Four-day week means 'I don't waste holidays on chores'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
There has been no drop in productivity - I guess I procrastinate less, and am more focused on doing things that need done.
I have an extra day for family and side projects - 1 day might not sound like much, but having that extra day off feels like my work/life balance is so much better!
If anyone else has the opportunity, and can afford the pay cut of course, I highly recommend it.
P.S. there was no way to negotiate less than a 20% cut; I work for a megacorp that has rigid rules and doesn't give half a crusty shit about individuals.
Edit: I should have also mentioned that I'm in the UK, where under EU law, employers have to consider reasonable requests for flexible working. I should have also mentioned that I work 7.5h per day, and the only time I work overtime is when I'm travelling to a customer site (which itself is rare, obviously not happening at all now!)
That's because you increase your free days by 50% by cutting your work days by 20%. It's not a symmetric exchange. I did the same over the summer (just by using my excess vacation days) and it was a revelation. Highly recommend, especially now that it's so hard to travel.
And then I realized there are second order effects. Double my pay actually means much more than double my savings per year as my costs are more or less fixed.
So then I changed the formula to scale with respect to the amount I am saving versus the discretionary free time. Maybe a 30% raise would actually double my savings.
And by discretionary free time I am subtracting time spent doing chores. I live very close to work and even getting a job that requires a 1 hour commute each way makes a huge difference in my discretionary free time and should be compensated accordingly.
And then I took it one step further. I decided to take an Excel sheet and map out all the discretionary free time I think I will have for the rest of my life. And then I evaluated job offers based on which one will maximize that free time. So maybe cutting short free time right now is okay if it is more than compensated by having me retire a lot earlier. Of course then you may want to factor that free time while young is perhaps worth more than free time when your body is not that healthy.
And of course you may not live long enough to retire and you do want to take that into account as well and not put all your joy off towards the end.
It's a bit of a rabbit hole.
How can you tell which jobs will give you how much free time? Besides commuting (I hope to work remotely forever), at many big companies, amount of free time greatly depends on the team you land on. Either way, there seems little insight into true work life balance of a company.
But there are things one can know such as the number of vacations you'll have.
But yeah commuting is where you have the most certainty.
Similarly, having more money hits serious diminishing returns. Watching a 500$ TV vs a 5,000$ TV doesn’t actually change much in the moment. Jump all the way to a 500,000$ home IMAX and watching a terrible movie still sucks.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/how-research-shows-you-can-l...
I still enjoy life in the present but I do sacrifice a bit of it so I can also enjoy life when older.
If you don't want to completely sacrifice today for tomorrow you simply adjust the age related weight in the Excel sheet :-)
GF does not like it at all, but it works very well for me.
echo $(expr '(' $(date -d 2070-01-01 +%s) - $(date +%s) + 86399 ')' / 604800) " weeks until I turn 80"For example, I'd bet most people would be unwilling to smooth over their 40 hour workweek over the course of the full week of 7 days, working 5.7 hours a day. Of course that's nice in a way, but having no fully free days and perpetually working forever, is agonising.
In that sense you can't just compare cutting a working day to simply having more discretionary time (which you have after workdays, too). Fully free days count a bit differently.
The worker interviewed in the article said, "Also being on call can be a challenge, but it's nothing that's not fixable."
I understand that to mean that he's not truly working a 4-day week. He's working 4 days + on-call day(s) at times.
But culturally, it also encourages a lot of automation, redundancy, and conservative DevOps decisions.
Granted, at times I'm on the job until late at night, to get things done and, sometimes, to make up for an extra long shopping excursion etc.
A 4 day on-site job would feel severely disadvantageous by comparison.
Not having to waste time commuting is fabulous, and in my case all my colleagues work in other countries. We do have a small office nearby, and I choose to go in once every 2 weeks or so, just for a change of scenery and a wee bit of socialising.
As in, your output is the same as with a 5 day work week? So essentially a 20% pay cut per unit of work performed?
