World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-21/four-day-work-week-uk-study-finds-majority-of-employers-shifting

by SirLJ • 3 years ago

557 363 3 years ago

adoxyz• 3 years ago

Four day work week sounds amazing. I doubt we'll see massive adoption anytime soon, but having that extra day every week really gives you time to enjoy life rather than just running around doing chores, preparing for the week to start again. Maybe someday!

kennywinker4• 3 years ago

If you wait around for it, it may happen. If you organize with your coworkers and demand it - you can make it happen.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Check out https://4dayweek.io built by u/philmcp

mrmincent• 3 years ago

I’ve gone down to 4 days, taking Fridays off to look after my son, and I certainly won’t be going back to 5 days until he’s in school. Looking after a toddler all day isn’t exactly a day off, but it is extremely rewarding, and something I’d recommend to any parent thinking about dropping down a day.

It definitely has some downsides however, I’m the only one in the team that’s off that day, so there’s usually meetings and information that I miss out on, as well as a 20% cut in pay, but I’m very lucky to be in a position where we could afford it, and the time with my son is worth it.

kennywinker4• 3 years ago

Based on most of the studies i’ve seen, at least for office/information jobs, that pay cut is unjustified. People mostly get as much done in 4 days as 5.

yamtaddle2• 3 years ago

It may be "justified" while five days remains the norm, as it may be possible to get similarly-capable employees to take the position for lower pay, to get that extra day off every week. This should provide a pretty big benefit to companies that can leverage it while five is still typical (assuming that the shift to four is in fact going to become a trend)

TeMPOraL3• 3 years ago

Usual counterpoint is that you're not being paid just for the things you get done, but also for availability - for being there when there's a need to handle something unexpected. This has real value to a business, so you being available for 80% of the time justifies some degree of pay cut.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 3 years ago

Honestly I don't even care. If I could take an extra day off at only 20% cut from my pay check I'd do it in a heart beat.

lettergram7• 3 years ago

I actually work 6 days a week (only Sunday off) noon until midnight with a two hour break 5-7pm.

That’s 60 hrs of work a week, but I get to spend every morning 7am-noon with my kids. It’s been a great change of pace for me personally. We have a garden we do as a family, I can do doc appointments, some field trips, etc. while still working extremely hard. It’s not for everyone, but that schedule has been great for me personally.

mobiledev20143• 3 years ago

That’s baffling. Nobody should have to work 60 hours a week and be happy about it, doesn’t matter when the hours are

therealdrag04• 3 years ago

I support it, as long as you’re well compensated and you like it. I think due to wanting to “stick it to the man” there can be too much anti-work sentiment.

It’s okay if it’s a throw away side project but not okay if it’s for your employer? Wat. Seems like a silly distinction and backward if anything.

I definitely don’t work as much as you but I also love my work and work random odd hours and sometimes voluntarily extra. I like it and it’s definitely paid of dividends for my career growth.

Gatsky• 3 years ago

Predictably, you are being downvoted.

Fact is, some people can just work harder than others. This is obvious is it not? It is not because some people are lazy and others aren't. It is not a moral issue. Some people just have higher energy levels in my experience (I'm not one of them, as a type this at 8pm nearly comatose). They just have more capacity. I think it is genetic.

askvictor4• 3 years ago

I did this, then when my son went to school, kept the day off. It's super valuable to just get some time for yourself. Have recently changed career and gone back full time, but pining for that extra time (luckily my company seems to be thinking about a 4 day week)

mettamage• 3 years ago

In the Netherlands I also take a 20% gross pay cut. So net, that's more like a 10% pay cut. It doesn't pay to work 5 days in NL.

lukevp• 3 years ago

This doesn’t make sense to me unless it moves you into a lower tax bracket or something. Eg. If you made $100k and were taxed at 30%, you’d get paid net $70k. If you took a 20% gross pay cut, you’d get paid $80k gross and $56k net. 56k is 20% less than 70k.

TedShiller• 3 years ago

I don't see any downside to a 4 day work week. Workers should expect to get paid 4/5 of what they made before, but it could be well worth it.

andrei_says_2• 3 years ago

You will remember the moments you spend with your son - and kids grow up fast.

The days at work - those no one will remember.

kitd• 3 years ago

Yes! When you lie on your deathbed, will you say "I wish I'd spent more time at the office"?

EarthIsHome• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/7sqfj

jakzurr• 3 years ago

thanks!

bachmeier2• 3 years ago

The rest were convinced by revenue gains, drops in turnover and lower levels of worker burnout that four is the new five when it comes to work days.

This is not surprising. The 20% of time that's getting cut is probably the 20% that shouldn't have been done anyway. Telling workers they can cut the 20% of the crap they hated doing is obviously going to lead to better results.

xyzelement2• 3 years ago

Do you make the same interpretation when companies cut 20% of the workforce instead?

skellington2• 3 years ago

There is no doubt that most companies (and the government) could cut 20% with no effect on their productivity. It's just no practical to ride the razors edge of leanness and it also would probably harm morale.

Twitter cut 80% of it's workforce and is becoming MORE productive.

peterashford• 3 years ago

The fact that the two figures are 20% is scant reason to assume that these are or should be comparable situations. This shouldn't even require stating

rodgerd3• 3 years ago

I prefer cuts where the benefits flow primarily to workers, rather than billionaires. Weird, I know.

bachmeier2• 3 years ago

Late reply, but for the record, I think those are largely orthogonal. If you have 20% fewer workers spending their time on the same useless meetings and filling out the same forms and so on, it won't matter. Cutting the number of hours rather than the number of employees forces a rethink of processes.

dmarlow• 3 years ago

I would welcome this, but won't skeptics say that remote work was also touted as a huge benefit and companies are now looking to go back to office? I can see the same thing happening with 4 day work week.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 3 years ago

won't skeptics say that remote work was also touted as a huge benefit and companies are now looking to go back to office?

These are not mutually exclusive concepts. It isn't like companies don't routinely make bad decisions despite plenty of evidence that it is the bad decision.

neogodless• 3 years ago

Alternate publications:

https://apnews.com/article/business-d114ef8be69e1665fd22c395...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/4-day-work-week-trial-yie...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230220-is-a-4-day-workw...

RupertEisenhart• 3 years ago

Couldn't help think of this[0]: the idea that chatgpt and other such breakthroughs might help us hit escape velocity from bullshit jobs.

[0] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/escape-velocity-from-bullshit-...

permo-w2• 3 years ago

as I see it, until now automation has done the opposite. it’s scarcified valuable skilled manufacturing jobs and forced more and more people into the service industry. I don’t see why this will be any different.

that’s the dystopia I’m terrified of, no one starving or homeless, but as penance we all have to be waitors and shop attendants for the landed upper classes

vouaobrasil• 3 years ago

When was a mathematician, I worked as hard as I could until I was mentally exhausted. I actually calculated how much I worked per week over a period of two years.

On actual "hard thinking", like working through logic, I spent about 7 hours. There was another 7 hours writing and clarifying topics, and another 6 hours or so on classes, seminars (sort of like meetings, but productive). That gives a total of 20 hours per week on work. Beyond that, I was not productive and so I didn't do any math-related work.

If you add the administrative overhead of a job, that might be another 5 hours at most, so about 3 full workdays. I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout.

Now, I'm just talking about mentally demanding, technical work. I can work longer if the work isn't very mentally demanding, but even so, not for more than 4-5 hours a day. And now I'm an independent content creator, so every additional hour I work is proportional to profit.

My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless, especially when it comes to fostering people in the long-term (short term is different).

I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.

themodelplumber• 3 years ago

That reasoning is complicated IMO by the fact that many jobs involve projects and tasks that are perceived as very important, yet will never be started, let alone continued, let alone completed.

That's a pretty big deal as-is. It can easily make the boss feel justified--OK this employee said we need to do this thing, they said they want to take it on, but it's not being done. The boss is in the loop and may feel like the employee wants to be pushed, checked in on, and so on.

But even then, add to this the stronger element of subjective mental torture often found at work, where the infantile pusher is none other than the self.

This element will stick the butt in the chair and turn the individual into a workaholic who sees no point in leaving to go home, because they are staying until it gets done. So still--50, 60, 80 hours in the office. Frustration, try harder. See some progress. OK, keep doing this.

Mix in a little bit of competitive thinking on the part of others ("wait, _they_ are working 50 hours even though we green-lit 25 hour weeks?") and this gets hour-reduction going sideways.

(This also relates fairly easily to persona-based theories of personality dynamics)

wnkrshm• 3 years ago

So much about work is about the perception of what you do and not about what is really being done. Add to that, that even when one is actually providing lots of value, it may not be perceived as important by whoever you report to - but the firefighting du jour is.

permo-w2• 3 years ago

I read somewhere that the 9-5 workweek was first implemented before the emancipation of women. whether it’s true or not I do not know, but it’s an interesting artifact to consider

spoonfeeder006• 3 years ago

Actually, it was the 1800s lol, though in the 1920s it became common

https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/workforce-management/articles/...

MomoXenosaga2• 3 years ago

Until the 1960s people worked on Saturday in my country.

