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

https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/you-re-right-you-are-working-longer-and-attending-more-meetings

by robtherobber • 1 year ago

120 112 1 year ago

library.hbs.edu

sublinear4• 1 year ago

Focus on output, not hours. It’s virtually impossible to track how employees are actually using their time. Instead, managers should focus on the quality of their work.

This was the most important change to the workplace since 2020, and it should have always been this way in the first place.

Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Many were laid off and the rest of the office is better for it.

The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.

AStonesThrow2• 1 year ago

In my last job, I was paid hourly wages, but the work we were doing was piecework. They could have structured our pay around how many pieces we finished during a shift.

It was indeed WFH and, during the lockdowns, more or less a dream job. The supervisors were lasseiz-faire and there was minimal surveillance of our activities. They repeatedly explained that the quality and attention to our work was more important than the speed or efficiency we could achieve.

However, I was operating at a rather advanced level, and my talents permitted me to absolutely burn through that piecework at an accelerated rate compared to anyone else. I could do dozens, hundreds in an hour if they were uncomplicated. And I could finish them with accuracy, attention to detail, and a personal touch in the feedback each time.

But going at the speed I did, there were mistakes made, and I tended to be a bit sloppy in overlooking things, when reading for comprehension would've improved if I slowed down. My colleagues offered gentle feedback about this between the lines, except the main feedback was focused on their KPIs and metrics, which I was far exceeding by every standard. But the haste took its toll on my intellect. I could barely catch my breath after some long sessions. I could fill a Slack channel before anyone else had a chance to chime in. I felt numb and drained, and I forgot every student's name, and they all blurred into one.

Thankfully, we rarely came together for meetings. They just weren't seen as necessary and it was true. Meetings were reserved for special trainings. At one point, some of the coworkers were putting together short self-care sessions, like yoga instruction, which was really cool of them!

But I was being paid by the hour! If I finished 50 pieces of work, I was paid the same as a guy who plodded through three of them! Was that unfair? I don't know. Because the time scale did matter; we were often slammed with a huge amount of work, and we did operate with deadlines. But other than kudos and verbal recognitions, there was never an incentive to clear backlogs or work priority tasks as they were publicized.

So in the end, I felt a little underappreciated, you know? But, I loved the company so much, and my colleagues and supervisors were great, and it wasn't really about the money at the end of the day for me; it was about the company's mission and my own fulfillment by doing something valuable for them.

Loughla• 1 year ago

I'm kind of confused by your writing. So your argument is that you didn't have incentive to do a shit ton of work compared to others, but by your own admission, your work was subpar because of the amount you pushed out.

Why would that get rewarded? I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm trying to understand your thought process.

Couldn't you just slow down and do really good work? Wouldn't that solve both problems?

azornathogron• 1 year ago

Your own description of your work seems self-contradictory?

You have a paragraph that says you could work much faster than others and still "finish them with accuracy, attention to detail" and then in the very next paragraph you note that going so fast meant you were making mistakes and overlooking things.

This is only to say that I'm not sure how to interpret your own description.

It also sounds like the KPIs that had been set did not match the stated goals of your supervisors. KPIs focused on speed of output while your supervisors are telling you that quality and attention to your work is more important. I see this as a classic example of an organisation falling into the trap of just measuring what's easy to measure because they can't measure what they actually care about.

DanielHB• 1 year ago

The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.

This is probably the biggest productivity shift I seen in my career, async communication is just so much more normal these days and it is enough for ~80% of the cases.

And this is not only about text chat, but the tools and practices like issue tracking, PR reviews, shared file drives, collaborative editing (google-docs/ confluence/notion/etc).

Issue tracking has always been there since I started but it feels it has gotten a lot better compared to back then. Even Jira is not nearly as bad as some of the tools we used to use.

wiseowise2• 1 year ago

Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt.

Bean counters want their cake and eat it too.

