Why the 8 Hour Workday Doesn’t Make Sense

Before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers. They got up at sunrise and typically worked long, hard days in the fields - workdays that were not circumscribed by any arbitrary time limit but rather defined by whatever it took to deal with the exigencies of each day.

The 8-hour day, as some sort of idealized goal, came about as a direct result of the industrial revolution. With people moving to cities and taking up factory work, reformers began to characterize such work situations as exploitative, particularly of children but also of adults in terms of length of hours worked in physically demanding situations. The answer for reformers lay in having governments prescribe maximum normative work periods, with anything in excess of the prescribed maximum being deemed extraordinary and warranting extraordinary compensation. Hence, in America, we eventually got the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week. (See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day for an overview).

I don't think "corporate America" has any particular stake in the 8-hour day. If anything, employers would undoubtedly want to have the power to shape the work schedules of employees in more flexible ways, especially by being able to freely demand longer work hours at normal compensation as a condition of continued employment. Of course, this would require repeal of the wage-and-hour laws that today proscribe any such thing. My point, though, is that it is those laws and not any scheme by employers that keeps the 8-hour structure in place as the normative work environment.

Bottom line: given pure freedom of contract, people could work any schedules they want and, in fact do so (that is what it means to be in business for yourself); however, given the problems arising from pure freedom of contract, the law imposes rigid limits deemed beneficial from a societal perspective on what may be expected of employees. That, I believe (and, I don't think, any other major factor), is what requires most people to work 8-hour schedules as their normative workday, at least in the U.S.

On a final note: the typical startup environment is really a throwback to the freedom of farming days because, in the earliest stages, there basically are no formal employees but rather just founders working round-the-clock like madmen for what might often be described as "below dirt wages," and, in later stages, there are large numbers of "exempt" engineers who are not subject to the overtime rules and hence who are also working insane hours - thus, not too many 8-hour days in your prototypical startup. I don't think most of the participants regard this as exploitation, probably because most of it is self-driven, i.e., most such people want to drive themselves hard in order to succeed.

But thousands, if not millions of people commute to work every single day.

Come on. Thousands, if not millions? They say that the number of people in Manhattan alone increases by a million during the day. More importantly, though, this has absolutely nothing to do with the 8 hour workday.

You still need to travel from wherever you live to wherever you do your work; the only way to solve this is to move those places closer together (maybe even to the same place).

In fact, I’m willing to bet that most people aren’t doing anything for 40% of the working week.

Assuming that this is true, there are a variety of alternate hypotheses. For example, this problem is pretty much exclusive to knowledge workers. Perhaps knowledge workers need "breaks" just as physical laborers do, but because the culture discourages it, they invent their own "breaks".

Today, human creativity is at an all time high because less and less people are working in offices.

This is self-contradictory: either human creativity is at an all-time high, or it's reduced by working in offices. After all, there was a time when nobody worked in offices. I'd wager that the proportion of humans who work in offices is actually increasing, even if you only look at Western cultures. Of course, I'd hardly say that human creativity is at an all-time high either (even for Western cultures alone, that was during the Renaissance).

This is an interesting point that I realized myself not long ago. A lot of people want to get from weekend to weekend, from vacation to vacation. It is a great escape. Their everyday lives somehow seem not very worth living to them. What I find amazing is how many people admittedly live that way, instead of changing something about their everyday life (especially work). Regarding the percentage of our awake time that we work over the course of our lives, it cannot be very healthy to say: Come saturday everything will be alright.

When you are expected to work 8 hours a day, the problem is not that you fill your time with useless shit and then become unproductive.

The problem is that you feel like you need to demonstrate or show to the world that you're doing work for the whole 8 hours, or more specifically, you need to show that you're not slacking off for too long.

So, let's take programmers as an example. I've had colleagues who alt-tab A LOT. Basically, 15 minutes in the IDE, tab out, 5 minutes of chatting. 15 minutes back to the IDE, 5 minutes back to browsing. For a 8 hour day, that's 75% of the time working. Good right? NO.

Context switching is expensive. A large part of the 15 minutes of work in the IDE is resetting the frame of mind to work.

Now why do people context switch. Simple. Micro-management from project managers, team leaders, bosses ...

If I, as a team leader, look over at your screen and see you surfing the net for 1 full hour, I'll get pissed. But if you alt-tab a lot, there is a good chance when I'm spying over your shoulder, you're on the IDE. Good worker!

I hate it. Which is why when I had my own team, I told my guys, you want to surf, sure, spend as long as you want. But when you code, focus on the coding for a full X amount of time. So, I tell them, you want a break, surf for 30 minutes. But make sure you get full one and a half hours of coding done first. Plan what you need to do, tell the team what you aim to achieve, and do it.

