9-5 Is Out. Try the 1-6 Instead | Hacker News Reader

9-5 Is Out. Try the 1-6 Instead

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151 pointsmprat143 comments

I live in a region where winter days are very short. I go to work and it's dark, I leave work and it's dark. I don't understand why we have decided to go sit in buildings during daylight hours.

Even with a 40-hour week, I would love if the work day was shifted to allow one to get sunlight for a few hours each day.

go outside during lunch mang.

This right here ... so many people eat lunch at their desk. I find that I feel so much better when I take a break, both from being inside, and being in front of my computer where my work cannot escape my brain.

Agreed.I try to run strict pomodoros. Also, when ever I start to feel lethargic, I do a few squats or push ups until failure and then I always go outside for some real air (day or night). It makes me a productivity machine.

But it's 14 degrees out there.

If it's too cold for you to go outside surely you can't complain about having to be inside at work. OP's comment was about not being able to get outside during daylight hours.

If that bothers you, you simply aren't wearing proper clothing.

The difference between a refreshing chill and a harrowing cold can just be an extra sweater under your coat and a good attitude. As long as it isn't very windy, it's easy to make 14 comfortable.

As someone who lives in Minnesota (and has lived in the upper Midwest for the last 14 years)... no, it's not just "proper clothing ...and a good attitude."

Below a certain temperature, it hurts to be outside for any nontrivial amount of time. That is a strong disincentive to go outside, no matter how many sweaters you're wearing.

That is pretty rare though. I live in Sweden (not the northern part) and at my previous job I liked to take walks at lunch and as long as it is not snowing, raining or being too windy it is pretty nice even at colder temperatures.

Now I'm usually talking about over -10C (14F) but a lot of people seem to think even that is too cold but just don't wear proper clothing.

I think that "certain temperature" varies for different people, or even over time for any particular person. When I was a child the cold killed me. A few weeks ago, the highs were in the mid-teens all week around here, and I found myself completely comfortable in jeans, a sweater, hat, gloves, and a coat while outside doing farm work. The big problem at those temperatures is working up a sweat when wearing clothes that don't immediately wick it away from the body. That gets very cold quickly.

I feel like he's thinking of 14 Celsius, not Fahrenheit

> As long as it isn't very windy, it's easy to make 14 comfortable.

No, no it is not.

And I say this as someone who enjoys the cold. No matter what, if it's 14 degrees outside, I'm only going out if I absolutely must. There's no hanging out in the parking lot during lunch in that kind of weather.

It's all relative. After a couple weeks of waking up to temperatures around or below 0F, the rise to the mid-teens felt like an early Spring.

I disagree. I'm from the midwest also. Grew up in Wisconsin/Iowa, and currently live in Iowa. I live where the wind hurts my face. Why do I live where the wind hurts my face?

Then probably sunlight is not your biggest worry. Here in Helsinki lunch walks are a must to catch that small amount of light we get, even if it's -10 or -20.

I have started going for lunch walks this winter. The effect has been dramatic. If you have low energy levels in the winter or experience SAD, definitely try lunch walks.

My current job allows me to get to work some time between 8 and 10. As winter has gone on, I've definitely pushed closer and closer to 10 to get some daylight in the morning.

> I live in a region where winter days are very short. I go to work and it's dark, I leave work and it's dark.

I have had that experience for years. It can be quite disheartening to see the sun set while you are on your way home. I do not mind the cold in the winter, but the darkness can literally be depressing.

Last year, after some health issues, my boss surprised me (in a good way), when he offered me to reduce my working hours to 30 hours a week. That went along, of course, with a proportionate cut in my salary, but I was surprised to find it is actually worth it.

I start working at the same time as before, which means I still have to get up at 05:30[1] in the morning, and in winter it is still dark when I arrive at the office. But I get to leave at 14:00 now, and even in the deepest winter, the sun is still up when I get home. I also am less exhausted when I get home, so keeping up with housework is much less of a chore now. I could shift my work time to start later and finish later, but having the afternoon to myself is worth getting up early to me. In summer, it is much easier anyway, because the sun is already rising or up when I get up. And in spring and fall, I get to watch some gorgeous sunrises, which is not a big deal in the greater scheme of things, but amazing nevertheless.

Also, at this point, imagine me ranting about DST, which gives me an hour's worth of jet lag without traveling, twice a year.

    I have had that experience for years. It can be quite disheartening to see
    the sun set while you are on your way home.

Try watching the sun set from work, then glancing at the clock and seeing that you won't leave for another hour

At least you see the sun. The pacific northwest is brutal this time of year. I have a massive UV lamp on my work desk. S.A.D.

Not to brag here but I think brutal is a bit of an overstatement. From what I can tell Seattle gets like 9,5 hours of sunlight now. That's almost two hours more than Stockholm, depending on the day. I have friends living in Luleå and two weeks ago they had less than 5 hours of sun. Now that's brutal.

The shitty thing about living in the north isn't the cold, it's the combination of cold and dark, but mostly it's the dark...

Fair enough.