I guess their brains go something like this: "if you're done already then work some more, I pay you for 8 hours!!!11" (when you're done early) and "we're not hitting deadlines, work more than 8 hours! I pay you for output, not for hours!!!11" (when you're not)

Bjartr• 1 year ago

You've gotta have some kind of secret sauce if text or recordings produces the same or better output than real conversation. I haven't seen it happen, though I'd love it if I did.

sublinear4• 1 year ago

Text works best when everyone involved in the chat is on the same level of deeper understanding. You're correct that this has pushed some forms of management away from the discussion, and I'm saying that's a net productivity gain for most workplaces. It accelerates the discussion towards results instead of constant hand holding and other unproductive social pressures.

Also, text and recordings hold people accountable and give reason to think more deeply about what is said. It's a huge improvement. If someone needs more time to focus on what to say or to understand what was said, they can now take it.

guappa• 1 year ago

Written text tends to eliminate all the backhanded insults because there's a record now :)

pards• 1 year ago

The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls.

Written communications skills are a superpower in a remote working environment. Unfortunately, very few people have it.

Lack of typing skills, ESL, Gen-Z slang, and internal acronyms makes for the perfect storm.

_Algernon_• 1 year ago

All of those problems you mention are infinitely worse when there is no record of the conversation.

jjk1662• 1 year ago

Luckily people are capable of learning skills. Being so addicted to Gen-Z slang and internal acronyms that you are unable to effectively convey information to your colleagues isn't a disability to be accommodated.

tbrownaw• 1 year ago

Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs.

Where I work, the budget people like to have at least some idea of how much different projects actually cost. And they like to know time spent on capitalizable vs not things, which I guess has something to do with taxes.

sublinear4• 1 year ago

Where I work, we still log hours towards jira tasks and those end up in projects on timesheets somewhere in servicenow.

I'm not saying that hours aren't relevant at all. I'm saying that tracking hours towards tasks is a totally separate concern that should be decoupled from the workday and individual time management in general. This is especially true if your employees are on salary and often on-call as well.

wisty• 1 year ago

This doesn't explain "Theory of the firm" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm.

Employees shouldn't theoretically exist - everything should just be subcontracted, but for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs).

Companies don't have perfect plans, contracts, and KPIs, and never will, unless someone like Jeff Bezos manages to turn the extraction of profit from human assets into an exact science in the company.

Fixed time employees have to hit their deadlines and also have some slack time to use their initiative. KPIs effectively means a much more rigid adherence to a plan, rather than trusting employees to invest their time at work on things that the employee (not their boss) thinks is valuable, with minimal friction. I guess this will be changing though, since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.

sublinear4• 1 year ago

for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs)

I think you'll find plenty of real world reasons if you listen to the experiences of employees and contractors.

thewebguyd2• 1 year ago

since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.

This is firmly the fault of the company(ies). When raises are so few or so little that the only way to help yourself is to change companies, or when despite your "dedication" to the company you are afraid of layoffs at anytime, you aren't going to care about the benefit of the company and are solely looking after your own interests.

Companies expect loyalty but give none back in return anymore, and employee attitude now is a direct result of the company's behavior.

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

Since most employees are now using LLMs for most tasks, we have a more standardized way now for tracking who is working, based on LLM usage. No need to vaguely measure “output”, which doesn’t give you realtime info until a task is delivered. This is why we are now pushing LLM tools across the entire org.

kleiba2• 1 year ago

An analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent—or 48.5 minutes—during the pandemic’s early weeks.

For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.

trollbridge2• 1 year ago

I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break.

Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).

kleiba2• 1 year ago

For a lot of tasks, productivity does not scale linearly with the amount of hours worked. When your shift is an hour longer, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get an hour more work done.

Al-Khwarizmi• 1 year ago

For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.

Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):

- Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)

- Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing).

- Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory).

