Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week

https://metarabbit.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/no-research-does-not-say-that-you-produce-more-when-working-40-hours-per-week/?utm_content=buffer58356&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

by barry-cotter • 9 years ago

221 189 9 years ago

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spamizbad• 9 years ago

On a phone so I can't really crunch the raw data, but looking at that chart example, Is the difference between 48 hours and 60 statistically significant?

divenorth5• 9 years ago

I think we should be looking at efficiency. If we can find a way to maximize the tradeoff between productivity and hours worked it would greatly benefit employers and employees.

autokad• 9 years ago

i think the author did a pretty good job at looking at the tradeoffs.

in a lot of ways, some businesses are already trying to take advantage of both options by using a mix of contractors/consultants and full time employees.

divenorth5• 9 years ago

I guess my opinion is that we should all be working less and earning a living wage. I feel that's the trend that must happen with all the automation taking place. And welcome UBI.

dec0dedab0de• 9 years ago

that would be great, but many employers would just use that as a reason to pay employees less, or not give them benefits.

divenorth5• 9 years ago

Yeah that's the problem. Potential solution is universal basic income.

the_cat_kittles7• 9 years ago

yes, and i would like to see people thinking of efficiency in terms where hours not worked are considered a good. putting it in overly simplistic terms, if someone has a better time not working than the sum of (them working + people consuming their product) then they shouldn't work.

divenorth5• 9 years ago

My goal in life is to automate myself so I can spend more time at the beach.

itsdrewmiller2• 9 years ago

The author addresses that and suggests that 40 hours is generally the right number there - productivity on a units per hour basis is maximized. For salaried employees though employers rationally care more about units per week, which continues to increase as hours per week go to 50 and beyond. Of course this is all research of factory work, so its application to software development is questionable.

divenorth5• 9 years ago

Obviously the more you work the you produce. From his graph the best productivity is less than 40 hours but he thinks 40 is a good trade off between production and productivity. I disagree. In my ideal world we would be working less and still earning a good wage. I hope to see that in my lifetime but probably unlikely.

debbiedowner• 9 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Pu_JuPILw&t=2m45s

jimnotgym2• 9 years ago

A bit surprised not to see a reference to Henry Ford. I thought he was the father of the 40 hour work week? He did include in his thinking the idea that more leisure time would allow workers more time to enjoy his cars, but IIRC the basis of the change was not social, but productivity, and based on his own studies.

pessimizer• 9 years ago

The 40-hour workweek was conceived of and fought for by many socialists and labor activists over many years. What can be said for Ford is that they instituted it without being forced to (by strike or law), but it was nearly 50 years after it had been instituted for federal employees (and 2 years after it was a part of FDR's platform.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States

jimnotgym2• 9 years ago

I wonder which had the biggest effect on its widespread adoption, Ford on the unions. I'm sure I read that once Ford did it, it became almost fasionable in the factory owning classes!

rajeshmr• 9 years ago

I think the real problem is presentialism – people would likely contribute more if they are provided with the flexibility of working according to their body rhythms. Each human peaks at different hours of the day. And being in the knowledge economy, it makes more sense to access these spikes of output by providing flexibility.

40 or 50 or 60 hours, i believe that if we could just eliminate the presentialism from our work life, build more trust with each other about being honest with our work – i think the whole research into how many hours we need to work will not even pop up. Everyone would be happy contributing their share of work in return for a paycheck.

veidr• 9 years ago

TL;DR: you can get more done if you work 60 hours instead of 40 hours in a week, but the work done in that extra 20 hours might be a small fraction of what gets done in 20 hours during a 40 hour week.

This is self-evidently true for many jobs. E.g., if you pick apples for 40 hours, then even if you only pick one apple per hour after that, you will still pick more apples working 50 hours than 40.

We software developers, though, have an additional consideration: creating software bugs which can (easily) push the productivity of a given period of time into the negative, sometimes deeply.

In my apple-picker example above, this would be like the tired picker driving the loaded apple truck off a cliff, destroying all the apples picked in the first 59 hours of the 60 hour work week (along with the expensive truck).

That example is contrived and unconvincing for the apple picker case, though; nobody makes their tired apple pickers drive the apple trucks back via treacherous mountain roads after a hard day of work.

That's not the case for software development, however; looking at my own 20+ years of professional software development through the lens of an extremely rigorous scientific n=1 anecdatal analysis (which undoubtedly thrills the OP hehe), in my own career probably 75% of the negative productivity caused by bugs I've created was the direct result of code I wrote while trying to work more hours than I should.

