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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Study after study has shown that working 80 hours dramatically reduces your productivity during those hours.

I loved what Tobi said in this tweet: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297

"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."

5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.

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Work isn't always creative though is it? It's often more menial: meetings, learning new APIs, stepping through existing code, trial and error, mentoring, etc.

For these your ROI per hour goes down, but your total ROI still goes up even after 5 or even 8 hours. Maybe not for everyone everyday, but for some people some days for sure.

That's why I still believe in 8 hour working days. Three hours for meetings, reading up on things etc - five hours for the hard creative stuff.

Wrong Twitter link posted. That’s about Apple and RSS

Bah, thanks - missed the edit window. Tweet was meant to be https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433

Oops, Twitter link should have been https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433

My experience/conclusions are similar to the comment above.

I feel like the hardest skill in jobs like programming, design (or any creative jobs, to be fair) is managing your cognitive resources, understanding when to approach problems requiring particular modes of thinking and when to stop, work on something else, or learn to do nothing.

In my mid 20s I did my share of reckless 80-100h weeks—ending up with depression and health issues that took years to recover. Some days are still challenging. And, I’m just 31.

If he's asking for 4 hours of work, then why ask for a 40 hour work week and not a 20 hour one?

40 hours (9-6) is rough enough!

I think he's assuming that people are going to spend some fraction of their time at work advancing their careers and maintaining their relationships with coworkers (and that he does not include that time as "creative work").

No. He is not asking for 4 hours of work. He is asking for laser-focused, 100% productive 4 hours work. You can do additional work in the rest of the hours left that not necessarily is going to require that level of focus.

I think some of it has to be taken as more of an adage than pragmatically. Firsly, the four hours may not be continuous so having random hours doesn't really work. Additionally, it's caveated with creative work, regardless of job title, a lot of work would involve non-creative aspects which need to be done.

Because there's meetings, email, IMs, documentation, waiting, etc. The rough breakdown is 20 hours of focused creative work and 20 hours of everything else per week.

He’s asking for 4 hours of creative work, with the assumption being that the balance won’t be creative.

You cannot work at 100% in 4 uninterrupted hours. You need to take some breaks in between, and also do some mundane things.

Correct (?) link (it's quite high up in TFA):

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433?s=20

> My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.

> Now true - some people, myself included, need a few hours to wind up and wind down for those to occur. Right now I'm procrastinating on twitter instead of writing my summit talk for instance. Reddit and HN are my siren calls.

> That's fine. We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome. What's even better than people are teams. Friends, that go on journeys doing difficult things.

While I'm sure they want people to do some non-creactive work - it sounds like in principle they'd be fine with 20 hours of focused creative work. Maybe a 6 hour day, to put in 4 hours of work?

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