Economically giving people more time to spend money was a great idea.

dheera3• 3 years ago

There's also that we once had a society where one person in a household worked 8 hours a day and one did house chores (including raising kids) for 8 hours a day.

In a modern, fair society, that should translate into both people working 4 hours a day and house chores 4 hours a day.

Unfortunately the reality right now is we're pushing both people to each work 12 hours a day AND do 4 hours of chores on top of that.

DiggyJohnson2• 3 years ago

Who is pushing for people to work extended hours? Assuming you’re talking about the tech industry and US market.

I find this sentiment to be pretty rare.

ambrose2• 3 years ago

There’s also the argument that you could live off of one salary and downsize / live frugally (two-income trap), but things are more expensive (e.g. the world is more safe now, but that also makes it more expensive).

idopmstuff• 3 years ago

I'm a PM and I work from home - far and away the biggest advantage IMHO isn't the lack of commute (though that's great), but rather the flexibility in schedule.

My most productive hours are 6-9am - I can crank through what would take me most of 9am-5pm in that time period. That's wasted when I have to get ready and commute during that time period. When optimizing for most efficient working times, 40 hours a week is really 20-30 depending on meetings.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

My most productive time is similar to yours, from about 7 to 11am.

2muchcoffeeman• 3 years ago

The one thing I would go to the office for are sprint ceremonies. On my best functioning teams, we would plan and make sure everyone knew what was needed and solutions brainstormed until we had an agreed approach.

Then you stay at home and just execute. And you can used your best hours to smash stuff out and then enjoy the rest of the day.

hnews_account_12• 3 years ago

What are you accomplishing daily at 6-9 am when most people aren't logged in? I know there's like a lot of individual work but when do you work with other people? Do you just work less efficiently during the day you mean?

mavu• 3 years ago

As a software developer, I can 100% support your findings.

Even counting deep concentration periods (flow, whatever you want to call it) this holds true.

lumost• 3 years ago

It’s Curious, I wonder if as the portion of time people spend on hard problems increases the rate of burnout increases.

10 years ago a much larger percentage of my day was spent on non-taxing activities that have since been automated.

hackerfromthefu• 3 years ago

I think so

MathMonkeyMan2• 3 years ago

This speaks to the "labor" argument made above. More efficiency means harder work, but it must also be less work, unless we are trying to extract more from workers.

OTOH, it might not be so bad to extract more from workers. More money and all.

bhewes• 3 years ago

Coming from the sales side 9-5 is useful as people know when to find me, IE office hours. The service side of business, waiting on others.

agumonkey• 3 years ago

thanks for you input, i'd just want to add a pinch of chaos and averages into the mix.. a 9-5 is also an escape from problems elsewhere, or a somehow balanced dance/wave (morning, commute, work, come back), it's not just late stage capitalism imo

thanks again

j1elo• 3 years ago

if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it.

Ok but an important detail is the distribution of those hours. You probably didn't do 7 consecutive hours of exhausting hard thinking work in one day, nor probably 3.5 hours across 2 days... you'll be able to confirm, but sounds to me like an important key part of most meaningful, intensively intellectual (or physical) work lots of people do is that those hours are more-or-less spread across the whole work week, so in your example, kind of 1h30m per day on a 5-day week or closer to 2h/day on a 4-day week.

I would fully agree with the latter part of your comment. Even if you argue that you'd not get more than 3 days of actual work done during a week, it doesn't necessarily follow that your work week should have been 3 days long; more like your daily timetable should probably be shorter and you should not have to wait in your office, mentally tired and not being productive, until the clock says it's 5pm and so you can now go home.

rodgerd3• 3 years ago

To add to your anecdote: Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species with a day that ran: Breakfast and a walk; 90 minutes of writing; spending time with his wife reading their letters and a novel; another 90 minutes of writing; and lunch.

After lunch was attending to his correspondence, reading with his wife, then dinner and games.

For all the talk of "crushing" and "changing the world" I doubt that anything almost anyone here works on or ever has worked on will have the same impact as Origin. The cult of productivity is unhinged, madness.

fshr• 3 years ago

Darwin was born to a rich family and the book was published when he was 50. I guess I see the point you're trying to make, but his life was very much not like the average person. It was also over 150 years ago; the world he lived in was so far different from 2023 it's absurd. I don't understand why you would use an example of someone extra-ordinary, a geo/biologist no less, in a critique of hustle culture.

Edit: I'd also recommend reading about his health and overwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin

bavila• 3 years ago

My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless...

I'm not so sure about this. I was working in a remote "full-stack" (but really 90% front-end role) for 14 months from the start of January 2021 to the end of February 2022. I tracked my hours religiously the entire time I was employed there (not required, but just for my own sake). I had a spreadsheet containing the date, start/end times (rounded to the nearest quarter on an hour), task name, and notes.

When I left the company, my team lead thought I was one of the hardest working people he had ever worked with. He thought I had to be working 60-hour weeks to be doing what I was doing. I showed him the spreadsheet and calculated the average hours worked per week - came out somewhere between 38~39 hours.

My role wasn't a senior one so, for the most part, the vast majority hours were spent coding, but of course some was spent in meetings as well. But these were all real hours of real time spent working. It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions).

Granted, I think being the type of person that acclimates well to remote work made this all doable. I would not have been this productive in office.

sodapopcan• 3 years ago

That's fine but many people can't, and don't, do this. Most people I've worked with have varying degrees of how long they can pay attention and how much they can get done in a day.

It's also not just about quantity buy quality. I'm certainly not suggesting that you were doing subpar work or anything, just that there is a spectrum there. For example I had a teammate who made incredibly disruptive and positive changes to how and what my team worked on. Yet he would also arrive at work with barely a second to spare before standup and most days he would leave _at least_ an hour early. Some days he was clearly not doing much work and even pretty brazen about it if confronted about it (he wasn't a dick about it just be like, "Oh, I'm just trying to look busy"). When he did work (which was more often than I'm making it seem), he was very serious and focused about it and would put in extra time when he was really into what he was working on (this of course was not to make up all the leaving early, haha).

Retric2• 3 years ago

Where these discussions trip up is different kinds of programming tasks vary in how mentality draining they are.

Some days I can spend 10 long hours working through straightforward problems and come home energized. Other days I mentally check out after spending 3-4 hours beating my head against a really difficult problem then go home and have little desire to do anything but zone out and recover.

gcascio• 3 years ago

It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions).

I have a similar experience working remotely. I can be productive 40+ hours a week without getting drained.

But this includes making rather long breaks between blocks of work. Usually this ends up in blocks of ~2-3hours with breaks of ~1hour in between. Although this works out my end of work is rather late (typically I work from 8am to 7pm) which leaves little time to do private things.

So in conclusion, although this works out I am looking into reducing my work hours to 30 hours per week to have a bit more time for myself.

birksherty2• 3 years ago

came out somewhere between 38~39 hours

Also worked more than 40 hrs full concentration work for few weeks, but that soon burned me out. Now I can't do that more than a day and don't ever want in future.

seer• 3 years ago

I feel like frontend work has some unique characteristics as opposed to hardcore backend one, at least for me. I feel like the parts of the brain that deal with visual and the analytical are not overlapping much so if I alternate between the two I can do a lot more hours of continuing work, resting one while the other centre is busy. Definitely can't do that doing hard algorithmic work, where I would clock out in just a few hours.

But I think there is something else though - frontend work is usually less abstracted and more menial - a lot of repeating various tasks, moving stuff around, fine tuning it by eye etc.

When I encounter something like this on the backend I would step back and spend time actually automating that with a function/library/package/framework and only then come back to the task at hand. Thus my time is usually more "concentrated" with making decisions, logic and calculations.

But frontends are usually so vast and complex pieces of software that its harder for me to abstract and automate away ideas, and its easier to just plow away through some visual task rather than step back, distil the logic into an abstraction and then go and use that abstraction effectively. That does happen but at least for me a lot less often than backend logic.

I would aim to distil the backend code down to its business logic and almost nothing else where possible, grinding away replication, but I (and people I've tended to work with it seems) don't seem to strive for that on the frontend for some reason, at least not in the same degree.