I suspect this holds true for other programmers as well.

trendia• 9 years ago

TL;DR: MS Paint [0]

[0] http://imgur.com/a/YrlD7

barrkel• 9 years ago

That graph doesn't reflect the gist of the comment you're replying to. It explicitly talks about negative productivity, not asymptotically zero output like the graph.

justbaker3• 9 years ago

Semi-true; it depends how the extra 20 hours are spent for myself. I've had weeks where I program 60 hours or more and it's all spent well, and then the next week I might be a little more burnt out.. take it a little easier and then sprint again.

JustSomeNobody• 9 years ago

Which goes towards 60 hour weeks are not sustainable...

jonas21• 9 years ago

I think you might be missing the author's last point which is that in a competitive field, even a small increase in output can lead to a large increase in payoff.

In his example of getting research funding, it's a step function: either you get funded (y=1) or you don't (y=0), and because you're competing with others, even a small output increase can take you from the 0 side to the 1 side.

the_cat_kittles7• 9 years ago

i've never thought about how these two things relate to each other: asymptotic productivity of work, and winner take almost all nature of capitalism. seems like a very succinct way of explaining why people work so damned much. i'm actually kind of embarrassed i've never connected the two. it seems to make the argument against it more clear too- if marginal hours worked grow less productive, and marginal improvement to the product is negligible in every day terms, we ought to mitigate that somehow, unless its something people are doing because they love it.

jakubp2• 9 years ago

The point your predecessor was making was that if you make bad design decisions or create bugs, your output isn't growing.

tome• 9 years ago

Is this really so? Perhaps in the long term 40-hour-a-week pickers pick more than 60-hour-a-week pickers in absolute terms simply because the extra recovery time helps them be fitter and have more energy.

MaysonL• 9 years ago

Apple picking is like crunch time – or at least like crunch time should be – it's not a long-term activity: the time between apples ripening and the first frost ruining them is not long.

conanbatt3• 9 years ago

I doubt that the bugs provoked by tiredness have an aggregate of negative productivity.

And even if so, it can be mitigated. As a webdeveloper, when Im tired i do the most menial tasks which means that bugs introduced there are rare and not important.

marcosdumay• 9 years ago

What is a menial task in software development?

I mean, our entire field exist for pushing menial tasks into computers. If you have as many of them to fill 50% of your work load, there's probably something wrong.

Besides, are you sure bugs in menial tasks are not important? When did you judge those tasks to decide this?

nickbauman2• 9 years ago

There's a ton of conflation going on in the article. Most importantly, what defines "productive work" versus just "output" is not defined. He seems to focus on "academic" work but doesn't define terms well.

I've written about this here before, in summary:

1) Work has a cost to the endeavor too. Even with salaried workers.

2) If what you're doing can be boiled down to time-and-motion studies, you can always make cases where longer hours yield more "output". BUT pushing even these types of work beyond marginally has been found to incur large ongoing cost the mission. This is backed by research that has been done many times since WWII with thousands of subjects.

3) Then, what software developers do is NOT amenable to time-and-motion studies. So even the marginal increases in time working has an even greater case of dubious value.

rlkf• 9 years ago

At my previous work, we attempted to find the correlation between faulty code and the time of commit in the version control. Most bugs were written after 14:00. (And no: we didn't check-in all code at the end of the day).

agumonkey2• 9 years ago

Is there something peculiar around 14:00 beside lunch ?

jakubp2• 9 years ago

A fellow student of mine did a study back in 2005 about this. He found that the worst time to fix a bug was Friday afternoon, as it introduces the most (new) bugs into the code.

I see similarities to another area where I have more experience: business meetings. I believe that most people are terrible at meetings held in the afternoon, either due to heavy lunch, or just because it's after 3pm and they are simply tired. A single meeting like this can cause great damage to the individuals and whole teams, measured in intangibles such as motivation, trust, momentum.

watwut2• 9 years ago

That is just his guess tho. He does not have study to confirm it nor appears to know what actually was done in studies he criticises nor their conclusions.

Studies found that crunch slows down only after few weeks of crunch and 40-50 hours a week had same product long term. He article implies different results.

luispedrocoelho7• 9 years ago

OP here.