From the management side, it's common for teams to get into routines where Fridays are basically lost. It starts with getting into the habit of leaving a little bit early on Fridays. Then people realize that they only have a few hours between lunch and leaving early, so they start checking out right after lunch. Then people realize that if they get in after 9AM on Friday, they don't have many hours to get anything done before lunch, so they don't want to get started on anything that requires focus. Eventually, Fridays are a short, laid-back day at the office where they catch up on stray e-mails before going home.
For those teams, going to a 4x8 workweek has no productivity drop because they weren't doing much on Friday anyway. However, for teams that actually get things done on Friday, going to 4x8 or even 4x10 can start to decrease productivity.
Productivity and hours spent working aren't the only things that matter, though. Going to a 4-day workweek is an easy way to keep employees happy, which is valuable in itself.
Also keep in mind that we aren't great at judging our own productivity. We tend to perceive percentage of busy time as productivity, and a 4-day workweek will naturally have a higher percentage of time occupied by work than a 5-day workweek. This increase in percentage of busy time can mislead people into thinking they're being even more productive on more time-compressed schedules, even if they're putting out less work on an absolute scale.
Frankly, a lot of companies switch to 4-day workweeks because they can get 80-90% of the productivity while offering employees a perk they can't usually get at big companies that pay higher salaries.
Perhaps Parkinson's law in action: 'work expands to fill available time'.
Working 4/5 of a standard week and getting paid 4/5 of standard salary would not be a win for me unless I only needed to complete 4/5 as much work.
This does not sound like winning.
I know I've spent half a day messing around before and then smashed out a piece of work in a few hours and still had the impression of being productive. Simply because the majority of employees aren't as productive as me. Being a very productive and capable developer will open lots of opportunities but some of us don't want to climb the ladder. I just want a comfortable job and be good at it.
I'd never take a pay cut though. If you kept the same productivity at a lower pay then you're effectively saying they overpaid you before. 20% less pay is 20% less work in my eyes.
It's your choice, of course - but that kind of thinking would just keep the parent poster from getting the deal they obviously prefer.
It was first when Covid19 WFH hit I realized how few hour a day I actually "work". It was hidden by meetings and discussions at the office I guess.
Regarding meetings maybe half the time in meetings is of no use for me and I am of no use for the others at the meeting but I still need to be there is the topic changes. The single biggest productivity improvement in WFH is that I can just work during uninteresting parts of meetings without being rude.
If you're working in an assembly line or checkout at the grocery store, your productivity isn't as variable. Assuming customers/inputs are always lined up, you'll process a similar number every hour and the quality is somewhat static.
In cloud infrastructure, I notice quality of work is highly variable. Some engineers will bandaid everything to get the task done. It's easy to do that.
Other engineers create solutions taking into account the current technical environment, business requirements and future concerns. I don't think we should hide from this fact. Software engineering as a profession becomes worth more the more we realize there's a difference in quality and quantity dependent on the engineer's abilities.
Highly recommended.
I'm a freelancer and not an employee, so you'd think it would be easy to negotiate such. However, I keep running into the same issue: few people need just a little software engineering. If someone needs some software engineering, they usually need a lot of it. Several times, I've been hired by customers with the promise of "we just need 10 hours a week", but somehow get talked into working full time pretty quickly.
The megacorp I have spent large amounts of time at actually seems to have a significant population of people with this informal arrangement with mixed opinion on the part of their management mostly based on how close they are to a realist position.
1) Work/Delivery can’t suffer. No decrease in velocity because of some work/life balance. This is easily measured and padded with a +\- 5%.
2) Accountable. If you have things you are accountable for and they aren’t done yet, better get that homework done.
3) If your an engineer, we pay you to think, not to sit in a chair. The “office” benefits are communication, collaboration, and contemplation. If you can achieve that with cohesion with the team then +1 I’m all for it!
The ‘70s white collar management style doesn’t really work well for productivity in 2020. It makes unhappy employees which makes people leave. If you enjoy interviewing people by all means, continue that oppression. If you value your employees and their innovation they bring to your company (or your department, or team) then you should practice servant leadership and remove any blockers from them being able to bring their best work to the table.
How did you communicate this to upper management or was it don't ask/don't tell?