I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.

maerch• 1 year ago

Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)

I would add that there are also cases where it’s the other way around—where the employer actually insists that employees work only a set number of hours (X), but the staff voluntarily puts in additional time (Y) without tracking it.

In fact, I’ve seen this happen more often in European companies than situations where employers pressure staff to work longer hours.

ndr42• 1 year ago

In Germany it's the state-run education system that has no measuring system for teachers yet (the federal states have to implement it but seen to be afraid to do so). So one of the biggest violators is the state itself.

blitzar2• 1 year ago

Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):

- You sign a waiver on day 1.

marcosdumay• 1 year ago

The law is most helpful to the people that need it the most.

Tracking time of people in shit call center jobs, or with highly repeatable tasks is very straight forward.

philipwhiuk2• 1 year ago

In practice many companies will de-facto make people sign the opt-out.

carlosjobim3• 1 year ago

without compensation.

Aren't the lower European salaries to be considered not compensating the worker?

Manfred• 1 year ago

Not when it's same by ratio, for example when someone in the US earns 100k a year for 50 weeks of 50 hours vs someone in EU earning 75.2k for 47 weeks of 40 hours.

And then we haven't even taken cost of living, lifetime healthcare costs, retirement benefits, and social security into account.

tmckd• 1 year ago

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

philipwhiuk2• 1 year ago

The business got more benefit. Harder to argue it is for the employees.

e1g• 1 year ago

If the business got more benefit, they would be fighting to keep this setup - and none are.

JKCalhoun• 1 year ago

Management got more benefit.

jjk1662• 1 year ago

And people work for businesses for their own self interest. A more successful business can afford to pay its employees more. Employees get more satisfaction from completing accomplishments. Tasks which make employees lives easier are more likely to get done. There is less stress when things are less crammed schedule-wise.

I mean we've all experienced the feeling of "I want to get this done but there just isn't enough time." Taking more hours of your day just exhausts you more, but eliminating a task that doesn't help you, whether it be busywork or a commute, is fantastic. If given the choice between sitting in traffic and knocking things off my to do list, what kind of freak would choose the former?

cbogie2• 1 year ago

maybe maybe not

ednite• 1 year ago

In my case, I learned that grinding 12-16-hour days on a single skill (coding) isn’t beneficial to anyone. The quality drops, mistakes creep in, and the risk of burnout skyrockets. Clients typically only care about delivery. Did the thing get done, and does it work?

Meanwhile, some managers and even teammates seem to care more about the hours you clock than whether you crossed the finish line. I’ve never fully understood that mindset. Why glorify effort over results, especially in knowledge work?

bix6• 1 year ago

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

tomhow• 1 year ago

I also have to wonder how much of the increase in that first few weeks/months of the pandemic was attributable to everyone having to work like crazy to figure out how the company/organisation can adapt to a global pandemic.

Koshima• 1 year ago

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

lukashoff• 1 year ago

The WFH shift also exposed the ones who have self discipline and the ones who are not. Nobody is asking you to go beyond the contracted hours. Inability to stop working is a fault of the person and not the mode of working. Agree that the managers fear kicked in so they start to pretend to do work for "visibility". However, that's a sign of a rotten culture and these people were most likely NOT productive in the first place and now they are being exposed therefore they have a need to over-compensate for it.

There are plenty of us who became extremely productive and can finally enjoy life rather than constantly play the spectacle in the office or sit in traffic for hours. And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.

willismichael• 1 year ago

    And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.

But that's what I want to hear more about!

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

Seems that was an unpopular comment, but it's basically correct.

Overwork can be corrosive to productivity and quality, but that can happen in-office, as much as at home.

But also, working at home does require self-discipline, and not everyone is able to do that. It's also like being a manager, or a company owner. These require a certain type of personality/skillset, and not everyone has it. There's a good possibility that we need external structure. I know folks who rented a desk in a local incubator, during COVID, because they needed the time away from home.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the most materially successful people in history, have been right bastards, in life. There's a lot to be said for a healthy work/life balance.