"Studies found that crunch slows down only after few weeks of crunch and 40-50 hours a week had same product long term" [citation needed]

Can people please stop claiming that "studies found..." without citations?

mrighele• 9 years ago

Your reasoning can be applied to a regular job: if I am tired I make more mistakes and every mistake has a cost. If the cost of mistakes made during the extra hours exceed the value of the job done, those extra hours didn't produce anything useful.

Even not taking into account mistakes, there is another important factor to consider: you need to recover energy from one day to another. The more you work the more you need to recover and less time you have to do it. If you don't, you will be less productive the following day.

I think that for this reason it is reasonable to say that there is a limit after which the productivity start to drop, though it probably depends on the individual and on a number of factors.

skybrian• 9 years ago

It seems plausible that programming while tired doesn't do a whole lot of damage in itself (more than the usual amount of bugs), provided that you also write unit tests and do code review. This could include self-review: that is, don't check in while tired, and read it over the next morning.

On the other hand, the shortcuts people take while under deadline pressure seem more damaging, and people are more likely to work longer hours when under time pressure. And the cumulative effects of working while tired might result in worse results the next day, even if a single day doesn't do it.

But I'm just speculating. It would be interesting to see a study that tries to distinguish between these different effects.

bsder• 9 years ago

It seems plausible that programming while tired doesn't do a whole lot of damage in itself (more than the usual amount of bugs)

I can tell you in embedded devices that simply isn't true.

In a lot of embedded programming, you can cause real damage--short out boards, crash equipment, etc.

If I have been at something for too many hours, I may simply stop. I will certainly stop if I recognize that I just did something really boneheaded and simple. That means that I'm likely to continue doing boneheaded things and cause real damage.

majewsky8• 9 years ago

provided that you also write unit tests and do code review

Not necessarily. Imagine submitting a patch on 8 PM, when everyone has already been in the office for 10 hours. It has a glaring bug in a particular branch that's not covered by the unit tests in a way that coverage testing doesn't show, yet everyone is too tired to see that bug. Thus the patch gets greenlit and applied to production. Just as everyone is heading home to fall into bed, pagers start ringing because prod is on fire.

kbutler2• 9 years ago

even if you only pick one apple per hour after that, you will still pick more apples working 50 hours than 40.

How about your 2 week total? Or 52-week total?

If weeks 2-52 are one apple per hour, 50 hours per week, you've done less work in more time.

raymondh• 9 years ago

This is self-evidently true for many jobs. E.g., if you pick apples for 40 hours, then even if you only pick one apple per hour after that, you will still pick more apples working 50 hours than 40.

That logic presumes that the first 40 hours aren't affected by the additional hours. IIRC, one of the premises of the "sustainable pace" rule for Extreme Programming was that people know when they are being pushed to work a lot of hours and either consciously or unconsciously slow down at the outset (with the mind or body shifting out of a sprint-mode and into a marathon-mode).

jbmorgado• 9 years ago

This title is very odd, I suggest an edit: Research is unable to prove that working more than 40 hours a week increases productivity.

tobych• 9 years ago

Yes, coming from the UK, where my hours in academia were 37.5/week, I was surprised to learn (from my incorrect interpretation of the title) that those 2.5 hours/week I work here in the US were pointless.

walshemj2• 9 years ago

I had one boss who had worked in the valley and the uk he said he got no more work out of the USA teams who worked longer hours and much less leave than he did in the UK where we where on civil service terms

jxub• 9 years ago

As an interesting remark, I still find myself quite productive working 50 hours a week thanks to context switches from working in 2 different languages at my jobs (node and python), and in different areas (data engineering and backend)

endorphone• 9 years ago

We need to delineate manual, low-effort work from mental exercise. I can perform manual work virtually unendingly, but have a very finite ability to do mental exercises before mental exhaustion or simple boredom/distraction undermines the work. Individuals will differ, but data for manual work has no application to research, software development, etc.

Having said that, there is shockingly little research or proof for any position, and if there was it can never be generalized to all people.

pishpash• 9 years ago

Any creative work does not follow a timeline. Butt in the seat means nothing. In fact, the opposite -- the more relaxed and freeing the structure of work, the better the output.

combatentropy• 9 years ago

Yes, I've thought the same thing. Wasn't 40 hours mainly about factories and coal mines --- though 40 hours in a mine would also be exhausting. But I think you meant something like a barista.

To my bosses and other non-programmers, I try to describe programming as doing math problems all day. I wonder what the history of hours is for clerks, architects, and other jobs more like ours.