Which ultimately makes this environment quite a lot less mentally challenging to work in. You can "zone out" doing something and let muscle memory do its thing, whereas if I ever start to feel that working on the backend code, I have an alarm in my mind shouting "something's wrong! there's a missing abstraction!"

adql2• 3 years ago

I find it depends heavily onto the task. Some let's say "organizational" work (moving stuff around, adding new machines to cluster etcetera) that just requires to be done but not "hard"? Can do for hours, will get a bit slower just coz of boredom. So the first 4 hours are still more effective than next 4 hours but not as much so, especially when I take break in the middle (bless WFH)

Programming or designing something complex to program ? Way shorter. So I usually mix and match

pjungwir• 3 years ago

A trick I've used for 20+ years that I think helps me put in ~8 hours of real work per day is to reserve some easy tasks for "after lunch work". It doesn't have to be literally after lunch, but whenever your brain is tired or doesn't want to try too hard. That's when you write a couple of the boring tests or do some easy refactoring. When you're in that kind of mood, doing those kinds of familiar low-friction tasks is relaxing and refreshing. Pretty soon you're ready for something harder. And it's a way to fit in the "hygiene" jobs that are easy to neglect. It helps to keep a little list in a text file somewhere, so you don't have to go searching for them.

genman• 3 years ago

I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions

Depending on how granular your tracking was, that may be the trick. It is possible that you did not count in the time needed to recover and transition time. Let say that a task took 1.5h to complete, but you didn't count in 15 minutes you needed in between to relax and gather thought or perhaps you didn't count in another 15 minutes that you needed between two separate tasks. Can you elaborate this?

weaksauce2• 3 years ago

the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.

the current system is mainly because henry ford decided that it was the most he could make people do line work before productivity decreased and injuries increased. that of course was better working conditions of 10 hour days that the labor unions had negotiated before that. it's not impossible to forsee it going down to 32 hours or working more at home since the nature of work is different.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...

vidarh11• 3 years ago

That article is whitewashing. There were demands for 8 hour work days decades before Ford. 10 hours had become widespread, sure, and some only asked for 10, but Robert Owen's slogan "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest" dates to 1817, and had been picked up by unions and socialist groups over the following decades.

May 1st as an international day for workers demonstrations even came about as a result of the aftermath of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre in 1886 during one of the demonstrations for the 8 hour day. The then AFL proposed May 1st demonstrations as part of relaunching the fight for the 8 hour day.

That some employers saw the writing on the wall and cut it to 8 with less pressure applied than others was in large part because the multiple decades long, sometimes bloody, fight for earlier cuts had shown it did not affect production anywhere near as much as opponents had claimed.

carlosjobim2• 3 years ago

What you write might be true for working only with your mind, but it is absolutely possible to work efficiently all day every day for several months in other fields, that are not only grunt style work. And when it comes to seasonal work, it is the most reasonable way to do it. You can work also work long hours efficiently if you are forced to it.

pclmulqdq• 3 years ago

Personally, I have been observing my own technical work habits a lot recently. What I have noticed agrees with your narrative but disagrees with your point. Here's the rundown:

* I can sustain hard mental labor (including but not limited to work) for about 50 hours per week total

* I don't know when I'm going to be in the best state to do that work, and it depends on a lot of factors

* Some of those factors are external, some depend on the project, etc.

* Sometimes, that mental labor needs to go somewhere else, and that subtracts from my overall work budget. That includes things like weird social situations, fixing something around the house, etc.

* I also spend a lot of time passively daydreaming about the last thing I worked on. This is often productive, but also often isn't.

* My productive output also varies a lot on those factors: some weeks, I can produce 60 hours of work, and others only 15-20

I think if you have bursty work patterns like this, it is actually beneficial to have more office days rather than fewer, to "catch" as much productive time and daydreaming time as possible. However, it's an even better argument for remote work, because that minimizes other forms of mental labor, like driving.

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

I think I'm like this. I've pushed myself fairly hard with technical work in the past, and got up to about 80 hours a week for weeks at a time, but about 50 is my useful maximum without diminishing returns.

hnews_account_12• 3 years ago

The productivity in office suits certain work styles that are people heavy. The argument for and against remote work isn't as dependent on the productivity time as people think. Sure, some people are unproductive for periods between 9am - 5pm. Most people are not. That's why those times work. I am myself very productive during those times but only for analytical work. When I need to code, I have to be home with ANC earphones and get lost in the iterations (assuming I'm not stuck somewhere).

The whole idiocy around 5 days a week 9-5 is because people think you have to be in office all that time. People can and do take random half days, hours off to go to the dentist or the doctor or to the post office or whatever the fuck. That's how it has always been. There are very few jobs that require you to literally never fuck off if there's nothing going on. Work adjusts around you if you're a productive person. Some of us can get stuck with shitty bosses and everyone empathizes with that, but for the vast majority of folks, the boss absolutely does not give a flying fuck about when you come in as long as he knows you're disciplined.

therealdrag04• 3 years ago

Your conclusions don’t follow. Most people are not doing exclusively mentally demanding technical work, which you admit, so why would you limit the work week based on that? And non strenuous work takes a nontrivial amount of time? I’m regularly solidly productive for 30-40 hours a week (tracked with RescueTime app).

Today I did around a dozen PRs (among other things like design reviews) that were tiny changes (cleanup, or migration config flags over various repos). It wasn’t hard work, but it’s important work that has to get done. Shortening the week doesn’t magically get this done faster.

I_AM_A_SMURF3• 3 years ago

A lot of time spent doing "hard" things is unproductive. So many times I've worked on a hard bug long fruitless hours just to come back the next day and spotting the problem almost immediately. Quick cleanup tasks are important yes, but most of the time you can delegate those to newer employees that can actually learn from them.

wonderwonder2• 3 years ago

I agree with the 20 - 25 hours of productive mental work per week. So much of my day is wasted with meetings that could be an email. The worst are recurring weekly meetings. Why?

Tomorrow I have meeting starting from 9am. From 9-5 I only have 1.5 hours that are not meetings and they are not concurrent, they are 3 30 minute blocks between meetings. I have an insane deadline I am trying to make in 2 weeks. How am I supposed to get any work done if I am constantly in meetings? I feel like companies should designate at most 2 hours a day as meeting hours, after that let tech workers build tech, its not right to fill days with meetings and then expect us to produce at night.

My last job had almost no meetings it was awesome. I really only worked maybe 20 hours a week but it was solid deep work. Its been a year and the company CTO still reaches out occasionally to see if I want a position for various projects they have coming up.

If you let developers just work when they are in work mode you will get solid results.

AndrewKemendo2• 3 years ago

I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.

Hanlon's razor applies here.

As does Chesterton's Fence for that matter

The 40 hour work week was won in actual blood from labor activists long before any of us were conceptions. The fact that we still live within it, is simply a proof of counter-revolution being pervasive such that the world has structured itself around this.

We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.

Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.

roenxi• 3 years ago

Intertia is a big part of the 40 hour standard; I'd anticipate legal structures that start penalising companies that offer different hours.

One of the situations I hear a lot of chatter about is people working 2+ jobs because they can't find the hours to make ends meet. Picking on US retail hours, there seems to have been a 2nd quiet revolution that has gotten the average hours down to 30/week without quite as much bloodshed [0].

It isn't that obvious that the efforts of labour activists have had that much impact. It is unlikely that they have managed to hold back the laws of supply and demand over the long term. If companies got much better results at 60 hours/week or 20 hours/week that is how long people would be working.

Eg, look at how quickly we ended up with mass working form home. It has been a possibility for ~20 years, and it took one shock and suddenly it seems to be embedded as far as it is likely to go. No bloodshed. That is a much bigger win than a 40 hour workweek. I'll sign whatever hours you want me to pretend to work if I can do it from my bedroom. 168 hour/week contract WFH? Works for me I suppose.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAERT/

sjtgraham• 3 years ago

> My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless...

If there are people who can't run a mile and those who can run over 100, what makes you think everyone universally can sustain 20-25 hours of focussed work per week?

cinntaile• 3 years ago

Are you suggesting the number of focused hours per week can be trained just like running a mile?

koonsolo• 3 years ago

If I do 20-25 hours a week, and nobody else can outperform me in productive output, I don't really care how much hours they put in.

I've had jobs where I was productive maybe 4 hours a week, and got excellent reviews. So I always wondered if I got that, WTF were the other devs doing?

bryanrasmussen2• 3 years ago

for programming work I would say 20-25 hours a week on complicated things, and an extra 5 - 10 hours on simple things.

The complicated things are stressing and you need to relax a bit afterwards, and then you can take easy stuff, like maybe an evaluation of what one might do to speed up some process without actually writing the code, just a report. Or simple fixing of design issues, code cleanup stuff like that.

qikInNdOutReply• 3 years ago

The main reason for meddle management existence is a recursive loop.

The narcissts produce unsolveable problems, intertribal conflict and other pressure related sypmtoms. After they poisoned the workspace, they themselves become necessary to work around the problems and coping behaviour they created. They are literaly self-employed.

j7ake• 3 years ago

This resonates with Sara Billeys advice for PhDs : https://sites.math.washington.edu/~billey/advice/timely.fash...

She recommends 20 hours of research a week. But there is a high bar to what qualifies an hour.

Maybe relevant for HN community is that they count programming as half time (ie 2 hours programming is 1 hour of work).

When mathematicians say they “work” it’s different than what normal people say is “work”.

An analogy is people who do a full proper pull-up versus people who “cheat” to pull themselves up, but both types of people are counting them as pull ups.

jacobjwebber• 3 years ago

I’m doing a phd in informatics. 4 hours per weekday of actual work is what I have found to be my sustainable limit. Not sure I could even do this 5 days a week, more like 3 or 4.

keyraycheck• 3 years ago

That is true for deep work like:

- solving mathematical problems

- coding non-trivial stuff

- teaching non-trival stuff

The challange is shallow work e.g.

- replying to emails

- meetings

- scheduling meetings

And than there is no-work:

- checking your phone

- lunch

- walking and chatting before the next meeting

Shallow and no-work can easily eat anywhere between 20 and infinity :)

stuaxo• 3 years ago

Even "shallow work" isn't done as well during the extra time.