As far as neurodiverse folks; some of them can do very well at home.

trollbridge2• 1 year ago

In a staff or lead level role with Indian team members active at 6 AM ET (and our day officially starting at 8:30 ET so we can interact with them), West and East Coast teams with the West Coast often working 10 AM - 7 PM, yeah, that means I’m going to be reasonably working from 8 AM - 5 PM or 6 PM.

During the WFH era which for me was 2017 - 2022, I made up for the 9 - 10 hour workdays by not using up PTO for doctor appointments, car repair shop trips, and so on. This worked reasonably well - and nobody minded if I was getting my oil changed or sitting for an hour at a doctor’s office lobby and responsive on Slack. It was a compromise that worked reasonably well.

We also carved out time for people to pick up/drop off kids at school. In exchange, the work day expanded from basically 8 to 5 or 9 to 6. Everyone was comfortable with this. I certainly didn’t mind people on my team doing this at all and really appreciated the extra availability - we just knew to plan around the school pick up and drop off times, which were also in the calendar as a recurring meeting.

What’s not working now is imposing RTO and trying to have the same extended hours. Sorry, but no, I’m not going to drive in from 7-8, work from 8-6 without breaks, and then drive home from 6-7.

jayd16• 1 year ago

Nobody is asking you to go beyond the contracted hours.

Remote work killed the concept of core hours. I started seeing meetings at 7am and 7pm as well as late messages because everyone was flexing their time. So yes, work hours did increase.

lolinder• 1 year ago

This may be true for a lot of people, but it's not universal and is readily avoidable. A few tips that have worked for me:

* Don't install any company apps or log in to any company accounts on your phone.

* Set your working hours in your calendar and stick to them.

* Set your Slack status to automatically show you as away and snoozed outside your working hours.

* When you're done with work, shut down your laptop and walk away.

I've never received any complaints from sticking to this pattern. When I'm in my working hours I'm consistently reachable and I do my job, when I'm not you can't get hold of me if you try. This is how it was in the office, I don't see why the expectation should be different in WFH.

I do think that a key thing that makes this work well for me is that I'm consistently online during (and only during) my specified hours, rather than mixing and matching my schedule on a day to day basis. I'm not always reachable, but I'm predictably unreachable.

ljf• 1 year ago

I can't remember where I was reading someone the other day remarking how since they had stopped working extra hours, they had suddenly been promoted, after years of trying.

They now stuck to their hours, got used to saying no, but worked hard while they were 'at work'. Part of the thinking was this moved them out of the group who were always staying on to finish something off, which can make you look ill-prepared or behind - despite the fact that you only there are you are taking on additional work.

tsumnia2• 1 year ago

When you're done with work, shut down your laptop and walk away.

I think this became the driving force of "always at work". When you sit at home all day, you're online. And the inevitable "let me just check..." habit I know I formed starts to occur. At some point its 6 or 7pm as you're playing catch up on work and since its still "early" its fine to respond to that small email or Slack message. Next thing you know its 11 or 12 at night and you're still sitting on the computer browsing or working or doing something in between. The 24/7 chatroom is always open and there's always someone willing to socialize.

Infernal• 1 year ago

I don't think it's a paradox at all. I saved X hours a day by not commuting, and spent maybe .25X to .5X extra hours working (which actually felt pleasant, because I was sleeping in later, getting "home from work" sooner, and taking zero-friction breaks when needed by walking to my kitchen instead of driving to lunch, etc.)

stringsandchars• 1 year ago

My work really flourished during WFH. I was actually headhunted back to a place I'd worked before with the (verbal) promise they were now and always would be 'remote first'. During the last 2 years my productivity has exploded. I get up, make myself a coffee, and start working at 6am. Then after a shower and a walk in the forest, I work a full day of intense and focussed work. I've been happy, fit, fulfilled. I've often visited the office and love the social interaction. I've often worked weekends and evening because it's been fun, and I've felt loyalty to the company. Then 8 weeks ago the CEO suddenly announced RTO.