I feel like I would be less tired if I just worked trouble tickets all day. Actually, writing a program too would be easier if that's all I did. Instead, I switch among writing a few different programs, working tickets, and the normal bureaucracy of emails, meetings, required training, etc.

JBlue42• 9 years ago

Being a barista can be exhausting at fast-paced place. Not as hard or deadly as coal mining, of course.

I work with architects. They work as much as they want to but are paid salary. The minority walk out of the office after their 8 hours is up but many work late into the night and on weekends. They say it's their "industry standard" but, from my observations, it's a) lack of boundaries and b) poor project/time management.

Not to mention the amount of time studying to take their many exams to become licensed.

adekok• 9 years ago

Which says to me that the game development culture of "work 80 hours per week for months on end" is largely about incompetent management, and/or deliberate abuse. It's not about getting things done.

itsdrewmiller2• 9 years ago

I think you may have misunderstood the article - if anything this is an argument for death marches.

Gibbon1• 9 years ago

I wonder if the author being a student pushing for a European PhD[1] warps his thinking about this. With a PhD all the reward is at the end. You either make or break. None of the work you do has any tangible results outside of the end goal.

Most work isn't like that. The rewards are continuous and ongoing. Meaning every task has captured value. If a loan officer closes 19 loans this month instead of 20, productivity is down 5%. BFD. Vs PhD student, complete 19 out of 20 required classes, no PhD. You totally wasted a couple of years of your life.

[1] Europeans historically are way more creditialist than Americans. Learning something isn't very helpful unless there is a credential to go along with it.

crdoconnor• 9 years ago

I think it's largely a loyalty and fealty signaling mechanism. Even though you are not achieving anything more, you are signaling your dedication to them by sacrificing leisure time.

AndrewKemendo9• 9 years ago

I love how things like the 40 hour work week with two days off get enshrined as some kind of natural phenomenon that has always been with us.

40 hours is an arbitrary number that came from trade unionists demanding fair hours and Robert Owen's slogan:

“Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.”

I mean those two things: 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep have been considered to be the biological/natural requirements, when the research isn't there for it at all.

The reality is, some people can work for 100 hours while others can only work for 20 hours per week without without losing productivity.

This is why I'm sick of this stupid trope that nobody should be working 80 hour weeks. Guess what, I want to, that's how my body works, why are you trying to stop me from doing that? When I was in the military I would work 12 hour days every day and my co-workers would complain because I was "making them look bad" that they only worked 8-10. What? Go home if you want.

The kind of person you are should push you into those types of roles - not the other way around. A 20 hour a week capable person isn't going to last very long in a 100 hour a week job, and they shouldn't be going out for it.

I think the major contention though is that you can't realistically succeed and live comfortably anymore as just a 40 hour a week person, because all of those jobs are gone. So inevitably 20 hour a week people, get put into 60 hour a week jobs and then say the whole system is screwed up (maybe it is, I dunno).

tertius• 9 years ago

Where can I find this research showing the health of these 100 hour persons?

rbjorklin• 9 years ago

Not reasearch but still relevant: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39981997

AndrewKemendo9• 9 years ago

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703712504576242...

beager• 9 years ago

The issue is that a normalized office environment will demand or imply that all workers work the same number of hours. The suggestion that you can consistently work 80 hours a week might be viable for you, but what about those who only get 20 hours before their productivity craters? What should you, or that person, do in the normalized 40-hour environment?

And what if the 20 hour worker produces more than you in 80 hours? For many environments, pay is by hour because that's the easiest thing to measure. Or it's per annum (salary) and it's supposed to track some loose or arbitrary or indirect metric.

If you shake loose the norms of a 40 hour work week, you have an awful lot of reconciliation to deal with before we efficiently extract the optimal and earnest amount of labor from all workers and compensate them appropriately with respect to their output and not their hours.

AndrewKemendo9• 9 years ago

If you shake loose the norms of a 40 hour work week, you have an awful lot of reconciliation to deal with...."

Yes agreed.

The point is that people should be given roles and responsibilities commensurate with their personality type and then given the flexibility to execute their job as they see fit.

dheera5• 9 years ago

It's actually flawed because there are other things that need to be done in a week besides work, recreation, and rest. For example:

- eating: 12-15 hours/week

- making food (or travelling to get food): 7-10 hours/week

- showering, shaving, grooming: 4-7 hours/week

- laundry, cleaning, house chores: 2-4 hours/week

- commuting: 5-10 hours/week

- waiting in line (checkout lines, customer service reps, Comcast/DMV/insurance, etc.): 2-3 hours/week

And that's for me, and I'm single. If I had children, add to that:

- taking care of children: 15-20 hours/week

None of the above counts as work, rest, or recreation. If work stays at 8 hours, that leaves very little time for rest and recreation.