Besides - doing meetings well is not shallow work at all; scheduling is a pain etc and emails are written better when people aren't tired.

vouwfietsman2• 3 years ago

I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.

Not really though, this is deeply culturally ingrained in everybody. You may not like a 40 hour workweek, but you like to own a Tesla, and you are envious of rich people, and you judge people who are homeless or don't have work or don't "apply themselves". (using "you" to mean "people")

The issue is deeply cultural, and cannot be blamed on any single evil entity or person. If everybody wanted this, it would be so. The question is, why does not everybody want this? This is largely due to cultural forces, which can be manipulated through marketing and politics, but are mostly upheld by every single individual going with the flow.

peoplefromibiza• 3 years ago

what about useful jobs which are not productive (in terms of monetization of the time units worked) nor physically demanding?

I guess 4 days work for a librarian doesn't mean anything meaningful and the said librarian productivity doesn't plummet like in a "writing math papers" scenario.

Or for an emergency doctor, a fireman, a shop owner, a sportsman etc. etc.

A friend of mine is an air traffic controller, they work 8 hours straight in 3 8 hours shifts during the 24h they need to cover constantly (meaning they don't even stop for a lunch break, only a few short 10 minutes breaks to stretch or to go to the bathroom) for 5 days straight and then they stay 3 days and 1/2 home, so they work 17-18 days a month.

Anyway 9-5 (which is more like 8-~16 in my Country on average, with an hour long lunch break, so ~36 hours/week in total) was won by workers with actual real social battles and 9-5 is the time of the day where the presence of natural light is more probable.

We could switch to working 23:00-6:00 but I guess it wouldn't be so good for the morale.

Also, I generally really work no more than 1-2 hours per day, the rest is spent thinking about the problem, reading documentation, watching a tutorial, participating in a meeting when I do not have to talk an I can keep the camera turned off and the mic on mute, but mostly is doing something else entirely, completely disconnected from my duties, to enable my brain to absorb the problem and have a fresh view on it sometimes later.

Best ideas happen when you're not actively thinking about them.

pwpw• 3 years ago

I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout.

This is similar to my experience.

Back in 2020 I decided to make a career switch from accounting to software engineering. I began studying in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening while working a full-time job. I quickly discovered that I could only study in the morning with a lighter review in the evening.

Eventually, I got to the point where I had to walk away from work and study full-time because it was so mentally exhausting. Around that time, I started learning Greek as well. I attended classes once per week and observed that I had to lighten my CompSci studying workload on days I had Greek class. Otherwise, I would have a high degree of difficulty learning Greek that evening.

I was hitting my mental exhaustion limit after 5 hours of intense, technical learning every day. If I tried to push past that point, I would burn myself out and become noticeably less productive. This was something I had never realized while in school with frequent built in breaks (and perhaps more energy from being younger).

When I was studying for the CPA exam in the library for 8 hours per day, I thought I was being highly efficient the entire time. However, looking back on it, I was spending a good portion of that time taking breaks and doing lighter review of material I already knew, which was not too taxing (pun intended) on my mental energy.

Now, I’m well aware of my upper limits of hard work and find that forcing myself past that point isn’t worth the trade-off of mental exhaustion. I realistically believe that I could switch to a 4 day work week and accomplish the same amount while being more energized in the long-run. I’d love to get the opportunity to test my hypothesis.

As a side note: I found when I was studying full-stack material, switching between backend and front end work when I began to tire of one slowed the rate of my mental exhaustion.

javier2• 3 years ago

To be honest, I cant do more than 5H of good technical work per day either

quacked5• 3 years ago

I don't like the Four Day Work Week because most of the people who are allowed to experiment with it are working on bullshit. I'm not a big Graeber fan, but I emphatically agree with his idea that the majority of actual hours worked inside the continental US are largely useless make-work in order to justify the existence of a monied consumer class.

Such a huge amount of the actual work that needs to be done so that we live in first-world comfort--textiles, agriculture, fuel chemicals, etc.--is so outsourced to developing countries that use serf-equivalent labor working 6 or 7 day weeks (in the same way that Americans did 150 years ago), or foreign migrant workers, that I don't actually have a sense of how much work is really needed to make the modern world function. If I get a four day workweek to make PowerPoints and write requirements documents for video calling software, is that actually a fair amount of work? If you divided the amount of non-bullshit work that went into sustaining America by the number of workers here, would we have a one-day workweek? A seven-day workweek?

Perhaps it's less accurate to say "I don't like the four day work week" than it is to say "I am suspicious that I deserve a four day work week given my consumption of resources". I of course would like to work as little as possible and would immediately accept a 4-day if it were offered.

aantix2• 3 years ago

Thought-work is work. Logistical planning is work. Having conversations where everyone makes sure that the others are on the same page, is work.

quacked5• 3 years ago

Whether or not something is 'work' has no bearing on whether or not it's bullshit. I am in perfect agreement that one hour of useful work requires many hours of equally useful thought-work.

jimmygrapes• 3 years ago

Fully agreed, but please don't discount the domestic workforce keeping things going alongside those other categories of workers. Some of us work long hours and extra days not because we are abused by a parody of a capitalist boss/system, but because the work needs to be done and we take pride in supporting the progress of humanity (for better or worse). That plumbing issue, that damaging weather event, that medical emergency, that slip, trip or fall, that electricity outage, that vandalism repair, that train derailment, that earthquake, that dirty diaper, that messy suicide, that produce delivery, that firebreak, that water break, that pitbull attack, that abscess bust, that gas leak, that sandwich you ordered online; someone is around to handle these emergent events. Some of us need to be around to take care of the rest of those who are spending 12 to 72 hours (or more) contributing to or experiencing these events.

Please don't forget us.

quacked5• 3 years ago

You're right. When I deliver the rant in the future I'll add that caveat. There are tons of domestic builders, drivers, operators, officers, longshoremen, etc. that work long, long nights and days to make society happen, who are part of the first-world.

You are who I believe deserves a four- or three-day work week. However, there are so many lower-middle and upper-low class people working these jobs that there's just no incentive to do so, and instead layoffs are focused on making you work harder, for more, with less. All the while I and my ilk get comparatively large bonuses for comparatively lackadaisical work weeks.

the_gipsy5• 3 years ago

That is whataboutism. Yes, al that stuff is really bad and should be fixed on a global level - but meanwhile pushing for less work hours where possible does not take away from improving, on the contrary, it paves the way.

quacked5• 3 years ago

"Whataboutism" is a made-up word to decry analogies.

"You get ten years for dealing marijuana."

"Well what about that rich kid that did the same thing as me that got no prison time?"

"That's whataboutism!"

What I said is relevant. The idea of the four-day work week is predicated on the fact that most people participating in the experiment can reduce their working hours to four days with no real effect on society. The fact that people discuss the 4DWW without constantly pointing this out further obscures what exactly it is about "work" that's useful.

TrackerFF4• 3 years ago

Ok so let's look at this from the economical side of things

A, let's say, assembly worker has a maximum production output. In a perfect system, their workload is uniform, and so is their production output. So a 20% increase in work would yield 20% increase in output, and vise versa.

That is obviously not true for a wide range of work that involves thinking - like creative work, many white collar jobs, academia, etc. Your output may not be a linear function of time, and your workload is probably not uniformly distributed across your workday. If you provide value, employers will keep paying you - even though you might only do what seems like bullshit work to others. And it does not matter that you have periods where you do nothing, because in the end - you're producing something, and that's all that maters.

With that said, yes - less hours do simply not translate well into certain jobs, unless you start setting up specific shift rotations.

This is just one variable. What about sick leave? Is that a problem, and how to reduce it? If a 20% decrease in work yields a 60% improvement in sick leaves, that's another important metric to consider.

NKosmatos• 3 years ago

Why would they want to return? One you do an “upgrade” in your life, i.e. like remote work, quality family time, it’s difficult/impossible to go back. The same is true for many other life “upgrades” like fiber internet connection, smart devices, smartphones, color TVs and so on

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

Some people might actually like working for its own sake, just as some truly prefer going into the office despite the tradeoffs.

I am not one of those people. lol

Not that I don't have a constant drive to do something, of course. I just wouldn't engage in surrogate work in order to feel like I'm worth something.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

I'm one of those people, but I still prefer 4 days. I can then work on something else on the 5th day which I normally wouldn't get to do and keep my weekends for relaxing and not side projects.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

I love working for works sake. I severely miss working in an office and bumping into people and getting great ideas. I believe highly skilled software engineers in a product focused startup should not work remote if they want innovation.

Pretty much as “I love work” as it gets, and I can’t wait for the move to 4 day weeks. Work for works sake gets better when it’s highly focused when you’re in the zone and lets your mind be free for all the rest of the time.

IanCal• 3 years ago

Most companies.

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

Good.

If civilization isn't moving to improve quality of life, but to make sure that we keep working more and more, we have to ask ourselves what exactly is the point of technological progress.

agubelu2• 3 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. Our time here on Earth is limited, and I think that as a society we should aim to work less and have more time for ourselves and enjoy everyting life has to offer.