But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

We're living in a mad world.

lesser23• 1 year ago

I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the industry after being in it so long but this struck me. I haven’t felt this way about any company, good or bad, in a long time. After surviving probably my 10th layoff across 5 different companies I can’t imagine ever being loyal, considering anyone at a company a “friend”, and most certainly not “family”.

I agree with your feeling that remote has really made me more productive. But I believe that’s because of the opposite of what you stated. I loved the ability to get a bunch of stuff done and then zone out the rest of the day. Without the constant interruptions, open office, etc I was able to get one giant burst of productivity and then check out. I was on paper “10x” and just omitted the fact I was only working 2/3 time.

Recently with RTO and myself being remote only I’ve been led to burnout. The company I am at has changed the merit equation from good work to showing up to the office. As a result, I end up picking up more slack during my workday as my coworkers get lunches, game rooms, parties, etc. I am still expected to grind and they are not. I sure do miss the remote first days.

dughnut• 1 year ago

My employer is tightening the screws. I get it. RTO externalizes costs and privatizes benefit. The incentives are not aligned for remote work, and it’s a publicly traded firm with an obligation to maximize shareholder value. I get it. While middle management should know if line of business employees are actually producing useful work, regardless of location, expecting 40 or 50-somethings to be engaged at work and not spend their day running personal errands is not realistic. So physical presence is the shareholders’ only option.

I see it as a pay cut where commute and prep hours are uncompensated, and I adjust my valuation of the job accordingly.

al_borland• 1 year ago

A lot of people I know who work from home feel the need to prove they are just as productive (or more) at home, so they can keep doing it and keep their job while being out of sight. They also take fewer breaks, because it feels like they aren’t working, or getting away with something. Those in the office take liberal breaks and just chat a lot, while still feeling like they are working, because they are at work.

_fat_santa• 1 year ago

I look at it as trading one evil for another (lesser one). I would say that I definitely work more hours now that I'm fully remote but at the same time I wouldn't want to back to the office even if it meant working less hours.

If anything remote work gave me flexibility. There might be some days I'm cranking code for close to 8 hours straight and others where I work maybe 3-4 hours because I have other things on my plate.

SirMaster2• 1 year ago

I worked 40 hours before and I work 40 hours now. Can't say I have seen a change in my meetings either. I have like 2-3 a week on average.

newAccount2025• 1 year ago

Say you have a great boss without saying you have a great boss. :)

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

Can’t be that great, he has 3 meetings a week.

add-sub-mul-div• 1 year ago

They understand that their findings don't apply to everyone in the world and it's implicitly understood that there will be exceptions. It can be discordant when you're the protagonist of your own reality and you see a headline that doesn't match your own experience but in the big picture it's very normal.

thuanao• 1 year ago

2-3 a week? I’m jealous. I’m just a programmer (or “IC senior software engineer” in corpo-speak) and I have 2-3 per day. Most days I only have about 3-4 hours after lunch to get any work done.

SirMaster2• 1 year ago

I mean with no meetings, I have 4 hours after lunch to do work. I work 8-5 and generally take 12-1 for lunch. 4 hours before and 4 hours after.

blitzar2• 1 year ago

I genuinely thought the meetings culture was out of control 10 years ago - it is way worse now. Management used to moan about sitting in meetings all day, I used to moan about it too because anytime I was in the meetings the first 20 minutes would be chit chat about the big game / their holiday plans / office gossip.

You're Right You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings

But ... you are doing less work and more of your meetings are a complete waste of time.

davio• 1 year ago

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

ctkhn• 1 year ago

4h daily maximum meetings is still unreal. That's what I clock on my absolute worst days, most days it's just standup and an hour of backlog refinement

climb_stealth• 1 year ago

Agreed. After 4 hours of meetings I'd mentally dead for at least the day, and there is no way there'd be any productive work left.

bluedino2• 1 year ago

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

wiseowise2• 1 year ago

God forbid someone does something gasp necessary for life on work time.