Cutting rest beyond that is physically unhealthy.

Cutting recreation beyond that is both mentally unhealthy AND physically unhealthy (I get all my exercise in my recreation time).

AndrewKemendo9• 9 years ago

Right, it was a completely different world when the 40 hour work week was proposed and people were pretty interchangeable in the industrializing shift.

grigjd32• 9 years ago

Your estimate on time to take care of children is ridiculously low.

tbrake• 9 years ago

I believe those were accounted for in those times with the notion of a stay-at-home spouse (in reality, read: wife) who did most if not all of that non-job work; food purchase/prep, laundry, chores, children, etc.

qwerty2020• 9 years ago

100% agree -- made a small free time calculator along these lines awhile back [1]

[1] http://www.datadriventhoughts.com/2016/09/27/how-much-free-t...

apatters• 9 years ago

Can you elaborate on what you believe to be the reasons you're able to work productively for 12 hours a day? I'd love to have that superpower.

AndrewKemendo9• 9 years ago

Couldn't tell you for certain. Probably some combination of genetics and intense training, with previous periods of long sustained critical work.

Often I find I compare whatever my current situation I'm in, with previous tough situations I've dealt with, and know that if I made it through those, then my current situation is tractable.

On multiple occasions in a previous life I've worked multiple 24-36 straight hours doing intense cognitive and physically intensive work for multiple crises in Korea, Iraq and other wartime places. So that's a good benchmark to compare to.

bousaid• 9 years ago

The secret according to my business professor who was an electrical engineer, a sniper in the military, and started a multimillion dollar PE firm, and sleeps <6 hours every night: eat more.

agumonkey2• 9 years ago

No research on sleep requirements ? are you serious ?

Have you been sleep deprived ? There's a clear limit under which you're useless. For an extreme instance, I lost sleep for 5 days and went borderline insane.

Maybe 6h of sleep is adequate but saying 8 is arbitrary bulls$t is... exactly that.

kafkaesq• 9 years ago

Guess what, I want to [work 80 hours], that's how my body works, why are you trying to stop me from doing that?

No one's going to "stop" you. We're just not going to believe you when you say that's how many hours you work.

redthrow• 9 years ago

Elon Musk says entrepreneurs should work 80-100 hours a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtaxU6DZvLs

empath75• 9 years ago

I honestly think most programmers do best with about 10 hours of actual coding a week.

Nursie2• 9 years ago

You must have no life, and no outside interests.

And yes, I've succeeded just fine on less than 40 hour weeks throughout my career. The obsession with stupidly long hours doesn't extend much into Europe, or Australia.

Nursie2• 9 years ago

I mean seriously, by the time you add in a half hour for lunch and a half hour each way for travel, 80 hours translates to over 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, working.

That's not a life.

dheera5• 9 years ago

I wonder how they got this curve. A lot of things can be sustained for 1 week cannot be sustained in the long term. I'd say in the long term:

* 140-168 hours/week --> almost certain death.

* 100-140 hours/week --> at risk of cardiovascular disease and many other serious medical conditions. Possible early death.

* 80-100 hours/week --> still super-bad for your body. Forget raising children, dating, getting married, or even making friends. You won't have time for any of those. Expect clinical depression.

* 60-80 hours/week --> you might be able to have meals with friends but forget having a life, hobbies, or anything outside of work. Expect depression and overall culture of unhappiness.

* 50-60 hours/week --> sustainable but not really fun. You can't join family or friends for dinner. Expect talented employees to leave because they'll find something that they enjoy more than being in your company.

* 40-50 hours --> reasonable level for long-term sustainability and retention

kilroy123• 9 years ago

What about these?

* 30-40 hours

* 20-30 hours

dheera5• 9 years ago

I think it depends on the nature of the job and whether or not I "own" my work.

If I "own" my work in some capacity, e.g. a freelancer, a co-founder, getting public recognition for my work, getting to publish papers in my name, getting to talk about my work in public, get the chance to open-source my work, then I'm happy working more.

If I work for somebody else, or some big boss always takes the recognition for my work, as is often the case in some large companies, then I'd probably be much happier on the <40 side so I have time to learn and build things that are truly my own, outside of work.