The huge productivity increase in the last 40 years have been entirely siphoned into maximizing profits while working conditions have remained essentially stagnant, so I'd say it's about time to start making some progress on this front.

piva007• 3 years ago

If you are not familiar with it, may I present to you Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness". In 1920 he was already advocating exactly that.

neom• 3 years ago

Hello fellow Bertrand Russell fan??! I don't see his name come up on HN too often but really nice to see In Praise of Idleness mentioned. For anyone reading this who wants to consume some of his philosophy:

In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays - https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Idleness-Routledge-Classics-46...

The Conquest of Happiness - https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Happiness-Bertrand-Russell/d...

drdrek• 3 years ago

Seems like the answer is total amount of human life. When you had 10K humans you could just walk around your cave and find enough food for everyone. When you had 10M humans you started tilling fields and created organizations to manage collection and storage. now you need incredibly complex machines, that require incredibly complex supply chains to feed 10B.

(food as an example. its the same for clothing to not freeze, shelter to rear offsprings, culture to not kill each other etc)

berniedurfee5• 3 years ago

Right? Where is all that extra productivity going?

Vinnl3• 3 years ago

It's the one thing I miss most from working for Dutch companies: being able to take a 20% pay cut and work 20% less.

Theoretically, that should be a great deal for my employer: the extra rest, and just the way productive work is usually spread out across the week, means that my productivity definitely was not down 20% compared to now, so I was cheaper per hour.

Yet even that culturally seems to be a hard sell in a majority-North American org, let alone keeping pay the same. Shame.

Invictus0• 3 years ago

You get healthcare 7 days a week but only work for 4. Salary is only one component of compensation

iamacyborg3• 3 years ago

What a strange way to think about health care.

Can you explain what you mean when you say you only work for 4?

In the UK where this trial was run both the employer and the employee pay for National Insurance which covers nationalised healthcare. Whether you work 1 day or 7 a week, you still get covered.

Vinnl3• 3 years ago

Dock it off my paycheck too, I don't care, I want that 4-day work week!

Though of course, being in the Netherlands, my employer doesn't pay for my health insurance.

Edit: as for the general point about compensation being more than salary, it is also common in the Netherlands that PTO is prorated to the hours you work per week. That is fine; I'm happy to scale everything down to 4/5th if I can scale my working hours down to that.

ThePowerOfFuet• 3 years ago

You get healthcare 7 days a week but only work for 4. Salary is only one component of compensation

Thinking of healthcare as compensation is what got America into the healthcare mess it's in today.

warkdarrior• 3 years ago

We should also restrict food and housing access to the days you work.

kevingadd• 3 years ago

Health insurance isn't THAT expensive. This is ridiculous

hinkley• 3 years ago

That's only a problem if you believe that the 33rd hour is as productive as the 23rd hour, which isn't the case. We're talking about 4 day work weeks, not 4 hour work weeks.

nerdbert2• 3 years ago

Thanks for your argument that health care should not be connected in any way to employment.

piva007• 3 years ago

Healthcare is not part of compensation, it's a basic modern human need that societies should take care of. That your system doesn't work that way tells more about your system than what healthcare is.

Loocid2• 3 years ago

Good thing I live in a reasonable country and get health care whether I work or not.

TigeriusKirk2• 3 years ago

In the 90s my girlfriend worked for the American office of a Danish industrial design company that closed at noon on Fridays. They claimed it was how everyone in Denmark worked, but I had no way to confirm it at the time.

bombolo• 3 years ago

It isn't.

nivenkos2• 3 years ago

Some companies do this in Spain too, especially in the summer.

Likewise in Sweden, but it's a minority of companies I'd say.

pm3003• 3 years ago

I worked in various places in Northern Germany a few years ago, close to the Danish border. Some businesses and most federal and state-related institutions would stop working at noon on Fridays. I was told it was to alleviate the pressure on the trains and Autobahn. This would make sense, especially given the fact that a very important military population was stationed there during the cold war and the railways and roads were a mess (and probably still are).

I don't know if it's true, nobody concerned would ever come to the stupid idea of questioning this nice practice.

GordonS• 3 years ago

I did this for years in the UK too, it was a tradeoff I was willing to make, and I'm glad I did.

mns• 3 years ago

In Germany, during the pandemic, the company went into "Kurzarbeit" for 6 months. We worked at 70%, but because of support and client issues, we couldn't just take one full day off and another half day, so we just worked around 5-6 hours a day.

Not only that the productivity didn't decrease, but after a while we were even more productive than before. Meetings were reduced to the minimum and depending on when you started and where you worked, when you finished you had almost a full day available for yourself. These were some of the best 6 months of my employee career.

berniedurfee5• 3 years ago

One of my favorite travel memories was driving through rural France looking for a pharmacy around noon.

Every store in the small town was closed, so we decided to head to a restaurant for lunch… and it was packed.

All the shops close up around noon so people can go eat lunch, then go back to work.

That seemed so remarkably human and logical, yet insane as an American. I never wanted to leave.

TigeriusKirk2• 3 years ago

I've had 4 day workweeks at two different times in my career. Once in my 20s, when I worked 10 hours days to get an extra day off. Didn't matter since I worked close to that anyway, and often more. The day off was flexible, so I chose Wednesday whenever possible. Two "weeks" of two days each worked great for me. Best schedule I ever had.

Another place, the salary was slightly lower (but not much due to the way they did levels), but the tradeoff was worth it. This was near the end of my time working for other people, so I was honestly on my way out anyway.

I think it's hard to make an entire company work on a 4 day schedule if you're interfacing with clients and so on. Or do the thing where half are off Monday, half off Friday.

robaye• 3 years ago

I work in construction and often get the 4-10 hour days work week, but only temporarily. I once convinced my boss to let me take Wednesdays off instead of Fridays. Those 2 day work weeks we're sooo perfect for me. I hope one day I can make it permanent thing.

freitzkriesler23• 3 years ago

Instead of 3 day weekends, why don't we go to a 6 day week? The only reason we have 7 days is because of the 7 classical planets.

urbandw311er• 3 years ago

It’s probably easier to effect change within a small region using the existing days than persuade the entire world to change their calendar simultaneously.

freitzkriesler23• 3 years ago

Take a look at this https://calendars.fandom.com/wiki/6-Day_Week_Solar_Calendar_...

Would be one of the biggest innovations in time keeping we could unleash on the world.

And to the person who downvoted my post: get over yourself mate.

skellington2• 3 years ago

When would God rest?

It's crazy when you think about how much of society is aligned around the totally arbitrary idea of a 7-day week. It would be hard to switch because so many things are aligned to it.

ChickenNugger• 3 years ago

The thing is it's completely non-existent in nature. Not to get too into the Naturalistic Fallacy, but we're biological organisms that evolved in nature and have acclimated through evolution to it the things that do exist.

That is we have a circadian rhythm, because for millions of years we couldn't see much at night, so we just went to sleep. And all sorts of animals including us start getting frisky in spring because it means resources are about to become abundant so it's a good time to copy ourselves. Even women's menstrual cycles are roughly equivalent to the lunar month.

But a 7 day period? Only exists in society because of - essentially - the bible.

In nature (on Earth) there are days, years, months, seasons, but that's really it. Even an hour is an arbitrary amount of time in a day (the length of which actually varies anyway!).

askvictor4• 3 years ago

A lunar month (28 days) is a slightly useful and easily measured unit of time, but a bit too long for a lot of purposes. But it only splits into 47 and 214, so a shorter measure would be 2 days (not so useful), 4 days (maybe), 7 days (maybe) and 14 days (too long). A seven day measure aligns nicely with the moon's quarters as well. That's what I had always assumed was the reason for a 7 day week; I wonder if the celestial bodies reasoning is more of a religious cover story for something people were already doing (this is pure conjecture on my part)

askvictor4• 3 years ago

Gah; markdown seems to have ruined my calculations; should read 4x7 and 2x14

standardUser• 3 years ago

I think it's worth considering that, in the US, the ultimate leap from 5 to 4 day work weeks would require a change in labor laws to mandate full-time status and overtime pay cutoff at 32 hours/week. Close to 60% of US workers are hourly. I can't predict all of the ramifications from that kind of change, but I have to imagine it would largely benefit workers. I wish we had a major political party that was at least willing to start the conversation. We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance, not some ideal or even well-reasoned number, let alone balanced in the interest of the overwhelming majority (working people).

Frost1x2• 3 years ago

We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance, not some ideal or even well-reasoned number, let alone balanced in the interest of the overwhelming majority (working people).

The more and more I see cases like this that exist, the more I feel it's yet more supporting evidence that the US is a failing democracy. We can point fingers and play responsibility games, we can claim its minority protection (are wealthy and powerful individuals really a minority that need more protection in our current structure or should they even be considered a minority), but at the end of the day it doesn't seem to be working in some respects. If we aren't seeing labor law improvements and most fall in labor, something seems amiss.