Throw in the rain with lack of UV in Seattle - unless you live in Wales there's not many other places that get this many consecutive days of rain and low to no UV during winter.

We're both miserable. Sounds like we should get a beverage or two and bitch about weather together. Cheers.

Biggest disappointment when I moved from grey and rainy Scotland to Spain.

The weather in winter is close to summer in Scotland during the day, but by the time I was out of the office it was dark.

That doesn't make any sense. The days in Spain are longer in the winter by a wide margin.

I work a completely remote position out of Phoenix, but live in the Eastern time zone. So I'm 2-3 hours off my team depending on whether daylight savings is in or not. I've considered options like taking extended vacations to Europe. I could wake up at 9am UK, do some sight seeing. Start my 8 hour PHX work day at 3pm UK time. Work until 11pm UK time, got to sleep. Rinse, repeat. The only thing stopping me is kids in school.

Forgive my ignorance, but aren't such places bitterly cold outside?

Scotland has pretty short days during winter, but it doesn't usually get "bitterly cold" because of the gulf stream. Though I guess it depends on your definition of "bitterly cold" - it will snow but it tends to be mushy and wet because it rarely stays below zero for long.

+1, from Malmö, Sweden... moved here from Istanbul, Turkey. Dark winters are killing me!

This is predicated on the idea that you're only really productive in the afternoon, and that the morning is just wasted time.

I'm most productive in the mornings, and my productivity only takes a dive in the afternoon because that's when all my meetings are.

Turns out, anecdotes about an individual's workflow aren't broadly generalizable!

I think the point is less about which actual hours, but more about focusing on those hours that you are productive, making those count as much as you can, and not forcing yourself to work more during those unproductive hours "just because".

I think you missed the part where those other, less-productive hours in my workday are spent in meetings with others. As in, that's part of my normal workday. And yeah, it may not be productive in the way I like, but it's necessary time to effectively collaborate.

This idealized notion of "when I feel like it" workdays is particularly unrealistic in a workplace where you collaborate across timezones. I work best in the morning Eastern time, and I have teammates on the US west coast. If there's any chance of working with them instead of around them, I can't just say "eh, I'm less productive after 11am Eastern, so I'm just gonna call it quits."

No, I didn't. I'm just pointing out that the specific hours mentioned in the article are not the focus, but the idea that you should concentrate during your peak hours, whatever they are.

Yup 100% this.

I shifted my schedule to early morning(6-7am) just so I could get 3-4 hours of uninterrupted work in before the onslaught of meetings. Highly recommend it.

I agree that the ideas aren't necessarily generalizable, but what if we shifted to an idea that people's individual schedules reflect when they specifically are most productive. Someone else who replied said they were most productive in the morning. Great! Let them have and earlier start time. For me, I'm completely useless in the morning. Sure, I can be in the office at 8:00am, but you're not getting any meaningful work out of me until late morning or noon-ish. So let me come in at noon and work until 6:00. And for someone else who is super productive in the evening hours, if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not?

I get that there are issues of collaboration or interaction that may be necessary. But in general, it seems like, as long as your job doesn't depend on customer interaction or some other constraint, why not let people work a schedule that suits their lifestyle, and lets them work when they are most productive?

...if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not?

Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that.

I once saw a workplace where there were night-person-friendly policies and schedules. Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid, and all night-person preferences had to be fought for and justified.

So if you want to reach a world with truly optimal flexible schedules, first you'll need to wrest ownership of the culture from the "morning people are better" people who currently dominate it.

> Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid

Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? It's as hard for the morning person to deal with night-person preferences as it's hard for a night person to deal with morning-person preferences.

(Disclaimer: I'm a morning person and I'm not American.)

I think it's because people think "morning person" is the default, and correct, way of being. And that not being a morning person makes you odd or lazy. So when someone comes in challenging late-friendly scheduling, they're assumed to be the correct one, and that the workplace has somehow been in error by allowing later schedules.

It's the Ben Franklin Poor Richard's Almanac thing: "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

He was also the buttmunch that gave us daylight savings time.

I used to be really against DST, but honestly, it's the only thing that actually lets me see the damn sun at all in the winter, so now I'm a fan.

But DST is in summer, isn't it? At least that is what I have been told: In summer, days are so long and start so early that we might as well move the whole day back by an hour, so get up early, finish work early and still have a couple of hours of daylight left.

Full disclosure: I am not a fan of DST, but I do not expect the current situation to change. In Europe, almost(?) all countries use it, so if just Germany (where I live) abolished DST, we would be out of sync with the rest of Europe for half of the year. Dealing with dates and times as a programmer is already confusing enough; if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain. And I do not see that happening anytime soon.

> if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain

There are already countless exceptions to DST and people seem to be doing fine. E.g. in Australia there are two regions in the same time zone where only one has DST, meaning they are out of sync for half the year.

It's a source of constant complaints, massive costs and is totally bloody stupid, assuming you're talking about the NSW/QLD border.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...

In areas that are arguably Europe, it looks like Iceland, Kaliningrad Oblast, and Belarus are the places that stick out.