I think 20-40 might be a sweet spot for certain fields where creativity drives money. In those cases, rest and recreation time are paramount to work productivity.

kentt• 9 years ago

We only question hours/week > 40. It's edgy and cool. Past that, you are looked upon as a sluggard or kook.

alangpierce• 9 years ago

I'm curious what you consider "work" when thinking about these numbers. Do you also consider chores, exercise, side projects/hobbies, etc to be work, or are you strictly referring to work for an employer? Do your numbers only apply to situations where people don't enjoy their jobs? If it's the weekend and I want to explore a cool work-related idea I had, does that count as work according to your numbers?

dheera5• 9 years ago

I'm considering "work" to be related to things you have contractual or financial obligations to, i.e. your primary employment or company that you own. Work that you enjoy doing still counts as "work" if you have obligations to customers, bosses, employees, investors, or anyone.

I consider "recreation" to be things that you are doing because you want to, and do not have obligations to do (of any kind, including but not limited to contractual, health, etc.).

I consider side projects (real side projects, not 20% projects) to be recreation. You're allowed to rest when you're tired, you're allowed to procastinate, you're allowed to take breaks whenever and however long you want, you're allowed to take your laptop to the beach, you're allowed to abandon them, change them, and do as you please with them. This kind of mental freedom is very, very important to qualitatively count as recreation.

If side projects evolve into a contractual obligation, then it becomes work by my book.

Exercise counts as recreation if you're doing it because you want to. It doesn't count as recreation if your work makes you do it (i.e. move boxes in a warehouse). It doesn't count if you're working 100 hours a week and spend 5 of those hours exercising in the office gym out of necessity for your health because you couldn't find time to exercise in a way that you find fun.

I hike for exercise. I hike because I want to, and nobody makes me do it. That counts as recreation.

hello_newman• 9 years ago

If this is your perception of an hourly break down, that's fine. But just because you think working 100 hours a week results in "Possible early death" doesn't mean it's like that for other people.

For example, in your chart, I'm currently in the 60-80 hour a week range, split between a full time job and a side hustle. Personally, I've never been happier, I have a life outside of work, a beautiful girlfriend, time to meet with friends, etc.

It's just, I don't spend 5+ hours a day when i get home from work watching Netflix or fucking around on the weekends. Don't equate hustling with depression, unless you're just looking for an excuse to justify why you don't want to work harder.

radicalOH• 9 years ago

Yes, but they are attempting to describe what happens to a population (i.e. in general terms). You claim to be an ubermensch, yet don't seem to grasps how distributions work.

dahart2• 9 years ago

Your side project does not count. You are working 40 hours a week, which makes your high horse comment about watching Netflix and not wanting to work harder sound pretty bad.

It's very easy to work on a side project, or side hustle, or whatever you want to call it. I don't doubt that you're happier. Making things yourself is fulfilling and fun. But that is your free time & your social life. That is your choice, not your day job. You are misunderstanding what the 40 hours per week concept is all about.

The parent comment is correct; working 100 hours a week for someone else, for extended periods, is possible early death. That's not an exaggeration, it will compromise a person's health if done for long periods of time. It is definitely like that for many, many people. Have you ever worked more than 40 for a single job? How about 60/80/100 for longer than a week? Do you know what 100 hours at one job feels like?

If you have a life outside of your job and 20-40 hrs/wk side project, with time to meet friends, you might be working less than you think. A real 80 hour week is hard to maintain without any social life, it's enough time for meals an maybe an hour of social or alone time per day, and not much else. 80 hours/week is 11.5 hours per day, 7 days a week, on average, sustained. Factor in eating, sleeping, bathing and travel to & from work, and you have maybe 10 hours left. If you exercise, you're probably down to 5 hours of free time for the week. If you try to drive anywhere in those 5 hours, you'll run out of time before you get there, activities very close to home are the only sane option. At 100 hours a week, you only have time to work, eat, and sleep, there is physically no time left for anything else.

An employer of mine measured how many hours people worked during crunch, and found that almost everyone in the studio overestimated their own hours. I overestimated my own hours, and I've worked a real 80 hours a week multiple times before. It's not fun, and I did not have time for a social life. It's not maintainable for long periods, at 80 hours a week you're trading your entire life for your salary, it's not a good deal.

ninjakeyboard• 9 years ago

40 hours is good for me for "you must do work" but lots of times when I'm working on projects I find interesting I'm just inspired to work on the project.

awinter-py• 9 years ago

Article is focused on the academic world so doesn't talk about interruptions, meetings, and quiet time.