But you do have to be available for calls or meetings.
Also opens up visits to regional parks and activities outside the weekend, which means no crowds and sometimes cheaper tickets.
20% less pay for 50% more leisure time each week = winning.
Unless your income and outgoings have been fixed at their exact current levels for your whole life, there's nothing magical about their current values and they could change?
Don't get me wrong, both myself and my wife are both working 4 day weeks after the birth of our son (culturally, that certainly helps the discussion), and that extra flexibility let's you choose the option that's best for you, but there is an opportunity costs trade off between them all...
That means there’s been a 20% increase in productivity! So you’re now underpaid by 20%.
As it stands however, I work for a megacorp that offers nice projects to work on, but with a "system" that's like a dystopian nightmare, and a rulebook and HR staff that exist to waste your time, use you up and spit you out.
It's weird that owners are paid proportional to aggregate productivity (units produced and sold), but those delivering the results are most often paid proportional to costs (hours worked).
I get why the system is this way, but it's not a "good" system in my opinion.
The biggest thing about working fewer hours was I could shift my days around to optimize for tasks. When I sat down to write code, I was in the zone to write code.
If they also worked 4 days a week, I bet productivity would fall.
It's something I could do, but I always think that as long as I'm able to earn that money, better get it as we don't know what tomorrow will be made of.
Still though, as a software engineer without a family and with money as high priority, you'd have a whole extra day per week to spend on side projects...
What it boils down to is: do things (work & play) while you're young. Spinning in place is the only real waste of time.
I spin in place.
I can get my work done in four days, but I also get work requests with same-day deadlines, either a soft expectation that you can miss sometimes but not structurally, or a hard expectation that you simply can't miss.
This is especially the case for friday because clients will often work weekends on the high-priority stuff. Sometimes they rely on something that takes me 2 hours on a friday, if I don't do that, they're stuck till monday. It's just not acceptable in my line of work.
I've not really found a good solution.
I can get fridays off formally, but then you're not just cutting your salary, you're also cutting chances for promotions (which isn't just a matter of pay, but also a matter of career development, personal development, keeping work interesting and dynamic, status/ego). There's a strong preference for employees with full-availability such that clients have one point of contact, instead of multiple parttimers across the week. And leadership positions are expected to always be working during regular working hours.
edit: I’m teasing ofcourse forgive me :) But like I mention in another comment, you have to agree employment in the US is generally very different from the EU with regard to working hours etc.
I've spent a little time in the US in the past with work, mainly in Texas, and the hours everyone worked were crazy - 60h weeks with unpaid overtime seemed to be the norm.
US is a big place though, and with my limited knowledge I'd expect places like CA to be more progressive, sensible even.
London and Switzerland are the only places in Europe with decent salaries.
(I work in Oslo, Norway)
Spending $1.5k on healthcare a month in exchange for double or triple the salary is worth it, by a long shot.
This isn't a religious debate, it would be great to be a developer in a friendly and beautiful EU country for me personally, but not if my salary is slashed to the bone to do so.
The EU is not competitive in the tech market at all, and especially not for senior level contributors.
According to Payscale, Senior Developers in Sweden earn roughly the equivalent of $70k USD. That's the biggest shafting I've ever seen.
$1.5k / month was my total cost of living as single! That was owning my own condo with 15 minutes bike ride to Stockholm city center. The rest I mostly used for vacation trips and did 4-5 (one week each) every year. No need to save for unexpected health care bills, your unborned kids college education, grandmas retirement home, that car you need to buy to commute 1 hour to your job etc.
That 3x salary comes with a really high price! In reality I would probably not make more than 120k / year in the US though. With that said, I can understand that some people really enjoy spending most of their lives working for the man, and getting a high salary and skipping out on vacations and work life balance. But not for me.
Second, there's work/life balance, for example you can look at annual workhours and see there's a 350 hour gap between the US and Sweden: https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/oecd-hours-w...
350 hours is equivalent to 8.75 weeks (or more than 2 months) of 8 hour, 5-day workweeks. That's a massive difference.