I'm in California; most of Arizona is permanently in daylight savings, and we work with a lot of developers in China and India, which don't observe it. It certainly complicates things, sometimes.

I've done work on my product's logging subsystem before, and especially bugs with recorded times. Dealing with different DST rules is a mess.

DST is the civil equivalent of changing the behavior of some electronic hardware by doubling the clock signal instead of reprogramming and re-flashing the firmware. It's simple to do, but is also stupid and inefficient, and causes a lot of obscure unintended consequences later on. I'd actually be fine with converting all time and date records, all calendars, and all clocks to integer Julian Day Number, plus the integer number of milliseconds since mean solar noon at the Prime Meridian, plus another numeric field for greater precision, because there is an enormous advantage to not doing stupid tricks with clocks and time zones. Just count.

I vaguely remember that astronomers sometimes use the Julian calendar for that very reason.

You do this at the expense of a huge amount of practical day-to-day functionality of time. Most people want times to be at least roughly synchronised with their day, and would rightly object to your system in the strongest possible terms.

https://qntm.org/abolish

Your link states that UTC is the international standard. Maybe for humans.

Unix time can represent roughly from 1902 to 2038 in 32 bits. That's the usual intermediary between the clusterfork of records in zoneinfo. To convert between time zones, you convert to the simple second count of Unix time, then convert to the target zone.

Much easier to store the time as the simple count and just make the UI do the work to display it in some user-friendly fashion. When the machines communicate to each other, there is no confusion, because they do not carry any assumption baggage regarding time.

We really need to fix time representation before 2038. Julian day plus second count is a decent intermediate step to a time representation that is agnostic to the cycles and orbits of specific planets. The least disruptive end game is probably a 64-bit integer representing a simple count of the number of milliseconds elapsed since the Julian Day epoch.

That would make now about 212383579680000, and we'd have until 9223372036854775807, or about 292 million years from now, to even decide whether to go another 292 million years by making it an unsigned int, or just expand it out to 128 bits, because chip architectures have been able to handle that much for 292 million years already.

The simple count is rather easy to convert into a human readable time. Subtract an epoch constant, then modulo by some cycle-length constants. Adjust by a custom rule set if necessary.

Besides that, why would I want to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne? Why couldn't I just send an asynchronous message to him? That asynchronous message can even include metadata about when I am available for synchronous communications. So yeah, I can "publish my 'waking hours'", as summarily dismissed by that apologia for time zones. I don't know when that was written, but now that every phone can be a computer, as well as a pocketwatch and personal calendar, the built-in assumptions that were necessary beforehand are no longer required.

I don't need to know that people are typically awake in a safe range between 9 AM and 9 PM as expressed in their local time zone. I don't really even need to know when they'll be awake to pick up. I can tell the computer assistant to give their user a message, and the assistant might or might not sound an audible alert that the user has new messages. I don't even really need to publish my own waking hours. If I don't care about that aspect of my privacy, I can let my computer assistant tell other computer assistants when its user is typically receptive to synchronous communication requests, based on usage history. It can advertise my "online" status for me, or lie about it for me, such as if I tell it to say I'm "away", but I'm actually on my phone, playing a few levels of Skinnerbox 5: Revenge of the Lootbox.

> Unix time can represent roughly from 1902 to 2038 in 32 bits.

Uh, several systems have already switched to a 64 bit timestamp that should last for a while. I am relatively certain that OpenBSD and NetBSD have done it, and I vaguely remember Linux doing that, too, but that might be a vague memory or wishful thinking. Other systems probably have switched, too.

That's fine; better than nothing. It still represents times within the span of human history as negative numbers, which sometimes leads to certain kinds of bugs.

Ideally, I'd never have to work with a negative date-time number, because someone always seems to want to check if t > 0 somewhere, and there's always a reason why t could plausibly be a valid negative. Or maybe someone picked some negative t as a sentinel value, and then left the company before I ever got a chance to slap them.

Julian Day is the only kind of time that has never insulted my delicate sensibilities in some way. Maybe that's intrinsic to the type, or maybe it's because those who chose to use it have never done stupid things with time (that I could see).

I get your point.

Most of the time (pun not intended), I do not need to worry about the time or date. But on a few occasions I had to, and it gave me a headache every time.

One time (again, pun not intended!), I helped one of our automation engineers who had somehow found out that I know the C programming language and asked me to help him with a problem he was facing: He wanted/needed an input gadget that would allow a worker at the customer site to schedule the cleaning process of the automated machinery in terms of "tomorrow at 3:15am". And then a process had to calculate how far that moment was in the future, sleep for the corresponding duration, then wake up and the the machines to get clean. Except that it had to work across the beginning and ending of DST. Which was not super hard in itself, you either add or subtract an hour from/to the duration you wait, but how do we figure out when the change between DST and normal time occurs? Well, turns out in Germany[0] DST begins on the last Sunday in March at 03:00am (the clock is set to 02:00am) and ends on the last Sunday in October at 02:00am (the clock is set to 03:00am). If all you have is the C standard library (C89!), figuring out if it is the last Sunday of a certain month is surprisingly annoying. Not difficult, but very, very tedious. That made me appreciate the simplicity of C's time_t like no other experience in my life. And I just scratched the tip of the iceberg, with nail file. I can imagine how much fun it gets when different timezones come into play, or divergent definitions of when DST begins and ends.