I also find that when people don't need to pretend to work, and can rest in peace chatting, surfing, they tend to be less stress.

Another example, sleeping in the office is a big no-no. So what do people do? They run off to the stairs to sleep. Or to the toilet. Ridiculous. If my guy has been pulling all nighters, I think it is perfectly fine for him to rest his head on the desk for a while.

Most employers are willing to soak up the waste, in order to have access to their staff throughout the work day. And most employees are eager to get the extra pay, even if they aren't spending the extra hours productively.

As an entrepreneur, I would love a 20 hour a week job that paid $40K a year -- it would provide financial stability and free time, allowing me to bootstrap businesses indefinitely. Most people aren't looking for that type of position, however. They're looking to maximize take-home pay.

When I'm on a roll I don't want to stop working, as a matter of fact, I once got to the office at 6am (I avoided traffic commuting at this time) on a Monday and left at 2pm Thursday. Although I didn't sleep at all, which was not a healthy thing to do, not only did I finish a three week task in 80 hours, but I ended up automating a bunch of processes, and fixing a bunch of bugs. I easily did a months work (probably more) in that time frame. Not only was I awarded a bonus, but I was expected not to work for a 15 days, of course I was till being payed as if I were still working. In contrast, I've had days where the only productive time I've had are two or three hours, and that's OK to, as long as you're reaching your goals.

Even a more flexible work schedule (for everyone) is not necessarily the solution. The fact that most people will be working during the day will mean that there will always been surges ~8-10 and ~4-6. It might lessen it's effect, but it'll still be there, and after the initial adjustment period, will seem every bit as unproductive and annoying.

Commuting isn't going to get better unless a very large percentage switches to work at home, or lives within walking/biking distance of their workplace, or everyone accepts some great overlord who coordinates everyone's travel and work time to minimize peak traffic (I'm sure the relevant algorithms already exist).

Typically it was from 8 to 2.

The same goes for school. High school (IIRC) was from 7 to 1, or something like that.

The 9-5 is a result of those factors and there are alternatives, start a product business or do freelance work.

Swedish also work 8 hours days (or slightly less), but lunch hour is not included. Programmers, even at big companies, generally get to choose which 8 hours. 7-4, 8-5, 9-6, 10-7, either is fine.

There is another reason for the 8 hour workday, maintaining real-time business-to-business interactions with a single shift workforce.

An expectation has been built up that businesses will be open from 9-5. This allows businesses to handle person to person interactions on an expected schedule. As a rule, if you need to contact someone for business you call them during this time.

Some companies can do with the delayed response form of email but phone and face-to-face conversations still hold weight in non software centric companies.

Some companies might establish their own culture, between a limited number of parties they interact with. However, if businesses at large started shifting their hours all over the place it would make things very confusing for a new player to establish business with them.

-The commute has nothing to do with the work day. If you work less or more, you still have to commute to get there to do the work.

-The author presents no alternative, except hints at the digital nomadic work style. If you're going to try to dismantle a structure that, as written in the article, has kept big business in America running for so long, please provide a reasonable sounding alternative so if we agree with you we can do something about it.

The traditional norms of working hours, work environment, management techniques, etc. established from past eras where physical labor dominated work are no longer relevant (and in some cases actively harmful) when it comes to knowledge work and especially artistic and creative work. Worse yet, many people do not appreciate or acknowledge the creative nature of many of these new jobs (software development being an excellent example).

As a result most working environments for a lot of modern creative work are wholly dysfunctional. Is it any wonder then why job churn is so incredibly high in the tech sector? If you're working in a dysfunctional environment then you are much more likely to switch jobs for a little extra pay or merely for a change.

Unfortunately, a lot of labor law is also very heavily biased toward physical labor as the model for all work. It'll take a very long time for these biases, bad traditions, and legal hindrances to be replaced by systems that actually work.

So he means we are now going to judge people by their output. Objectively. Like pay them for work produced, not time spent "working."

That's a great idea in theory.

What about the lazy, handicapped, and less-than-full-potential people? (I'm not at all clumping them as all equally bad.) They won't be able to produce as much, at least initially, and consequently receive less pay. Just wait until the ACLU hears about it.

We have a 9 to 5 structure because anybody can show up for 8 hours a day. If we don't change our value structure, our workday will never change.

1. Robert Levine, _A Geography of Time_, p141.

The article doesn't really mean anything without this.

Personally I'd be in favor of a 4 day 10 hour work week. I think it could be similarly productive, cuts down on commute time, and yields a better quality of life.