Second, Sweden has free education. Being a top 5% earner in the US sometimes comes easy, but often times you're looking at medschool, lawschool or CS or whatever, that can set you back anywhere from 30k to 250k, with 7% average student loan interest rates.
Stuff like this can put a massive weight on your shoulders from age 18 til 38 or so, constantly climbing a corporate ladder, working crazy hours, and paying off a massive debt. All the while fearing that an economic crisis or some kind of disability leading to unemployment, can ruin you. In a country like Sweden there's no such weight on your shoulders, subsidised, and a massive social safety net. Quality of life is quite stable, and you can both very much enjoy student life, and your life right after, all the way til old age, with a healthy work/life balance.
You also don't have to live in a city that you share with an extremely poor underclass, homelessness, crime, drug addiction, while paying a million for a single bedroom.
Of course I'm not saying everyone in tech is working 80 hours and getting crushed by debt while working in an overpriced city with some minor dystopian undertones. But when looking at these things, Sweden and the US are certainly on opposite sides of the spectrum. And it must be taken into account when looking at pay.
I'd love to move to the US for some time, the natural parks are amazing, I like the culture and the vibe. But work/life balance, the lack of safety net if you're unlucky and the general state of the country for many of its people, are repelling me. I've never thought of pay as something that attracts me to the US, it's really not worth it for me because I'm not lacking anything (although I do make about $100k equivalent in western Europe, but even at much lower salaries when I was younger I loved it here).
What are you doing about it?
I've heard (but never checked, although I did find some resources: https://www.hensche.de/Rechtsanwalt_Arbeitsrecht_Gesetze_TzB...) it is mandated by law that employer (as long as it has more than 15 employees) must allow you that.
The 20% paycut is pre-tax, so the real cut is a lot lower. It also lets employers hire a 5th person for every 4 80%s, so total productivity is likely higher due to people being happier, and there's more jobs total.
It's hard for me to imagine why tech companies wouldn't want to offer this to all their employees.
“Equal employment conditions
You must offer your part‑time staff the same employment conditions as full-time workers, including pay, leave, notice periods and other rights and benefits linked to their employment.
Modifying working arrangements
Whenever possible, you should try to accommodate requests from your employees if they want to change their working schedules, such as:
- transferring from full-time to part-time
- transferring from part-time to full-time
- increasing their working hours
You cannot dismiss an employee if they refuse to transfer from part-time to full-time work or vice versa.”
Working hours per week by country in Europe (includes some non-EU countries) at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
I'm sure there are other similar cases, but overall it's pretty rare here.
In the EU, employers have to, by law, consider reasonable requests for flexible working. If you work for a large company, that should mean most will have the option.
Why as people do we not just add an extra day to the week between Saturday and Sunday?
Who cares about official calendar?
Make all months 4 days longer.
All work weeks still 5 days.
All monthly : 30 day contracts stay the same.
People who need cash or work hard can use the extra day to get ahead.
3 day weekend society - I would vote for it.
Months and weeks are completely independent, we could have an eight-day week and keep months precisely as they are now.
I think it's way too weird to actually do it, but it's less weird than having a cycle of months that's longer than a year.
Islam manages, somehow, to have a cycle of months that's substantially shorter than a year, and doesn't throw in an extra month from time to time like Jews do. I've always found that exceedingly strange, but I guess you get used to it.
- Seasons shift, who cares...
- Law overhaul (this is the ask, make it the law...)
- Consistent tracking mechanism (we aren’t throwing anything out)
3 day weekend society
It can cause issues
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
If you're going to keep months, but have an 8-day week, I'd rather see something like: 9 months of 5 weeks each (40 days) with an extra 4 days at the end or beginning of the year. Leap days could be appended to the extra week. This has the added benefit that the 8th is always Blernsday in any month.
In any case, I think there are advantages to only working 4-days in a row; and 4/3 is a better ratio for workers than 5/3; and I think you're just moving the goal posts, really. People 50 years from now would be arguing about going to a 4/4 week...
As it is, lately i've been working longer chunks of days in a row, 14+ days without breaks and it drains me. It feels like each day after the next really compounds.