Having happy workers is, obviously, worse for the company than literal days of useless chit chats and coffee breaks.

bluedino2• 1 year ago

I think you're confusing that with the people that slacked off the entire time.

PaulRobinson• 1 year ago

I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work.

I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it.

If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.

wenc• 1 year ago

I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

Off topic: I think that’s generally true in an 8 hr work day, but I find in a 10 hr work day I can actually be productive for up to 7 hrs. It’s a non linearity due to chunking.

When I worked 8 hrs, I spent mornings reading news, did a bit of work (1-2 hours), then it was lunch time, then surfed a bit to ease my way back to work, and worked a couple hours (another 1-2 hours) and then it was time to go home —- leaving at 4:45 because if I left any later I had to fight traffic. So you’re right - about 4 hours.

Nowadays, I work a 10 hr work day, and I can actually squeeze about 7 productive hrs in. I do a bit of work in the morning (2 hrs), then lunch and then some news reading, and then back to work (3 hrs) until 3pm when I go for a walk. When I get back at 4pm, I still have 2 more hours so I manage to get more work in because 2 hours is enough time to start something substantial. In an 8 hr work day, I’m already getting ready to go home so am not inclined to start anything new.

The chunking works so much better in a 10 hr work day. Humans are poor context switchers, and it’s hard to start back up. But a longer work day lets me account for the startup time, and gives me more productive chunks of time. Traffic is also better after 6pm. 10 hr work days are also more leisurely because there are two long breaks (lunch and afternoon)

Of course I’m not advocating for this - folks have kids and other hobbies, and you shouldn’t have to give your employer more hours than contracted. But I’m just saying if one has to extract more productive hours in a work day, this seems to work.

Or do as the Germans do. I worked out of Germany once and saw that everyone worked 3 hrs, then 30 minute lunch, and then 4 hours. Coffee breaks sprinkled in between, but everybody was almost robotic in their focus.

BriggyDwiggs422• 1 year ago

I feel like the real thing here is that people are much more productive when given some flexibility to choose how to work and, often, when not to work. Personally I’m a big fan of a freelance-style model of work for this reason. You get paid for the task, so you can center your schedule around what works best for you.

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

You may be less productive after 5 hours of work, but even if your output 50% less in the next 5 hours, you'll still produce more by working more.

Employers don't care about productivity, they care about your total output. And it's not only employers, if you want to improve or pass a selective test or anything, you have to put the hours.

There may be some threshold where more work becomes detrimental, but it's definitely not 5 hours.

BriggyDwiggs422• 1 year ago

You can in many cases run multiple shifts if you need the same hours of output.

its definitely not five hours

Why are you so sure?

closeparen• 1 year ago

Those 4-5 productive hours start for me after 6-8 hours riddled with Zoom calls, if not completely covered in them.

ta1243• 1 year ago

I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

That depends very much on your work

isk517• 1 year ago

Unfortunately all I can offer is another 2nd hand story I saw posted recently on some social media site or message board. It was a person complaining about how they were being passed up for promotion and not receiving praise from management like their more lazy coworkers despite working 12+ hours a day plus putting in time on the weekends. They were baffled by the fact that once they said 'screw it' and started only putting in the time expected of them that their work started being praised by management. The replies were pretty universal in the opinion that once the person stopped burning themselves out by working all the time they then started producing work that was better than merely acceptable.

vasusen• 1 year ago

It really depends on the work. I used to run a large product-engineering org and I saw that slack-engagement correlated very closely with how well PMs were doing. That wasn't true for engineers.

wormius• 1 year ago

From a capitalist perspective all it means is "more money extracted from the same amount of labor".