If you work in an open-plan office the 10 hours you do at night, at home, and on the wkend can be the most productive.

I've had months where I put out more real fires on a kayak, on vacation, than at my desk; people bother you when you're at a desk but they can't get to you on the water.

titanomachy• 9 years ago

Academia isn't exempt from those things. A professor (PI) is as much a manager as anything.

luispedrocoelho7• 9 years ago

All these things happen in academia. Nowadays, many people regularly work from home for the quiet (I do 1 day a week from home).

mempko• 9 years ago

Productivity is the greatest source of waste.

dahart2• 9 years ago

the point of productivity inflection is just about 40 hours per week

To me, that does seem to support the claim “research shows that 40 hours per week is the best”. I don't know who's claiming that overall output goes down the minute you hit 40, that's obviously exaggerated, so why take it so seriously? There's strong evidence that productivity starts to decline somewhere around 40ish, and it obviously varies by individual and situation.

I think the more common, and more correct claim is that 40-ish is optimal, rather than anything above 40 is a negative return.

That bit of data he referenced is for munitions workers doing a low-skill monotonous job - easy to measure productivity. Who would expect to produce solid high quality thought output for 40 or 50 hours a week? I'd be surprised if most academics & programers managed more than 15 hours of conceptual work in a week, the rest we fill with coffee & lunch, browsing the web, talking to people, and loads of other stuff that doesn't require much thinking.

The author's completely right about many of his points; this just isn't clearly defined or unambiguously supported by data. There are obviously some people out there rationalizing and mis-presenting the evidence in favor of a 40 hour work week. As with all studies, there are people who summarize incorrectly and decide that weak evidence justifies a hard line decision. But why get twisted over the worst arguments? Let's discuss the strongest arguments instead.

Do we need data to support the idea that 8 hours is enough? Productivity is only a tiny part of the equation, so this debate is academic. Why are we obsessing over unmeasurable productivity and ignoring labor & poverty issues? Do you need data to prove that when you work 12 hours a day, you physically can't have much life outside of work? The idea of an 8 hour work day is meant to work for everyone. It's guaranteed to be conservative, because it has to be good enough for teenagers as well as people near retirement, for single people as well as parents, for everyone.

WisNorCan• 9 years ago

"If you are managing as a group, go for the average"

This is a point I strongly disagree with. Just the way some people need fewer hours of sleep than others OR some people can run further than others. I have found that people have vastly different ability to focus and personal drive.

Orienting around averages is a terrible way to develop a team and people. It also demotivates people that want to work harder and they end up leaving. Instead of setting an average, create an environment where people can push harder if they want to AND get incremental rewards.

luispedrocoelho7• 9 years ago

OP here.

I agree and my phrasing may not have been exact. I meant that if you need to pick a number for a whole group of people, then you look at the average.

This can be in the context of industrial production where you have thousands of workers and are forced to have fixed shifts (because you cannot run the assembly line without all the stations filled).

Or, in more modern example, a public sector bureaucracy where you cannot be very flexible as these things are negotiated with a union as whole.

rb808• 9 years ago

Does this include side projects? ie if you work 10 hours/week on a side project you shouldn't work more than 30 in your job.

Maybe employers should be able to ban side projects for this reason.

michaelmrose• 9 years ago

Maybe if you don't want any good employees

walshemj2• 9 years ago

Given the source of employment law is the masters and servants act I think you might find that employers can veto outside work certainly getting permission for out side work is often required by contract.

heisenbit• 9 years ago

Ability to perform is in part a function of age which the article leaves out completely. 40h/week is doable for most but there are plenty of posts by more experienced developers here who have said they strictly limit hours or report that when they were younger they were able to perform longer.

There is also the question of sustainability. Not only health wise but also the social system around one gets impacted imho. somewhere beyond 45-50h. More work directed output may well be possible but at the cost of weakening the support system and with that increased risk in times of crisis.