It's also why i dislike longer vacations. I get super antsy after day 3 or 4.
Fake-work-fridays is the new casual Friday.
What are you gonna do it about? And no, I’m not taking a pay cut either.
Though you're not really under EU law anymore, has the UK resolved these sorts of issues, i.e., EU law will apply unless/until changed by Parliament?
AFAIK we are basically keeping everything from the EU at the time of severance, and I think the Brexit trade deal means we can't make any significant degredation of labour laws going forward. If anyone reading this knows different, please do correct me.
I can narrow it down to a handful of Indian outsourcing companies though (I'm British, working out of the UK tho), since I've talked about them all in the past.
It's a megacorp (100s of thousands of employees) known for outsourcing. It calls itself a USA company (but it's not; it's mainly based in India).
From my other post, you should easily be able to narrow it down to about 5 (which includes the horrible company you mentioned), and TBH, they are all about equally horrible.
> There has been no drop in productivity
Your employer seems to believes different.
I'd imagine many of us are not wealthy enough to afford a personal assistant but live complex enough lives to warrant it. Modern life kind of requires a 4 day work week, if you are salaried slave.
The fact that I'm a salaried slave means I'm expected to work more than 5 days per week sometimes. I swear, half the time I take vacation I either need to work extra before/after it or even log in while on vacation.
So at least in my situation, if I had a four day week I would probably be working more than just those 4 days. Hopefully it would be a reduction from current levels.
Big ongoing thing is that she helps with my inbox, deals with ordering stuff online, random annoying tasks like booking travel, some customer support, stuff like that. Oh also makes calls for me when I don’t wanna deal with it like booking appointments and such.
Kinda wishing I could afford someone in the same city so they could help with physical tasks but maybe later.
She doesn’t have direct access to my money, only credit cards. Those are easy to cancel or chargeback if things go screwy. She does know my SSN which is a bigger concern, but then again you give your SSN to all sorts of people and services in USA, it’s very not actually a secret.
Oh and she doesn’t know passwords to anything. LastPass sharing only.
I think if applied globally, a large number of things that I want to do on extra free day will also be closed. If everyone gets friday off it will be just like saturday where I can't to bank, dr, therapist appointments and so on because they also closed. This new holiday must be mandatorily floating
If your scenario was to happen, it would be 10 years at least, even with a quick change in habits. That's a long time before such problems come into play.
Similar arguments are made against the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement - if everyone stopped buying things wouldn't the economy slow down? Sure, it probably would, but such large changes in behaviour take time, and adjustments would be made during that time if the trend continues.
Some would take Monday (me)
Some would take Friday
Some would take Wednesday.
Hourly employees would still take whatever day fits the official schedule
Something funny is happening in my native Belgium. Some people drop their fifth formal working day to become bicycle couriers, Uber drivers or whatnot in the "sharing economy". The reason is taxation regimes.
80% or 100% gross wage as a median income employee will hardly make any difference in net wage around there. A friend for example recently got a promotion from an entry level job (with tax discounts) to something more in line with her qualifications (without tax discounts). 600€ gross salary increase translated to 155€ net salary increase. All the rest got eaten by tax and social contributions increases.
Belgium combines high formal job taxes combine with a low tax scheme meant to formalise "sharing economy" jobs. These enjoy super low 10% taxation up to 500€ per month. Many people actually do the math. They switch to 80% formal jobs hardly losing any income. Some actually increase their income by becoming pizza couriers or Uber drivers in their 20% time...
UPDATED: corrected the net wage delta from 100 to 155€.
In the Netherlands the tax rate is 36% and then caps out at 52%. There's no scenario in which you will net less than 48% on an increase.
But, if you look at it from a more holistic perspective, there's not just taxes on wages. When you earn little you get rent and healthcare insurance subsidies. You lose these once you earn more, so there are income ranges where extra income leads not only to a tax rate of 36 to 52%, but also a loss of subsidies which can be the equivalent of a tax rate. The marginal net income can therefore be < 30 cents per euro earned.
