Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dannyw

The commute may influence this. The average American commute is about 30 minutes each way. That's 1 hour round trip.

Commute as a portion of work time....

4 hrs work: 25%

5 hrs work: 20%

6 hrs work: 16.7%

7 hrs work: 14.3%

8 hrs work: 12.5%

Considering you don't get paid for your commute, there is a natural incentive to work more hours.

View on HN

Remote work may influence this. Commuting to a workplace just to do the things you might as well do from home will be considered old-fashioned, inefficient and/or shameful in a few years, if my crystal ball is not lying.

The problem with that this is is co located teams are a massive multiplier - very few jobs are truly singleton roles.

There are ways to work around that problem remotely.

When working similar to the Basecamp guys it's even the other way around.

Write problems down and give people time to chew on them. Everyone adds his thoughts and refining the idea will lead to better results than a two hours meeting.

Our team comes in the office once a week for some face time. But we have plenty of face time throughout the week on Webex Teams. We've eliminated the friction for remote face time.

If anything, it's an improvement over the in-office because instead of interrupting someone at work, we politely message someone (or the team) about doing a quick call once it's convenient for them.

If you cycle to work you can change this equation, because, your commute becomes one of the best parts of your day.

That's optimistic. I have what I think has to be about as close to optimal a bike commute as it's possible to get in the US (nearly all separated bike paths, minimal risk of getting hit be a car). I wouldn't call it particularly enjoyable, much less one of the best parts of my day. It's just a thing I do a couple times a week because I hate going to the gym even more and it saves a bit of gas.

For 20 hours a week, you can just work 2.5 8h shifts, not necessary 5 4h shifts.

Not only have others suggested the reduction of the week to 4 days, but if you manage to de-align everyone's work week then commuting can become faster. And de-centralising work (not necessarily to the home!) can also improve the commuting situation.

10h 4 days a week to keep the 40h work week. But it also depends on the type of work. I think desk jobs would benefit more than manual labour form longer days(asuming same total). As the mind and body recovers differently.

>10h 4 days a week to keep the 40h work week

Why keep an arbitrary "40h" standard? Productivity has increased 100x from when it was established, what keeps it is busywork...

I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week. It's almost 10% longer than the default UK week which is already too long. Having worked both and currently on 36.75 there's still a huge amount of slack and wasted time assuming software development or other office jobs.

> I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week.

Not just America. We have elections coming up in Saxony (a state in East Germany), so I watched a 2-hour interview with the current MP from the conservative party (the same party as Angela Merkel). When it came to the topic of UBI and automation, he adamantly refused to consider any policy that would move away from the 40-hour work week. He meant that there were so many challenges ahead of us, we couldn't afford to lose any of our precious working hours. His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".

> His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".

Bavarian here. Your MP is a nutjob, as is Söder and the rest of the conservatives. The point is that conservatives (as well as the FDP and the AfD) focus primarily on the needs of the businesses which means keeping to old Prussian traditions no matter what.

> Your MP

#NotMyMP. I just happen to live here.

This just reads like incentive to work longer hours for fewer days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com