I agree with you in general regarding personal productivity. However from the capitalist perspective, even if you aren't as "productive" in the later hours, it's still a production cost that they no longer have to hire another person for. Every person hired is not just an "hourly cost" but an extra capital incentive. It's why they love to fire people and make more people take on a heavier load. To us, on the bottom it feels like less productivity (and man do I feel you there!), but to them it's one less cost. And that's what "productivity" is in their eyes. As long as they can extract enough value without having to take on the extra expense, they will call it "productivity increase".

Another interesting book about some of this is a stochastic approach to economics (from a left-wing perspective) - The Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy: http://symbioid.com/pdf/Politics/laws%20of%20chaos%20probabi...

wnc3141• 1 year ago

My theory is that, with some exceptions, no one really does more than 4 hrs. of focused (the productive bit) work. The rest is clerical, administrative or unfocused.

I do however hope my surgeon stays focused for longer should their services be needed.

BobbyTables2• 1 year ago

I also find that while I might have 4-5 extremely productive hours, they don’t necessarily start at the beginning of the day.

Often starts at about 1-2pm in the afternoon, just as I start to understand and work through issues blocking me.

bachmeier• 1 year ago

I absolutely had a longer workday. But that wasn't what I hated about the first year of the pandemic. It's that I was doing more worthless things with my time: communicating by email, learning technology, handling administrative items related to the pandemic. None of these had value to the world. It was just a big tax on top of the stuff I was doing already, and it left me with less time to do things that had value.

nunez• 1 year ago

I felt this one personally.

The four to six hours of 30/45/60 minute meetings (that always seem to go over by some unknown amount) slays me regardless of whether I'm actively participating or not.

It's easier if you're a morning person, since you can do all of your "life stuff" before work. However, I'm not (and not for lack of trying), so it feels like I'm confined to my very nice office chair and desk for hours on end. (Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of pressure to work nights and weekends to catch up. This is much easier to do when work is life and life is work. I refuse to do this, even if it means I stay perpetually behind.)

(I could do walking meetings, and I do that sometimes when I know I'll be a passive participant. However, what often happens is this: I finish a meeting, then spend the "free" time between meetings doing follow up from the previous meeting, then I join the next meeting, etc. ad nauseum.)

Meanwhile, I have no problems being in all-day meetings when I'm at customer sites. It feels much, much easier.

For me, a big part of it is environment. When I'm home, I want to do "home" stuff: go to the gym, clean up around the house, walk to a coffee shop or brewery, etc. Being glued to a chair inhibits all of that, and having to talk at your screen for hours at a time is extremely draining (for me). However, when I'm in an "office", I'm in work mode. I'm locked in. It's much easier for me to focus on work things this way.

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

In the very early days, Java was pushed into the mainstream long before it was ready. This left a foul taste as management demanded we jumped on the bandwagon while the trenches filled with frustration over many bugs in the early JVM's and language implementations and missing quality in core features.

It was not that it was fundamentally bad, maybe a tad too academic, just overhyped beyond it's maturity and capabilities at the time.

It did not feel as quirky as C++'s paradigm neutrality, and less esoteric (syntactically) than Lisp, so all in all in theory a welcome hi gh level language with decent perks. But if you are going to push adoption by preaching to the managerial class with half thruths, expect some pushback (remember write once, debug everywhere?).

Then the second wave with colsultancyware feature adoption (anyone like CORBA?) and becoming academia's darling (I heard you like frameworks, so I put a framework in your framework so you can meta-factory your own DSl framework at runtime!) made it so that when later .NET arrived, it felt like Java, the good parts.

Of course, .NET would go on to become a monster in itself. But that is another story.

htk• 1 year ago

More emails and more meetings means workdays increased? Are they adjusting for the fact the in person you don't need as many emails and meetings and can just talk person to person?

rufasterisco• 1 year ago

Lovkbbbkbl itioiyk

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

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