I'm not advocating for mob rule, there are very good reasons for minority protections, but in some cases when the majority of a democratic society abhors the state of affairs yet we continually have no significant influence to at least try something different, that to me says we're in a failing or failed democracy charading around as a democracy. The older I get, the more I want to call a duck a duck if it walks, quacks, and looks like a duck.

flangola7• 3 years ago

We had a literal coup attempt two years ago. Of course our democracy is faulting, it's been disintegrating for many years.

np-• 3 years ago

To be pedantic, the US has never been a democracy, it has always been a republic and it was built in to give land equal or more power than individuals. Though I don’t deny that it seems to be either in or approaching a failure mode (though perhaps the observant may notice it never worked as it was advertised even from Day 1, there was never really a success mode).

ghiculescu2• 3 years ago

To make this claim about the US is to overlook that basically all western countries have 40 hour work weeks.

Are they all failing democracies too?

Its a shame how many Americans are too busy hating America to look outside the border and see how good they have it, but also how most of their “uniquely American” problems are not unique at all.

(My perspective is as an Australian living in America. And my comment doesn’t apply to guns.)

renewiltord3• 3 years ago

The US is a fully functioning representative democracy. People in small groups always overestimate the popularity of their cause.

Quite simply there are other people. And those people often have other opinions.

rodgerd3• 3 years ago

We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance

It's not happenstance. It's something workers fought and sometimes died to win against an incumbent 6 or 7 day, 10 plus hour a day norm.

MBCook• 3 years ago

Right, but it’s not some magical optimal number.

It’s lets you have 3 shifts per day (3 x 8 = 24) for full coverage. That also fits with the idea that it gave you a balanced life. 8 hours at work, 8 hours asleep, 8 hours for the rest.

It was a convenient number below the old, much worse, standard.

People act like 40 hours is some kind of natural law that can’t be questioned.

It absolutely can be.

Bloating3• 3 years ago

40 hours really has to due with overtime rates, advocated by progressive companies back in the day. 20 years ago, Progressive companies advocated for company gyms, day-care, unlimited M&Ms and ping-pong tables. Now, its work from home (for now.)

Otherwise can we question the need to differentiate full-time vs part-time? Its certainly arbitrary, and mostly related to whether one qualifies for benefits. In the case of benefits, it may be less than 40 hours.

cooperadymas• 3 years ago

Something I've never understood is why four days? Is it simply because it's an incremental improvement over the current five day week, a stopping point toward the next target, or is it the target?

NoPicklez• 3 years ago

I've wondered that as well. People say 5 days is too much, well why 4? Why not 3?

Potentially there isn't a real reason, but that it's just an easier bite to chew for now, where people have noticeable improvements.

Vinnl3• 3 years ago

For me it was a great balance: instead of the weekend feeling like days off from work, general life felt like alternating between holidays and work, since they're about the same length.

3 work days might work as well, but fewer than that and you start to lose the flow at work. And given that I do generally enjoy my work, it isn't necessary for that holiday feel anyway.

hahamrfunnyguy• 3 years ago

Having worked a 3-day week for a couple of years, I will second the notion that it possible to lose continuity by being off for four days in a row. Part of that might be that everyone else is still on the 5-day schedule, the other part of that is I would get wrapped up in other matters during the 4 days and then need to refocus attention on something completely unrelated back at work.

I ended up leaving myself notes on what I was working on before I left on Thursday and what to do first. This was a big help in getting the continuity back and not feeling like I missed a beat when I resumed working again on Tuesday.

bobsmooth• 3 years ago

3 * 12 is the best imo. After 3 days I'm ready for the weekend and after 4 days I'm itching to get back to being productive.

wes-k• 3 years ago

Going from 5 work days to 4 is a 20% cut in work/pay and a 50% increase in weekends (2 to 3).

4 to 3 is a 25% cut and a 33% increase in weekends (3 to 4).

3 to 2 is a 33% cut and a 25% increase in weekends (4 to 5).

Thus we see, 3 work days a week is mathematically optimal.

TrackerFF4• 3 years ago

To be honest, just being able to work half a day on Fridays is a huge improvement. I'm doing that currently (weekend starts at noon), and I get to do a lot of things with those 4 extra hours. Any chores of other things I'd do on Saturdays, I now do on Fridays after work.

I also used to work shifts for quite some time, and while I hated working nights/evenings, we "only" worked around 30 hours a week. So most of my weeks had odd days off here and there. Sometimes longer and more consecutive days. That is what I miss the most.

But having tried that, I can say that for me: Three consecutive days off > Two consecutive days off + one random day off here and there > Two consecutive days off.

SteveGerencser• 3 years ago

My dad's factory went to 4 day work weeks in the 90s and never looked back. Everyone was happier, and the various suppliers and customers learned pretty quickly not to call on Friday because it was rare that anyone was there.

And now I rarely schedule work for Friday's If something important comes up I have an extra day to deal with it, otherwise I get my 3 day weekends and family life is good.

nukeman• 3 years ago

Ditto, a good chunk of the nuclear sector moved to 4/10 and 9/80 in the 1990s. The days are long, but man is it nice to not have to work Fridays. Helps with the commute too.

berniedurfee5• 3 years ago

9/80 was great. That was in the early aughts, but was in fact in the nuclear industry.

Philip-J-Fry• 3 years ago

I could see quite a few companies reaching for this over pay rises. Considering inflation right now, it may make sense to suggest a 4 day working week at their existing pay versus offering an inflation beating pay rise.

greedo• 3 years ago

Haha, "inflation beating pay raise."

Our VP of HR said "If we were to give you raises when inflation goes up, we'd have to cut your salary when it goes down."

Bitch, when was the last time we had significant deflation?

piva007• 3 years ago

I'd sign that agreement in a heartbeat. Seriously, if my VP of HR said that I'd challenge them to write an employment agreement with that exact phrasing, my salary will follow whatever is the inflation/deflation rate for the year...

Tiktaalik2• 3 years ago

or I could see it as another tool in the toolbox for smaller private companies that simply cannot match the offers of the big FAANG tech companies with their sky high pay and oodles of RSUs.

A private tech company can't match what Apple can do in financial compensation, but what they can offer is better quality of life. Previously that might have been something around benefits and vacation days, but four day work week is a new lever.

Beaver117• 3 years ago

simply cannot match the offers of the big FAANG tech companies with their sky high pay and oodles of RSUs.

But I bet they have no problem paying the CEO millions of dollars

Think of how much funding "smaller private companies" get from VCs nowadays. We're not talking about a startup in someones garage.

carlosjobim2• 3 years ago

If they cannot offer what it costs to hire the competence the require, they need to learn how to do those things themselves. You cannot just start a company and expect to buy your way out of your own lack of competence - at least not when there are others paying more.

rr888• 3 years ago

4 day week is here. It feels as Fridays are virtually no work days already, office is empty, hard to find people online, lots of people just do a few token mails and maybe a side project.

gslin• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/2cmyP

lettergram7• 3 years ago

Good, you all work 4 days and I’ll work my standard 6x10 6 days, 10hrs a day.

When people get fired presumably I’ll still be standing. When promotion time comes around, the person who does the most will get the promotion. When bonus time comes, I’ll have the most done.

You can try to regulate day(s), but if there’s people willing to work more they’ll set the standard.

the_gipsy5• 3 years ago

Oh boy, you're in for a surprise.

agubelu2• 3 years ago

When you're in your final years and you look back at your life, does anyone seriously think "I wish I had spent more hours at work"? I personally don't know a single case. However, "I wish I had had more time for..." is probably the norm.

Life is so much more than work.

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

Some of us actually like our jobs and find joy in what we work on. If you want single case it's me. I can look back at previous jobs and wish that I spent more time working making something even better, improving other people's lives more.

ioseph• 3 years ago

"When promotion time comes around, the person who does the most will get the promotion."

Oh my sweet summer child.

piva007• 3 years ago

What a clear example of one of Paulo Freire's best insights: "When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor."

Go on with your career ladder game, not everyone in humanity praise that as much as you. On the contrary, lots will see you as either naive or moronic.

Your 6x10 work schedule is being spent on creating... A chatbot.

lettergram7• 3 years ago

Go on with your career ladder game, not everyone in humanity praise that as much as you. On the contrary, lots will see you as either naive or moronic.

We can critique how I choose to spend my time, but what about the alternatives? Play video games with strangers? Drink and dance? Play board games with friends? Go to church / mosque every day? Walk down paths to see pretty streams? Smoke pot and watch cartoons? Strum a guitar for hours in a subway?

In my book, it’s not my place to judge others, provided no one is harming me. I think anyone can do what ever they’d like — have at it. Society needs different kinds of people.

For me, it’s about family.

I work probably 40-50hrs a week coding/architecting and 10-20hrs a week managing a farm [cows, hay, honey] (plus 2-3 weeks out of the year doing 12 hr day harvesting).

The rest of the time I’m with my family. That’s 4-7hrs every morning and a couple hours every evening. I see my kids more than most. Importantly, I’m providing for my children — I teach them what I know, help them grow and provide for their needs.

My ancestors gave me what I have and I personally believe I have a duty to live up to all I can be. Yes; that means working hard, building a legacy and leaving our civilization (hopefully) better than we received it.

