perhaps, a little harsh. I'm about as far from them on the political scale as is possible without being Atilla the Hun, but they do have one insight shining like a gem among so much donkey offal:

There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered ‘normal’ today. Time, like work, has become commodified – a recent legacy of industrial capitalism. Yet the logic of industrial time is out of step with today’s conditions, where instant communications and mobile technologies bring new risks and pressures, as well as opportunities.

This is right in every respect, I think.

It is taken by many as an article of faith that there are 10x productivity differences in knowledge workers. If we actually mean that, then 2x differences in numbers of hours worked should be quite sustainable. As I've said before, why should my daily life be fit to the schedule designed to maximize the productivity of illiterate water loom operators.

Where this report gets really really wacky is assuming that everyone can do it, which probably requires massive amounts of wealth flowing around to support unproductive workers. That might even work, for a while at least, if you had some sort of unfair advantage which could conceal you from the market -- taxing authority, perhaps, or such a booming economy that you could afford extravagances like the demands of the United Auto Workers out of the petty cash drawer.

There are also hard limits on how much value can be wrung out of the labor of low-skilled people, and those hard limits work in pretty much direct proportion to hours labored. I think achieving income parity (and relatedly, working hour parity) between them and high-skilled workers is probably a lost cause. I can sell software while sleeping, a trader can act as a productivity multiplier on millions in capital at the click of a button, but this floor isn't getting swept until somebody actually pushes a broom over it for an hour. (Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably.)

lionhearted• 16 years ago

> It is taken by many as an article of faith that there are 10x productivity differences in knowledge workers. If we actually mean that, then 2x differences in numbers of hours worked should be quite sustainable.

This might interest you if you haven't heard of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE

Results Only Work Environment - you agree on a set of tasks with your manager, you complete them, you get paid. Doesn't matter when you do it or how long it takes you. That lets people choose to work at a slower pace with more goofing off on Facebook or webcomics, or work in a blaze and hit the beach, or whatever. People who wish to produce manic levels of work can produce more and get paid for it as gauged by results, people who want to work less can complete less tasks can do so and still get paid a reasonable amount. I think there'll be some kinks to be ironed out, but it's more or less the future.

> (Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably.)

Cleaning floors is notoriously hard to outsource, but the technology-in-theory for automating/roboticizing much more of manual labor is already there. It's why I'd like to see the world get more wealthier - people have a false believe that if there's no more poor people, everything will get more expensive. Pretty false idea - if more people are doing R&D, pure science, engineering, art, programming instead of manual labor, we'll see huge gains in new innovation and can roboticize/automate much of the manual labor away. Hell, when I was in China I'd see like 30 guys with chisels tearing up asphalt which you'd have one guy with a jackhammer doing in the States. The labor was cheaper than the machinery, but as the Chinese get more educated and into high skilled work, that'll change and they'll switch over to jackhammers and whatever we invent next after jackhammers.

camccann2• 16 years ago

Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably.

This is really a key point, I think. Automation is the means by which high-skill workers apply their productivity multipliers to what would otherwise be low-skill work.

The technology already exists to automate large swathes of low-skill work; the only reason it's not already done is that, for the most part, low-skill workers are still cheaper, mostly due to the implicit coercion of things like "needing money to buy food".

What happens when technology progresses to the point where robots are cheaper than paying someone minimum wage is a tricky question--and it's going to happen, probably in Japan first (thanks to both a high level of technological sophistication and an aversion to cheap immigrant labor).

rjurney3• 16 years ago

Ever had your project interrupted when a European decides to take six weeks of consecutive vacation? I'll take puritan productivity any day.

gaius5• 16 years ago

Yet, European firms are still comparable to Americans in terms of productivity and compete successfully in global markets. Intriguing, no?

houseabsolute2• 16 years ago

Some types of European firms. You don't see as much innovative software coming out of that part of the world as the U.S.

ovi256• 16 years ago

Ever had your vacation interrupted because an American decided to start a project ? I'll take atheist productivity any day.

zach• 16 years ago

Don't be fooled by that, productivity in the top EU countries is better than just about any state in America. But the overall Europe/US productivity gap has gotten a lot worse as of late...

http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2009/12/10/the-trans-atlant...

yannis2• 16 years ago

All 'wealth' is created by labor, either directly or indirectly. (Think of an economy with no money). The more people work - subject to efficiency, the more wealth being generated. However, people do not produce wealth equally. Suppose there is a 10% unemployment. If these people's efficiency is an average 70% and the employed had an overall efficiency of 80%, there is an optimum hours per week for full employment.

lsc2• 16 years ago

well, even given the exact same person, one hour is not equal to the next. at 90 hours a week, after the first or second week, I get less useful work done than if I just work 20 hours.