But that isn't necessarily tax related. Further, there's some non-tax consequences that are left out of the story. (e.g. social housing subsidy is only possible for social homes, which you typically don't want to live in if you don't have to).
I'd be interested how it works in Belgium.
- Gross to net includes 13.07% employee side social security contributions. The state somewhat lowers those for the lowest income earners. This increases the gap.
- Progressive taxation. Under 24k gross, you pay 40%. Up to 41k, you pay 45%.
- A large part of the bottom 25% tax bracket is actually 0% (~9k tax free base).
- Local taxation (usually about 7%, but 0% in the richest enclaves) gets tacked onto the tax amount.
- Regional taxes are also progressive.
Gross | Gross New | Net Delta | Total taxation
2000 €2600 €155 31.00%
3000 €3600 €262 38.00%
4000 €4600 €253 42.00%
Because here it seems from 2k, 3k or 4k, an extra 600 is taxed consistently by more than 50%, and sometimes even 75%. That's a very high marginal tax rate. I wonder if that's cherrypicking something and the x600 to x000 range looks better.
I also wonder what the taxes break down into, I think it's always good to separate pure taxes (going to the government for the public good) from various social safety net contributions (some of which go to a general fund for the public good, but some are also individually-accrued benefits by paying a monthly premium, e.g. unemployment insurance of your particular salary).
When making cross-country comparisons, I find there's a ton of apples to oranges comparisons like this, where taxes and other things aren't properly separated and just lumped together.
Another example: in some countries healthcare is arranged as a benefit on-top of gross income. In others healthcare is subsidised by 80% by the government, and paid for through a tax on gross income. It could very well be that compensation in both these countries is the same, but that the former looks like you're earning more because you get paid out more of your gross income.
EDIT: Ah, i figured it out:
Gross | Gross New | Net Delta | Total taxation
2000 €2600 €155 31.00%
3000 €3600 €262 38.00%
4000 €4600 €253 42.00%
Gross | Gross New | Net Delta | Total taxation
2000 €2600 €155 31.00%
3000 €3600 €262 38.00%
4000 €4600 €253 42.00%
[0] https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/how-we-switched-to-4-day-we...
At my last employer, productivity was suffering and schedules were slipping on a 9/80 schedule. When management tried going back to 5 day work weeks, there was a near mutiny. Leadership eventually caved.
I suspect the leadership is a core part of making this work. E.g., communicating clear expectations, holding people accountable etc.
As I left, they were integrating into the larger corporate structure to make sure everyone has the same Friday off beyond just our campus. It will be interesting to see if this helps productivity or if there aren’t enough projects that cross those org lines to make enough impact.
9/80 can be great if there’s a cultural fit with a mission centric focus. Ironically as the c-suite was considering going back to a 5 day schedule, people lower were pushing to go to a 8/80 schedule. I always got the impression people weren’t terribly mission focused, rationalizing why that would make them more productive when the data from the 9/80 switch ran counter to their claim. Honestly, they were one of the least productive orgs I’ve worked with
We work in 6-week cycles with flexible scope. This is stolen from Basecamp. I think we’ll have to wait and see if the experiment matches results longer term.
And yes, I’d say the co-founders enjoyed this freedom as much as (or more than?) our small team, so we’re all motivated to make it work!
In terms of salaries they’re not too bad, but not amazing. We’re not a “real” startup or a tech company though. We hope to bump salaries as well next year...
EDIT: funny I made the same mistake in two places, but only fixed one before. Thanks again, it should be updated now.
In the UAE, for example, most people work 12+ hours every day, and barely get just Fridays off. Almost every one I know was working on Christmas, and they'll be working on New Year's. Vacations etc are unthinkable.
They don't feel it's odd or that it's "over"working or that having more free time would be rewarding; this is dominant mentality in the the Middle East and most of Asia and Africa (and I bet in other "poor" regions like parts of South America and Eastern Europe too).
Being idle in these societies is seen as a sin at best and the difference between survival and starvation in practice. Besides, even if people were forced to take 2 days off every week, they wouldn't know what to do with their time anyway (which manifests as the generally low output of creative arts from these parts), or have the disposable income to indulge in anything beyond a stroll at the mall or a meal at McDonald's (though KFC is more common round here I suppose).