Working less wouldn’t aid in my objectives. I want to be the best in my field. It wouldn’t help my family to be less / worse. What most people should really ask themselves are what’s their purpose. With purpose you can orient yourself appropriately.

Loocid2• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, how long have you been in the workforce?

Insanity• 3 years ago

As someone managing a team of engineers, I would see this as a red flag and not something to praise. Promotions are not based on working such hours anywhere I have seen either. And similarly, that alone will not protect you from being laid off.

lettergram7• 3 years ago

As someone who also managed, fair enough. I always measured by consistency. The engineers would commit and if they met their commitments they were usually good. Sometimes I’d have to nudge them one way or the other, but rarely did I see an issue.

For me personally, I enjoy committing to stretch myself. Leave it all on the field so-to-speak. I love my / our trade so it’s easy for me. I don’t expect it from others at that level.

TrackerFF4• 3 years ago

What about the workers that are simply more efficient than you are? And produce the same output, but spend much less time?

Tiktaalik2• 3 years ago

I think a four day, 32h work week is a good idea, though I'd be concerned if companies were so restrictive around their contracts that they banned people from working elsewhere with their free time and extra day off. That should not be allowed to happen.

Older employees that are established and have met various life goals (eg. owning a home) may be very satisfied to only work four days and to use their time for hobbies, but those that haven't met those life goals may not feel the same way.

Younger employees for example that are feeling anxiety around high costs of living and wanting to earn more money should have the freedom to work more and work that extra day somewhere if they so choose. (Perhaps they could work on a startup idea...)

sokoloff4• 3 years ago

One argument in favor of a 32-hour week is that better rested employees will be approximately as productive as if they worked 40 hours. (I believe that for creative work.)

Take that away by having them juggle a second job and employers might be better off to just leave the workweek at 40 hours.

cableshaft• 3 years ago

There are already people who work two jobs and well over 40 hour weeks, with a 40 hour workweek standard. I don't see what the difference is there.

If anything it should still let them work a few less hours, on average, than the previous status quo, i.e. instead of one 40 hour job and one 20 hour part-time job, it could be one 32 hour and one 20 hour job, thus still seeing an increase in well-being for that employee.

nivenkos2• 3 years ago

My company even bans us from working outside of the 40h work week...

ed25519FUUU2• 3 years ago

I work at a FANG now. There’s really no job openings I’m interested in, but if a recruiter dropped by and said they needed an expert and had a company-wide 4-day workweek I’d probably take their call.

That’s a perk that can not be matched at FANG. Truly a way to set yourself apart.

habosa• 3 years ago

Google (and maybe some of the others) does let some employees do a 4-day work week for 80% pay. I’ve met more than one such person, but they are rare.

ed25519FUUU2• 3 years ago

It has to be company wide. If you take 80% and everyone else does 100% you end up missing important meetings or just having to make up the work when you get back.

Apocryphon3• 3 years ago

Why not have some workers working M-Th, others T-F, and some other combination, and managers working all five days to coordinate? After all, they get paid the big bucks.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

Creative work doesn't keep office hours.

HEmanZ2• 3 years ago

In America I would really like to see people balance work and life better, and normalizing a 4 day workweek would go a long way to help that. We have a business culture and set of laws that I think results most people sacrificing too much life to get stuff that doesn’t make them happy.

BUT I disagree strongly with this idea that anyone who works more than 30 hours per week is just unproductive. That’s just factually false. With many jobs productivity scales close to linearly long past 30 hours. Sometimes working more many hours is exponentially more productive. Some people want to work many more hours to get more money, maybe because working more doesn’t bother them, maybe because they’d rather have the money, whatever.

I think people want “how many hours should humans work” to have a unified answer, when in reality it ranges from 0 to 100 depending on the person (what they want and what they can do) and situation(e.g some peoples jobs are literally life saving, an extra few hours can be life-or-death).

For example: I believe the most productive time of my life, by far and above, was the time I worked insanely long hours, and in fact those hours were exponential since knowledge work and the fruits of knowledge work often compound.

Now watch how many people tell me my experience is wrong and I’m either lying or delusional, just because they don’t want to believe that sometimes long hours really are more productive.

blitz_skull• 3 years ago

I think most folks, especially the ones I’ve spoken to on the issue—specifically object to the idea that more than 40 hours nets any real gain for KNOWLEDGE work. Results may vary. I don’t think anyone is arguing for example that our paramedics aren’t doing anything useful after 40 hours.

That’s the key distinction and as someone who has worked a distinctly bullshit job his entire career; I’m not rushing to spend any more time than I need to sitting at that desk.

HEmanZ2• 3 years ago

I still argue against this for all knowledge work. I keep seeing this term “bullshit jobs” and need to probably look more into it, but it seems to refer to office jobs where huge amounts of time are wasted on unproductive work. I’ve had this kind of work in the past. But not all knowledge work is like this.

I’m a software engineer, and on some of the big projects I’ve been on I have squeezed massive amounts of real productivity out of long long hours. I know managers, bankers, real estate agents, and lawyers who also work long hours and get significantly more done for it. They take an hour less of work per day and start to legitimately fall behind (maybe that’s a good litmus test for how “bullshit” job is? How much time can you take off before it becomes noticeable?). The reality is a spectrum and we shouldn’t bring down some subset in favor of another.

escape_goat2• 3 years ago

Honestly if knowledge workers are sort of dialing it in unhappily with minimal productivity after X hours and labor/service/on-call workers can keep plugging away for Y>X hours then there might be some win-win there in terms of quality of life and wage inflation.

the_gipsy5• 3 years ago

BUT I disagree strongly with this idea that anyone who works more than 30 hours per week is just unproductive. That’s just factually false. With many jobs productivity scales close to linearly long past 30 hours.

Blue collar jobs do scale linearly. Many white collar jobs do not, though self-reportedly.

But linear or not in itself is not a problem. If it is linear for a certain job, then there simply must be more people employed. Which is always a good thing, since our system has a baseline unemployment almost by design. People in unemployment but wanting to work are miserable and usually exploited when they do find work. Some businesses won't be able to be profitable without exploiting their workers, but this has historically happened every time workers gained some rights.

Bloating3• 3 years ago

Cool, lets also advocate for year-round school. The school schedule is what really dictates our family schedule

Bloating3• 3 years ago

At least in my experience, a good part my unproductive time is spent satisfying the demands of the self-perpetuating bureaucracy

askvictor4• 3 years ago

Where do people feel the extra day should fall? While Monday or Friday is convenient, I can definitely see a point to making it Wednesday, so you can re-charge and be more productive for the second half of the week; in a normal 5 day week, I definitely see tiredness creeping in by Thursday and Friday.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

I've been doing it on Monday and it works well. I just take the days off as unpaid days in the leave system so I can request a different day whenever I want or when Monday is a public holiday.

gopalv• 3 years ago

I can definitely see a point to making it Wednesday

You probably agree a lot with CGP Grey on this video[1]

I really liked when Cloudera did "unplug days" which basically threw in an extra day off every 3 weeks and a double extra off every 3 months, but it was a Friday so there was always the temptation to drive out somewhere or go do something for 3 days.

If it had been Wednesdays, we'd have just slept and relaxed instead.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw

rizach8• 3 years ago

Friday or Monday allow us to plan better for longer activities. 3 days makes a weekend trip super smooth and easy to pull off.

Having Wednesday off, I would find it harder to disconnect.

robswc• 3 years ago

Well its hardly a shocker that most people prefer to work less for the same pay, lol.

IMO, employers should just let employees work to whatever schedule fits, as long as they can make any meetings and reasonable goals are met.

psvv• 3 years ago

It's a 50% increase in your days off for only 20% reduction in work days.

pard68• 3 years ago

I'd love a four day work week so I can have an extra day to work on other things. I'd also be happy with 5 or 6 hour days, or even just saying, "you're an adult, get your work done then get out of here."

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

I estimate each year I spend one month coding and 11 months supporting, integrating, documenting, packaging, releasing.

spencerchubb• 3 years ago

I would be curious to see a company do 5 out of 8 instead of 4 out of 7.

impalallama• 3 years ago

I have a pet theory that it’s not that people are more productive when they work less but that there is less work needs doing but few are willing to say it. You go back in time and a lot of great technological innovations have the inventors talking about how great it will be when we only have to work one day a week thanks to it. All this crazy tech we have nowadays means a lot can be done in less time so more of peoples jobs is just pretending to work or inventing work that needs doing.

It’s about time we reap the fruits of technological progress.

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

There's difference between employment and actually doing work. A lot of us keep busy with something and get paid for that even. But that doesn't mean that that something holds a lot of value.

We've just seen big silicon valley companies go through the process of shedding 10-20% of their work forces; more in some cases. Seemingly without consequence. Reason: most of those people are busy but not with something that is particularly valuable or productive.

Basically before the industrial revolution, you worked to scrape together a living. Most work was related to food production (farming). The idle were rounded up and put to work typically. The only people not working were the aristocracy. Then the industrial revolution happened and a lot of people started working in factories. Early on this was dangerous and a hard life. It's only with the socialist movements of people rebelling against that things like a five day work week became common. Saturday used to be a working day in most places. Also things like retirement and time off became a thing. And the 40 hour work week.