Your idea of Julian day + millisecond offset sounds beautiful. But I fear it will meet the same enthusiasm as my proposal to convert the metric system from 10^3 to 2^10, i.e. make one kilogram 1024 grams, a metric ton would be 1048576 gram, and so forth.

[0] And probably a lot of other places, but not all of them, because then it would be sorta-kinda consistent, and we cannot have any of that.

As someone who lives in Arizona myself, it is a bit strange to have (virtually) the rest of the world change their clocks without us... makes scheduling remote meetings difficult, if nothing else. (On the other hand, we don't have to worry about changing our clocks in the first place, so there's that?)

For some extra fun, the Navajo Nation observes DST, and they're _inside_ Arizona.

For extra extra fun, the Hopi Nation, completely surrounded by Navajo, does not observe DST.

Context is important. You should read about why those two (completely unrelated) things came about when they did.

For example, there was a period of history where it was much safer to drink beer all day instead of water. Without context, that sounds like a really bad idea.

To make a long story short, it was because you boil the wort when you make beer, and the kinds of beers that people drank all day were small beers and session ales, with lower alcohol content (and cheaper to buy).

Those things actually are related. Franklin proposed that Parisians could save on candle wax by getting out of bed earlier, as a joke. Nobody actually changed a clock until WW1 when Germany did it to save lamp oil.

Franklin likely promoted the lark lifestyle only because he was one, rather than from any real evidence of objective superiority. He participated in a business group that looked at successful businesses with an aim to emulate their practices. It is possible that his advice to work early was just cargo culting, in following with a long line of sanctimonious lark philosophers that painted their owl counterparts as slothful or lazy.

Standard business hours favor being a lark because those are lark hours! And then they have the nerve to be all chipper and cheerful every morning, at a time when every decent owl would prefer to be getting one last REM cycle in. How do you think they'd like it if we made them stay up past midnight every day?

Why do you believe Ben Franklin had anything to do with daylight saving time? The only thing I've ever seen by him in regards to DST roundly satirized the idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

He wrote a paper (humorously) suggesting that Parisians would save on candle wax if they got out of bed earlier. Apparently Germany missed the humor when they pushed the clocks back in WW1 to save lamp oil.

It is possible that DST would have happened without Franklin, but I blame him anyway, because I never liked his sanctimonious attitude toward waking up early.

Perhaps "morning person" is the default because many people have families and children and whether or not they operate best in the morning or evening, they are forced to operate in the morning because that's when school time is scheduled (the children are at school) and the children are home in the evening (default family time). I'm wishing that someday we can get to more flexible schooling hours. I think if we want to change the "morning default position" then we need to address schooling defaults.

Schooling is definitely a major issue. My nephew has to be at school by 7:15 am. It’s absolutley asinine to believe that pre-teens and teens can be functional or able to actually learn anything at such an hour. Not to mention the fact that every school is different. His younger brother, for example doesn’t start school until nearl 9:00. And this is an elementary and a high school in the same district. It’s insane. So their mom has to figure out how to get them to school a vastly different times, then figure out how to make it to work at a reasonable time given her schedule.

I definitely agree that this is a major issue that we need to address.

This is slowly changing. Here in Seattle we just went through a major shift where (most) public elementary schools start early, and the middle/highschool kids shift later.

But morning really is the default; it's our biological default. Most people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night naturally. Many people have small children, good luck remaining a night person with a 1 year old in the house. There are real reasons here, it's not just some arbitrary decision.

Biologically, don't most people wake up at dawn? That doesn't get you to the office at 7:30 AM in the winter.

That is, our schedule is not a biologically-based schedule. "Morning" (as defined by our society) is not the biological default.

Sure, but you're quibbling over an hour here or there. When people use the term "night person" they don't mean someone who wakes up at e.g. 8 instead of 7, we're talking about pushing back work by many hours, which just isn't possible for most people without a much shorter work day (I'm ok with that!)

Grades in primary and secondary school jump significantly if you push start times back from 8 AM to more like 10 AM. It may be the biological default to wake up in the morning, but there's absolutely nothing that says that peak performance should be reached the instant you wake up. If anything, I'd expect exactly the opposite! It takes time to get caches warmed, adjust biochemistry away from resting levels and toward operational levels, and get dumb maintenance tasks (breakfast, travel to workplace, "milk the cows") out of the way and move to higher-value and more complex activities (hunting, crafting, socialization). Until you do those things you're not going to be operating well, and many early-morning tasks wouldn't require peak performance and optimizations for an early peak would be wasted. I'd also expect intellectual pursuits to be more strongly affected; you need to be able to not get eaten by a tiger at absolutely any time, but you can choose when to sit down and start knapping flint or talking to people, which means you have more freedom and reward when optimizing the timing of peak performance on intellectual tasks.