I imagine 'optimal' productivity for one person varies considerably from person to person, and situation to situation, (and I imagine /on average/ optimal productivity means working more than 20 hours a week)

Which is why I was so disappointed by this article. I thought they were going to do some research on the optimal number of hours/week to work for maximum productivity. (I suppose I shouldn't be too disappointed; just measuring productivity is /hard/)

yannis2• 16 years ago

Agreed and to measure productivity over a year is more difficult. The authors present some data in their report, but some of the examples are difficult to accept (like Utah public servants). However, if you make a thought experiment in has merits. Assume 5 programmers with equal skills and a 'fixed work load'. From a social point of view it will be better for them to be all employed working for less hours than 4 of them working full hours.

camccann2• 16 years ago

I recall seeing at some point, but alas cannot recall where, a study that looked at average productivity per hour vs. hours worked each day/week. If memory serves me, they found that productivity/hr reliably dropped at the beginning and end of the work day, mostly independent of how many hours were worked, and also dropped steadily with increasing hours per week beyond some threshold, up to a (surprisingly low) point where the marginal productivity of an additional hour was actually negative.

The end result basically said that 4-hr workdays are less than half as productive as 8-hr workdays, and that diminishing returns make long work weeks quickly useless. Interestingly, per hour productivity peaked fairly low--something like 30hrs/week, I think. So, all else equal, if you're paying people hourly, you get best value for money having more people, working fewer hours in fewer days.

On the other hand, if you're paying people a salary, you technically always get more value up to the point of burnout (i.e., negative marginal productivity), but for whatever work week length, you get best value for money having people work a few very long days. That is, 12hr days M-R would be more productive than 8hr days M-S.

Unfortunately, I've been unable to find the study in question again; so take the above with a grain of salt, as my memory is certainly fallible.

nfnaaron• 16 years ago

"Unfortunately, I've been unable to find the study in question again; so take the above with a grain of salt, as my memory is certainly fallible."

That's OK, it's late in the week.

pw0ncakes• 16 years ago

It depends how you define "work". Sitting in an office doing what is told for 40 hours is ridiculous and hellish, and it's much of why that system doesn't work. People "revolt" by showing up and working at 1/8 speed.

If we extend the definition of "work" to include self-directed projects, education and enrichment, 40-55 is about right; 40 for most people and 55 for the more ambitious.

Beyond 60 hours per week, marginal productivity is minimal.

mofey• 16 years ago

4HWW anyone?

DaniFong2• 16 years ago

This reminds me of a conversation I recently had with some Berkeley graduates, who were mystified at how much I had accomplished, and how quickly, and by the fact that I might stay up into the wee hours of the morning working or blasting out an essay or coding or designing. These same people put in 50 hour sessions in Final Fantasy.

People want to work. Some people want to work hard. Most especially, people want to achieve. The question is where people put their effort; whether they 'level-up' in real life or some artificial one.

realitygrill• 16 years ago

This is exactly why I quit playing video games. However I haven't been able to shunt that effort into something productive so easily..

DaniFong2• 16 years ago

It takes time, effort, practice, and purpose. Figure out what you really want to do. That's your first challenge.

thinkbohemian• 16 years ago

I love working, what would i do with the rest of the time i "save" ?

AFerenci• 16 years ago

I Would have to agree with Ryan on the "fixed pie" thinking. This isn't an allocation issue, its based on productivity.

In the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," Stephen Covey explains a great theory called the P/PC ratio (production to production capacity). In other words, take care of your physical and mental self, and you will produce far better results in your work related endeavors.

People don't realize that not exercising and not eating healthy will severely limit your ability to work productive 40-100 hour work weeks.

Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week

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