Basically as worker productivity increased (through automation), less and less people work in food production or anything else that is essential. Since the seventies, we've actually outsourced a lot of production to cheap labor countries. Most of us neither work in production nor food production anymore but in the service industry. Few of us actually even have the skills to produce anything.

The logical conclusion of AI, automation is not idleness. But just busying ourselves with increasingly more frivolous and less essential things for increasingly less time. We'll need to do something with our time. But the value of that is a very loose notion. Having more time to spend basically means there is more money on spending time on each other. Arts, artisanal foods, whatever seems fun/interesting/entertaining.

cpeterso• 3 years ago

I knew someone who had accrued so many PTO days that he started using them to take every Friday off instead of losing his PTO. That reminds me that I should check my PTO balance.

AndrewKemendo2• 3 years ago

no amount of money would convince them to return to five days a week

I love to hear this because it's people actually reclaiming their lives!

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

Meanwhile China is going to make us irrelevant with their 996 work week. I would prefer to stay ahead and build great products than lounging around for half the week.

vore• 3 years ago

This is workable if you’re in your early 20s and dedicated to the grind, but not sustainable if you’re going on 40 with two kids.

Owing my employer almost all of my waking hours is not worth it for me personally. In the end I’d rather look back on the personal relationships I’ve built outside of work than the shareholder value I’ve increased.

TrackerFF4• 3 years ago

Unless you work in a factory:

The 996 work culture is no threat - It's one of the most inefficient ways of working I've ever observed. Same goes for other equivalents found in Asia - too much of that "work" is just butts on seats either pretending to work, or straight up looking at the watch and twiddling thumbs. For any serious intellectual work, it's pure nonsense.

cf-d-ycom• 3 years ago

I'd like to be proven wrong on this point, but it feels to me that this trend is two things, individuals and companies reaping the benefits of technological improvements towards efficiency, and _ALSO_ the revealing redundancy of more and more work.

It seems to me that the negotiating power of workers is largely connected to the dependency of the people that hired them to the output of those workers. As that dependency diminishes (ie. by realising technological advancement and thereby reducing work hours from 5 days to 4 days for example), it seems unlikely that these improved benefits will flow to the workers, as the required* negotiating power to get them is vanishing.

*required in the sense that going on strike becomes much less powerful, and with technological advancements in hiring/remote work, it increases the possibility of replacing the striking workers.

Also, this is largely going to affect the pyjama-laptop class, not anyone that actually needs to be somewhere, and perhaps is revealing that they have largely filled positions they could be significantly reduced.

I'm guessing the coming global recession(that the tech layoffs imply are coming to at least that sector) should be a way to see if these predictions are any where close to right, or just nonsense rambling.

dqpb• 3 years ago

most UK companies participating are not returning to the five-day standard, and a third are ready to make that change permanent

This is a confusing sentence.

silves89• 3 years ago

You can eat as many fermented foods and do as much tai chi as you like, and you can get therapy and manifest and go on retreats. But nothing improves life as much as a 4-day week.

jamesadevine• 3 years ago

Im all for a four day working week. Has any one thought about the impact on schooling and education? Education is centred around a 5 day working week (at least in the U.K.). Presumably teachers would not be eligible to work a four day week? This seems a little unfair.

If workers move to a four day week, should schools do too?

jsty• 3 years ago

If it wasn't a government-mandated day (e.g. Friday is now part of the weekend) then you'd have to ensure days off were split such that there was coverage of the whole working week - which is exactly what service industries that need more than 9-5 x 5 days a week availability often do currently.

tarl0s• 3 years ago

France has been experimenting a 4-day week for primary school since the 80s [1], generally with a day-off on Wednesdays. The impacts are certainly there, e.g. "before September 2013, more than 40% of mothers whose youngest child was of elementary school age did not work on Wednesdays".

It sounds like a 4-day school week would be the natural consequence of a global 4-day working week.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rythmes_scolaires_en_France

b3nji• 3 years ago

It would be interesting to get a breakdown of what exactly these people do.

Claude_Shannon• 3 years ago

If you work four days a week, others will work five days a week and will outpace you.

Strom• 3 years ago

Why stop at five? What about six days a week?

Also I doubt the amount of time worked is anywhere near as good of a predictor for success as willingness to work.

BrandoElFollito• 3 years ago

Edit: sorry for the long post, the TL;DR is at the end

I have a job that combines highly stressful times (managing quickly evolving crises) and governance points (policies, useless meetings, some useful meetings). And socialization on top of that.

I work 3 days at the office and 2 days from home.

The days at the office are dedicated to the most exhausting meetings - the one everyone hates where people battle about who has the longest penis and stresses everyone. Productivity is close to zero.

These are also the days where I socialize with my team around coffee and chatter.

Strictly productivity wise these days are very poor. The fact that I meet people and have actual meaningful meetings as well saves the day.

Ideally, I would compress the dick show meetings on a Monday and start the real week on Tuesday.

Two days in the office from 9 to 18 are acceptable then. Effective work wood be probably about 4 hours per day.

The days at home are for thinking and quick Zoom calls focused on a given topic. I set 30 minutes per call, with the possibility to extend to 1h if needed. Anything more means another call.

Effective work time: about 5 hours a day.

I am exhausted after the dick show meetings and I know I won't do any good work afterwards. Despite having a very senior position at my company I know I cannot change these meetings.

A crisis is not a problem, I can do it over hours and hours and be very positive. That is before my management arrives "to help".

Sorry for the long post, the TL;DR is that it would be great to have 4 days weeks, but this would need to come with major changes on how companies are managed or we will end with less productivity because of the mentally draining part that is endangering the useful one.

mclightning• 3 years ago

This, and remote working. People need to understand how capitalism works. Value extraction always comes back around in your final bill.

None will give you that extra day without eventually adjusting the salary. This is not a predatory action, but how markets work.

You can already observe this by comparing salaries offered by fully-remote jobs and on-site jobs.

1602• 3 years ago

I went to four days a week, by using holiday allowance during covid to look after newborn. It was a huge game-changer for me, so I never looked back and eventually switched to working part-time (3 days a week). I still feel productive and useful at work, but less mentally drained and have more of life to live, recently I started sketching, I enjoy time with my toddler, feel much happier despite being poorer. I know not everyone can afford taking pay cut, but I also know that lots people in tech earn more money they can spend, for these people I would strongly recommend - do not take more money, take more of your time back, no matter how in love with your profession you are.

dustedcodes• 3 years ago

I've been doing a 4 day work week since early 2019 and it this has had a tremendous positive effect on my mental and physical wellbeing. Despite being in a 4 day work week just over 4 years now I can confidently say that I'm not thinking now that 4 days are too many and I need to go down to 3 days. Actually I am very content with 4 days. I am a lot more productive than I was during 5 day work weeks. I feel so much fresher on Mondays and ready to tackle some programming tasks that I even get up early on Mondays nowadays and enjoy to have an early start. I WFH (something I already did before Covid) and when I wake up I normally make myself a coffee and then I'm straight at my laptop. The hours between 7:30 AM and 11:00 AM are my most productive hours of the day. Often I have some late meetings which can drag until 6PM so I tend to take a longer lunch break which allows me to hit the tennis court during sunlight hours and have a hit at my local club or go to the gym. By 6PM I have had a super productive work day and got a good 1.5-2h sport session in as well. In the evening I am completely free for my family which is a big bonus point.

The biggest benefit of the 4 day work week is that I never get to the point where I run low on energy as the week progresses. A lot of my friends who work 5 days never have enough time to recover over the weekend so they enter work on Monday still not fully recharged and then deplete their energy even more, so as weeks go on they get more tired until they have a holiday or fall ill for a few days. This never happens to me, so not only do I feel more focused and energetic for work, family and hobbies but also it means that when my weekend starts on Friday I don't actually waste my Friday to mostly sleep and recover. I honestly can't see myself to ever go back to 5 days a week, unless I was really desperate for a short term income boost where someone pays me an unreasonable high amount to slave myself off for a few months but otherwise there is no way I will sacrifice my health for something where I don't even arguably achieve more than in my current 4 day work week.

cko• 3 years ago

I still play World of Warcraft Classic. A lot of my guildies are playing while at work.

EchoReflection• 3 years ago

No paywall: https://archive.is/2023.02.21-232019/https://www.bloomberg.c...

W4nn4B_h4x0r• 3 years ago

A few years ago this would have been interesting, even exciting news, but considering that we are legitimately getting close to having AI do our jobs - a 24x7, hyper-efficient worker - this seems to be concerning news. While better worker rights and shorter working hours are of course things we should strive for, I feel that as automation takes over, most management would prefer to take on a worker that, while initially possibly very limited in scope and error-prone, can learn quickly and soon perform the tasks the human was doing more efficiently, for a much lower cost, and with close to zero breaks. Of course, this scenario may be 5-10 years away, but it's round the corner and therefore scary for human Workers.

aagha• 3 years ago

I wonder how much of this movement (which I support) is a function of business builders/entrepreneurs/founders having worked OVER 40 hours a week to create their businesses, and this ethos carrying over into the culture of businesses.

World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

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