Without electrical lighting and such, I'd agree. Sleep not long after sundown, a mid-night period of wakefulness, wake up for the day around sunrise. Ever since I can remember, my own default is to maintain activity late into the night, and then sleep as close to 8 or 9 hours as I'm permitted. Granted, that's a little rough if my 3 year old happens to wake up at 7:30, but 8:30 or 9 is pretty common for him; at 1, he often slept until 10, after being put to bed at 8pm.

8:30 - 10:00 seems to be the time range that I'll be ready to get up, when left to my own schedule. It's usually 2-3 hours after I wake up that I'm really ready to jump into a heavy project. The person who wakes up at 6 is right on target to start working, if they come in at 8. Me, I always feel like I could've used a couple more hours of sleep, even if I went to bed at 10pm the night before.

> Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid?

I'm guessing OP doesn't mean 'presumed valid' but 'preferred in decisions' despite previous practice and ostensibly minority position..

It's like everyone missed the second half of that sentence! Morning was presumed valid and night wasn't. That's the point.

Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? If I read the story right, there was one morning person and several night people. Why should the one person's preferences be presumed more valid than the several persons' preferences?

Cultural momentum (as an "is" not a "should").

I think they meant more valid than the others. But if most people on the team are night person schedules, it should be on the morning person to adapt more.

> Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that.

I think you really nailed it here. People who aren't "morning people" are viewed as lazy, strange, and unmotivated. And it's very frustrating to try to make people understand that I don't stay up until 3:00am every night and sleep until noon, or that I'm not lazy because I'm not flitting around the room like a humming bird the moment I get out of bed. It's like it's completely impossible to have this conversation because people are totally unwilling to see things in any other way.

Also, the early worm gets eaten.

In tech it seems to be opposite. Staying late make you seem like hard workers, but nobody cares if you come soon.

It is more complex than that. I do not own a car, so I have to use public transportation to get to work, and that dries up outside the main working hours.

Another issue is that it often makes sense for people that work together to be in the same place at the same time.

The implicit assumption that it is somehow morally better to get up early in the morning is very prevalent in Germany, too. I think it's a protestant thing, or at least a Christianity thing - getting up late in the morning implies sleeping in which implies laziness, which is a deadly sin. In fact, I remember listening to an interview with a neurologist (or a biologist whose focus was the nervous system), who said it was absurd to force children to get up as early in the morning as the adults, because for the first one or two lessons, their ability to learn would be impaired anyway.

There is one thing to be said, though, in favour of uniform working hours - it is that you do not need to worry about when your friends are free or working. During my Zivildienst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst) I worked in a hospital in shift work. Working the early shift meant I could not go out the evening before, because I had to get up at 05:00, so I had get to bed early; working the late shift meant that I only got off work when it was already evening.

part of it, yes, but unless you work in a complete vacuum people will need your input throughout the day. They may need support, or your attendance at a meeting, or maybe the just need to ask a simple question. I couldn't support one of my devs asking for hours completely opposite everyone else as it would slow the entire team down.

For 99.9999999999999% of things, waiting for a response is not going to kill anyone. The sun will still come up tomorrow, the business will still be around, and things will continue as normal.

We've got a minority working in the US and a majority across the Pacific. It adds friction, but you work it out. Even in the local office, a couple of the devs tend to have personal matters in the morning, but work late into the night. Again, you work it out, and it's not a big deal.

Yeah, 8PM to 2AM is tricky for the same reason as international teams since you might have zero face-to-face overlap with someone doing 10AM-6PM, but I've worked at three different places that were all fine with a less extreme version of that (noon-to-8, for instance, seems pretty common, or even 3-11PM for the occasional outlier).

Ask around, look around, and discuss stuff like this before signing the offer if it's important to you. It's definitely not impossible. :) Barring a union or such, things like this will only change one job at a time.

The way to make it not tricky is to be //remote friendly// in your work culture and get the interactions externalized and committed to information storage and dissemination systems.

Make processes phased and allow for multiple inputs (maybe blinded) during each phase, followed by a digestion step. Repeat this cycle until a strong consensus is reached.

Shifting a schedule is one thing (in fact, I work on a shifted schedule on days I commute; from 6:45am or 7am to 3pm, due to bad local traffic); cutting your workday effectively in half is another. This article is touting "forget your 8-hour/9-hour job, just work a 5-hour day instead!"

That'd be nice from a free-time perspective, but it doesn't line up with business needs.

If only we started valuing free time as a society. If all the automation and productivity gains, you would think we could work less now. What modern comforts necessitate an 8 hour work schedule?

I would rather have more free time and less money.

It turns out there are people who literally believe that having multiple people in a room is 'productive' even when there is no agenda, no goal and no fucking point to doing so. So that kind of person sees 'being at the office at the same time as other people' as a goal in itself.

It's rather annoying that there's a thought that by random chance something (who knows what that something would be) can come out of people being in the same place at the same time.