I'm willing to discuss this more in depth with the author once he's got a few grey hairs.

slaymaker1907• 9 years ago

I think the key thing for me is that maybe I produce more one week, but working 60+ hours is going to make me useless the following week.

johnmyers2• 9 years ago

We work a 9/80 flex schedule. 44 hours one week, ,then 36 hours the next with Friday off. So every other weekend we have a 3 day weekend, or 4 if there is a holiday on Monday. Works great, moral increases, productivity increases. Its a win, win.

logingone• 9 years ago

At my last job I probably did 20 hours of work a week due to the awful environment. I started burning out from frustration. I'm not convinced the number of hours is as important as the suitability of the environment.

sklivvz1971• 9 years ago

Hogwash:

1. Go read the linked article: http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

2. It's about munition line workers in 1920 UK during the war.

3. The blog post claims generality based on this.

lstroud• 9 years ago

The question is how long you can maintain a pace (hours worked) before that pace begins to impact performance. Usain Bolt can't run his 100m pace for the duration of a 400m race.

freeduck• 9 years ago

What a strange article, his first issue: "I am happy to be contradicted with data, but too often I see this issue being discussed with links to web articles citing other web articles, finally citing studies which suffer from the issues listed below. Maximum output at work is traded off" while he him self does not cite a single scientific article

luispedrocoelho7• 9 years ago

I do cite one study, but burden of proof of producing citations is on people claiming that "science shows". I never claim that.

In fact, I found few scientific articles on the subject and the few that I did find were not relevant (for some of the reasons in the text).

launchtomorrow• 9 years ago

No one seems to have mentioned the value of the work done. Like market value or impact. The quantity of work is kind of a distraction, and focusing on it implicitly says that presentalism is ok. Which is not true.

GoldDust• 9 years ago

40 hours per week is detrimental to the health as well, especially if you don't take breaks where you exercise vigorously. I've seen research that showed a 4% reduction in lifespan for people that worked 45 hours versus 40. I'll look for it and be back with more details.

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

During WW2, the government wanted to increase production, so did some studies. They found that a 60 hr week boosted production for a couple weeks, but then it fell below what was produced by a 40 hr week.

The solution to a sustained increase in output was to do 60 hr weeks in bursts, not continuously.

majewsky8• 9 years ago

"In bursts" as in "40 hours with the occasional 60-hour week" or "60-hour weeks with weeks off in between"?

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

the former

watwut2• 9 years ago

The study I have seen claimed that 40-50 hours long term have same output and then it goes down.

The studies on game development teams found that crunch raise productivity of short (don't recall if 3 or 6 weeks) and productivity goes down only after.

This article does not seem to adress concrete studies nor their results - it just generally theorise about what might be wrong about them without knowing what is on them.

luispedrocoelho7• 9 years ago

OP here.

Do you have a citation? The post is mostly to address this constant claims that 40 hours is proven by science and no convincing citations are provided.

I am also writing in the context of self-managing knowledge workers who can manage their own time. I explicitly write that the flexibility we have may mitigate many of the downsides observed in mandated long hours. For example, I do work >40 hours, but I rarely have to wake up with an alarm clock. I can follow the occasional 16 hour day with a 10 hour sleep cycle and stroll into work at lunch time the next day feeling pretty relaxed.

kbutler2• 9 years ago

This essay and most of the comments saying, "of course more work time yields more work completed" ignore the fact that there is no magic reset to full productivity Monday morning.

If you work every hour of week 1, your output of week 2 will be drastically reduced. There is therefore some optimal balance between work time and recovery time. It may be 40 hours, or 20, or 80. It probably varies between tasks and individuals and situations.

Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that spending more time working is necessarily going to be more effective.

Sometimes the best thing you can do to get the job done is to stop working on it for a while.

majewsky8• 9 years ago

Sometimes the best thing you can do to get the job done is to stop working on it for a while.

This. I like to have several side projects at once so I can switch to another one when I'm stuck on the current one.

On the downside, this procedure made me question if I can actually work as a programmer professionally, where I don't have the liberty to just leave any task assigned to me lying around for a week (or a month). It worked out nicely, though, since I found that I can get my train of thought unstuck by discussing the problem with a colleague.

ryanbrunner• 9 years ago

One point I'll agree with is that a lot of times, people use the argument that working 40 hours a week is actually the most efficient to mask their real argument, which is socially unacceptable in today's business climate (particulary tech):

People ought to have more to their lives than their jobs, and working 50, 60, or more hours a week makes that difficult.

Personally, even if people had inexhaustible energy, I still would think it would be wrong to spend more than a third of your day at work. It so happens that it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint to, but I want people working under me to be able to have hobbies, families, and something other than their career.

mcv• 9 years ago

When I read the title, I thought: if there's no evidence that people produce more when working 40 hours, why would we work 40 hours? Let's work less!

I didn't expect anyone to argue for working more than 40 hours. But then again, I don't live in the US.

Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week

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