Microsoft Japan tested a four-day work week. Productivity jumped by 40% | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Japan tested a four-day work week. Productivity jumped by 40%

theguardian.com

10 pointsmojuba11 comments

Discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433710 (540 points/205 comments)

I wonder if it is the novelty factor at play here. it will be interesting to see if these effects last long term

EDIT: I found a company that did a six month trial and had the same effects https://www.prweek.com/article/1596231/pr-agency-implements-...

It's been tested already, and proven to be working really well.

Here's a similar experiment from last year: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw...

To be completely honest, how this can give positive results is beyond me. Personally I use my free time for side projects except only for social events on weekends. If my work time was reduced to say 6 hours, or alternatively to a 4-day work week, I'd use more time on side projects which are the same in nature as my main job. I don't think that would affect my productivity neither for the main job nor for the side projects, it would just change the time allocation and therefore the amount of work done on each side. That's all. I'm in my early 50s and I just can't stop doing this.

While I can imagine a lot of people in the world would only applaud to any official reduction of work time, again, I just don't understand how that can increase their productivity at work.

"Work expands to fill the time available" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

Basically with less time, people focus instead on what really matters. A lot of the fluff that was actually a burden is dropped.

So the fact that the experiment worked at Microsoft only says that Microsoft is terribly unproductive otherwise. Which should be true for the majority of large organizations.

I suspect you would understand if you spent less time at work or doing side projects and more time resting.. some insights come after having some time to get bored.

This was posted here yesterday.

The "experiment" only took one month and the employees were paid for the day off every week.

The results are inconclusive at best.

So you were expecting the person not to be paid for the day off even after increasing productivity 40%?

No. I was expecting the productivity to rise.

So, since the trial apparently worked so well, why haven’t they continued with the 4-day week? Anyone know?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com