I do see value in being at the same place/time when you are working with someone, as it's so much easier and more fluid when collaborating in person.

I most productive in the morning too, I get into the office around 8:20am and leave at 4:20ish.

I can get the most work done between 8:20 - 13:00 or so, then lunch, then the productivity tails off after that

I'm the opposite. I try and get every meeting possible in before lunch time, then I eat, and then I work until I have to go home. If I were a manager, I'd probably have less control over this... but if someone asks to meet with me after 2p, I always make an attempt to just have that same meeting the next day at 9a or 10a.

I'm definitely most productive in the morning. I do best when I can just get to work and get into something. If I should up to work mid day (perhaps, due to prior appointments) it's a struggle to get into work.

Maybe the lesson here is not that working 13:00-18:00 is best for everybody, but that different people have different "peak hours", and forcing everyone to work a 9-5 40-hour week might not be such a good idea after all.

This all sounds good unless you work a "shift" style schedule. Every single person I know works what is considered first shift (approximately 6/7/8/9am to 2/3/4/5pm). Some of them have tried second and third shifts, but they always go back to first shift because "second/third shift don't work for me" they say.

Now for me I work better at night/early morning. Because of this I have worked third shift (midnight to 8am) for over 30 years and it works perfectly for me. If I want to be up while first shift is working I can. Or if I want to sleep during first shift and be awake for second shift I can do that too. It is nice to get off of work and do my errands and such without much traffic or that many people in stores. I get my errands done faster which gives me more free time.

Third shift has the advantage that most of the population is asleep when I am working. So when I drive into work at night the roads are mostly empty and when I leave work in the morning the morning rush traffic is moving in the opposite direction that I am.

Another advantage of third shift is I only spend 20 minutes driving to work and 20 minutes driving home from work each day. All the first shift people I know spend at least double that in traffic each day because dang near everyone works first shift.

neat! I'm often a nightowl myself, and often reflect on how life would be different if we spread out the working hours for people more - so most places would be 24-hour, and roads wouldn't be so packed.

It would be different if each shift only contained 1/3 of the workforce at a time. Rush hour(s) should contain much less traffic volume this way (since now there are what, 3 of them per day?). Overall there would be a slight increase in continuous traffic volume (as in at any given time of the day/night more people would be out and about).

I do wonder if cities could benefit from a 24 hour schedule. Sure, during first shift the cities near me are bustling with people and activity. Second shift there are still people about and things to do, but after 8pm or so most cities around here start to look barren. Third shift. Shoot, it's me, the police, the newspaper delivery drivers and pretty much no one else.

I spend 12-15 minutes each direction, driving to and from work for my "first shift" job. I think I'd ask for 15-20% more if I had a 40 minute commute, and still resent having to drive that long.

I could have a shorter commute if I lived closer to where I work, but then I would also run into higher rent. A one bedroom closer to work would be double my current rent and I wold also lose a bedroom in the process.

Honestly I enjoy my commute. For me it's not long and I get time to get into and out of my work mindset on the way to and from work. Most of the time I end up listening to classical music or books on tape during my commute.

I've never enjoyed driving, and I'm not in a super-expensive area. If I had a longer commute, I'd probably find something more than the radio to listen to, but we're talking about close to an hour a day band-aiding over something I find unpleasant.

It's one reason I dread leaving my current job; I suspect I'm going to have to take a serious hit to my quality of life.

Sounds like #NoKids rather than #SpainBrain.

I'm sure it sounds like I'm being pithy, but you fall into line when your kids get home at 4 and you want to spend time with them before they go to bed at 8.

Maybe his point stands in some sense, but once you add kids into the mix it quickly becomes "9-5" again or "burning the candle at both ends."

*her

There's also an argument that's been made that kids go to school too early in the day and school start time should be postponed to later in the morning, because they need more hours of sleep.

How is that even an argument? Does someone really argue that getting them up early is good for them?

Especially for high school kids (maybe 14-18 ish?). No one could possibly think that sending them to a school that starts at 7am is any way good for them. In our distract the high school starts at 7am and the small kids start at 9am. This makes no sense to me at all. (I'm not a kid complaining, I'm a parent)

Yes, a lot of people like to argue that getting up early is good for everyone, kids and adults. It's silly, but the "early bird catches the worm" people seem to run the world.

If the early bird people run the world, isn't that proof enough that it is good to be an early bird?

The problem is that whether you're an "early bird" or "night owl" is a matter of biology, not how early or late you choose to wake up (https://www.livescience.com/16334-night-owls-early-birds-sle...).

Because of the way school and work schedules are structured, you're right that it can give you an edge to be a morning person (I'm fortunate enough to be one). However, waking up early doesn't make a night owl an early bird - it makes them tired. The fact that people are split along these lines makes it questionable to enforce schedules that suit part of the population but leave the remainder strained and underutilized.

>In our distract the high school starts at 7am and the small kids start at 9am. This makes no sense to me at all. (I'm not a kid complaining, I'm a parent)

I was always under the impression this staggered start rate among school tiers was because they all share the same buses. If they all started at the same time they would need ~3x as many buses and bus drivers.

It would make a lot more sense to have the small kids start at 7 and the high school start at 9. Elementary school kids are naturally larks while teenagers are notorious owls.

It would, but people start panicking because they don't want their six year old standing alone on a deserted street corner in the dark waiting for a school bus. Seattle changed it to do that last year, but honestly what the fuck makes sense about a 7am school start time for anyone? In Australia I didn't know anyone who started school before 8.30am, ever. And that start time was basically consistent for 12 years of schooling, public, private, elementary, high school, whatever. It is like discovering aliens to see how the US school system is arranged.

6 year olds don't stand alone waiting for the bus anymore, there's always a parent waiting with them even though it's safer today than when we waited outside by ourselves. Even 9-10 year olds commonly have parents waiting with them.

Well, it's usually parents making this complaint, so I assume that it is the parents who don't want to stand with their kids that have an issue.

There was no schoolbus system where I grew up in southern california, we only ever took the school bus for field trips. Is it really that common across the country for kids to get to school by bus? We always just rode our bikes or walked, or got driven by parents.

The argument is basically "we know this is bad for kids" vs "well, yeah ... but I want to drop them off on the way to work"

They need a solid 6-8 hours of sleep, like other humans.

I suspect the problem is that teens just stay awake FAR LONGER than is advisable perhaps to maximize their free unstructured time at night and to minimize the crushing grind of the mornings?

I expect that if the school start time was shifted to 9am, the kids would just stay up until 5AM instead of only 3AM.

Most adults need 6-8 hours of sleep. Kids need more than that.

https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchslee...

There may be something to it. At least, when I was young, I could accumulate a lot more sleep-debt before there were consequences.

These days (I am 37 now), when I go to bed an hour later than usual, I will feel it all day. Might not be a huge deal, but I notice it.

For some reason the sleep pattern changes for adolescents. Now that I'm in my 30s, waking up early is no big deal, but waking up before 8 was a huge struggle and I was always an advocate of 8 hours of sleep for myself.

Here's a summary of the issue: https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/school-start-time-and...

Most teenagers aren't staying awake til 3am, it turns out. And you can test your theory in several ways - either by checking American teenager sleep habits against those in other countries where school does start later (e.g Australia - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2941425/figure/...), or by looking for the existing studies that have been done on changing school times (e.g this one in Norway https://teensneedsleep.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/school-st...)

Summary: your theory doesn't appear to be supported by data.

In Weston Massachusetts there is a proposal to move the start of high school and middle school back to 8:45 for this reason.

https://www.westonschools.org/blog/2017/10/23/proposed-chang...

I saw some other comments that this doesn't work with kids.

Not sure I follow exactly. The point is that 5 hour work days can be a better setup than 8 hour days (given that no manager is in your way etc.). What's stopping you from putting those hours in when the kids are in school?

I would agree of course that choosing to be employed in a 9-5 job is probably a much better deal when you have kids because of parental leave.

Article should be titled “Try being a wealthy business owner to work less.” Most people don’t have the luxury of choosing their hours and only working 4 hours a day, remotely from a cafe or hotel. It’s not as if everyone is getting up and going to work for 8 hours because they want to...

Plenty of us do, particularly here among the HN crowd it's fairly common (myself included and I work for a salary).

Obviously it is implied that this article is giving advice for people who set their own schedule and are wondering about how to move time around to feel more productive. Not for people who have their schedule strictly set for them by their employer. You dont have to be a wealthy business owner to fall into the former camp though.

It's absolutely great.

Unless you start having kids. Or work in an area where you need to meet customers face to face. Or both.

Just like working from Bali, working from a van, working from a plane, etc.

If you're a SINK or a DINK, go for it, 100%.

What do "SINK" and "DINK" mean?

single income no kids; dual income no kids

my life goal is dink

if you will it, it is no dream

Working efficiently at your peak working time makes sense. Assuming everyone else shares that same peak working time does not. You either need to set up an organizations where all collaboration can happen via async mechanisms (possible, but difficult)... or you need to have some times where people's work overlaps enough to have discussions and meetings.

I've worked in remote jobs where, in general, people worked whenever they wanted, and we'd get on phone calls at agreed upon times if needed. I've also worked in jobs where we set aside a 2 hour window each day for everyone to be there, not caring if that window was the beginning, middle, or end of your day. Both of those scenarios felt more productive than "9-5".

God Forbes' website is awful

It is genuinely terrible. I enjoy a lot of their content, but that website is malignant.

Wasn't forbes banned here because they had malware in their ads which infected a bunch of people and because most of their stuff is behind paywall?

Yes! A thousand times yes!

I'd also be okay starting at a 1-9 if people are against the idea of working less hours per day.

Now this would only work if everything adapted. Schools, shops, banks, would all need to shift their hours.

Finally we could enjoy daylight. Imagine spending time outside in the sun with your kids and wife during the day!! Everyday!

Imagine not being too tired after your hard day of work to spend quality time with your family, hangout with friends, so household chores, work on that hobby project of yours, exercise!

I don't think its feasible without a King or dictator forcing this change though. I hope we did, the idea of working on the hours that the sun is out is old, everyone works indoors now.

Also, its difficult to gage the health and mental health impact of how little less sunshine we now consume compared to days past when we were outside a lot more during daylight times.

I work the over way (west side of the Atlantic, most clients in Europe). So I get up, work until lunchtime, and then my 5 hours working day is other if I want.

Of course it’s not everyday I don’t work in the afternoon, but it’s nice that you can spend the afternoon with the kids if you want.

Ok, sometimes duty calls in the middle of my night (last Tuesday I was woke up at 3am for an emergency on a client server) but in the 3 years I’ve been living this side of the ocean, it happened 7 or 8 tiles max.

I once got woken up by a phone call from Europe at 4 AM. The first thing I had to do was remember an 8-digit hex number. It took a bit...

I would've thought it would take 32 bits.

I'm a Spaniard and I could never do that.

In order to be able to work like that you need a very specific set of circumstances, probably first of all being self-employed.

Since I work by contract for a company, and they force me to put 8 hours a day, I can't do that. However, it is true that I am the most productive in the afternoon. That is why I try to enter and leave work as early as possible, so that I can spend those sweet afternoon hours being productive.

Depends if your hourly paid or salaried - in theory salaried jobs its up to you to decide how and when you work within reason.

These ideas are interesting but it seems to suggest that if you work less you don't need as many breaks. Motivation for me comes in waves. When I'm inspired I can easily work 12-16 hours with just bathroom breaks. But, I can't induce those experiences, they just come.

My fear of a 5 hour day would be that I'd be running at 80% for 5 hours instead of 80% for 8 hours.

I come in at around 11 45 every day and work until 7 with couple of 15 minute breaks for ping pong. No loss in productivity and extremely satisfied with commute(DC metro). But I make sure, I check my emails and respond at around 930 am, if some one needs me.

As many have said, there's more to this than just one type or the other. It might be worth considering taking a more intentional look at organizing teams around similar circadian rhythms. Some of the most productive work I've done was with a team that really started gaining momentum in the afternoons and sometimes into the evenings. I think many who deviate far from the "norm" self-select into late-night service industry positions. There are a lot of misconceptions around "early birds" or "late workers" that could be explained by varying sleeping patterns.

I'm 1000% in favor of spending fewer hours at work, and making those hours that are spent at work count more. However, I'm guessing that the 1-6 was for the bosses, and not for the workers.

I have felt this way for a long time about work, but my schedule demands something close to an 8 hour day. So to stay fresh, I take walks, small breaks, and try and avoid social media, which makes my desk time immensely more productive, oftentimes moreso than if I were to sit and grind for the entire workday.

Nice idea but probably not written by someone who writes code or debugs for a living. Activities that imho benefit from long stretches of deep focus. Now perhaps you could work like that -- 16h sessions -- for three days then snowboard for the remainder of the week. That might work.

I don't see why. Part of the article is that you get down to what you need to do as soon as possible during the working hours. So you have your 1-6 (or whatever stretch of time you choose), you get down to it as soon as you can. No YouTube, no HN, nothing. Deep focus like that can really only be sustained for so long. I'd imagine that around dinnertime, I'd be ready to wrap up.

I used to do this, as a software engineer straddle 2 departmental areas, and I was explaining it to someone on Twitter last night,, in regards to my sleep schedule.

I used to go in right before lunch to avoid the impromptu meetings associated with people coming back into the office. Coming in 11am-1PM allowed me to block off my productive time and work until dinner sometime between 6-8pm; and then come back to problem solving after dinner. This gave me one 6-8 hour stretch of time with little distraction vs a 3 and 4 hour stretch with lots of distractions in the first period.

I write code and debug for a living and often work similarly. I even force myself to take a break every hour, deep concentration or not. Necessity makes amazing things happen. I definitely do not do more than 8 hour sessions, ever, and never without multiple breaks anymore. It works out fine, a little slower than before but that's mainly due to lack of communication and has nothing to do with hours worked.

I'm most productive in the early morning and late evening. The mid-afternoon is my least productive time, perhaps because of lunch or because I live in a sunny area and I'd like to take advantage of the sunshine in the afternoon. I don't mind working 8 hours in a day, but I'd rather do something like the inverse of this person's schedule and work 7 to 11, both AM and PM.

Spending your day in a sales role can be very similar to this. After losing time in client meetings, you often have only 5 hours left in the day to get your things done (frequently less than half that amount).

I have certainly worked my fair share of > 40 hour weeks, but it’s safe to say you are forced to learn a way to be very efficient when you don’t have all day available to work.

This might be a fitting work schedule for people with an inverted cortisol production profile. Perhaps have some tests done before wanting this. You could be in a stressed-out state.

Shortening the work day seems like a great idea. Making everyone work the same hours seems like a terrible one. Especially the proposed 1-6. What if you have kids?

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