Holidays are a first world luxury.
If everyone took them more often in every country, your Samsungs etc would be a lot more expensive.
But even among them I'm sure there's plenty bread-and-butter 9-to-5ers, just in slightly posher professions.
One thing that convinced me that the company would tolerate it was that women returning from maternity leave often worked a three day week, so there was good precedent from a management perspective. And my female colleagues also persuaded me that it was doable.
The biggest challenge I found was having to work on projects that had frequent and unpredictable interactions with customers / stakeholders. I didn't mind occasionally swapping my days around to accommodate interactions, but there was one project that I would have enjoyed in terms of the work, but which I stepped back from because its timings were so unpredictable. This was probably the main problem with non-standard hours.
I really doubt a 10 hour work day is more productive than an 8 hour day for most people. You're tired by the end of the day anyway.
I started working ~1.5hrs early in the morning just so I could get my coffee/hackernews routine out of the way and really get my head in to the work, then by the time stand-ups and meetings start I'm ready for a break and helping my team. Do an extra 30min at the end of the day wrapping things up and there's your extra two hours being used productively.
I'm actually already working this schedule (5 days/week) due to lack of senior staff at the company, I just want to formalise it and get Mondays off...
If I was purely coding my own tasks all day I would probably not get as much use out of the extra time, but my work is varied enough now that it's not an issue.
I actually learnt two lessons:
4 days a week is something I'm looking forward when I have a profitable side project.
5 days x 6 hours imo is better than 5 x 8 hours, better to be less tired and maximize next day's most productive hours than to be tired and burn out eventually
I feel like most office jobs are fairly accommodating about flexible time for chores these days. I work a 5-day week, but I don't think I've ever used vacation days to go to the DMV or the dentist either (~15 years as a white-collar worker in various parts of the US, multiple industries and levels).
Whereas in normal years, for all the jokes you'd like to make about British teeth, I go to the dentist every 6/9/12 months (according to ~how short of cash he is~ his recommendation) - but going by HN comments and films et al. 'the DMV' seems an even popular day out!(?)
Many American families have multiple vehicles. Usually both parents work, and when children are old enough they get a hand-me-down car. So, it's not unusual to have to manage 3+ vehicles. Depending on when registration is 'due' one could visit from 1x to 3x a year.
There are online resources, but to pass the air quality tests you must appear in person. The only way around this in my state is own vehicles which are exempt (pre-1974, and motorcycles), or be in a county which is exempt (most of the land area of the state, but not where most people live). I only know this because my project car is from 1972: I just pay taxes online and they mail me my registration and stickers.
Add into it that DMV visits are common-denominator and tend to be unpleasant (long wait times, confusing processes, having to start over if you mess up... then wait in the line AGAIN) and I think that's why you may see so much talk about it. FWIW, I think there are very few people who enjoy this. It's a past-time, but not one we choose.
Obviously passing a driving test etc requires an in-person appointment.
Definitely not.
It's often said along the same lines of "I need to go to the mechanic", where it's something that you need to do, but is miserable.
The DVLA does appear to fill the same role, but more efficiently. Many of the things it appears you can do online require you to go in in person (Well, pre-covid at least. I don't know about now.), even better, the DMV got caught selling data about people who had to use it.
For a comparison, last time I got a license change I waited in line 10. freaking. hours. On a Saturday.
At my current company, we are explicitly allowed to schedule work hours off for these.
It was as stereotypical as you can imagine: small business, wasted inordinate amount of time and resources doing pointless things, insane processes, run by a husband and wife who were largely intolerable (the highlight was hearing the wife tell me that she didn't let her daughter participate in sports at school either because she thought it would turn her into a homosexual or was a plot by homosexuals to groom her), one of my co-workers started the day two hours early and finished at the same time...I have no idea why, and (ofc) the people who ran the business disappeared frequently (for some reason, the husband went somewhere every Friday afternoon...it wasn't work-related, and he repeatedly brought up the fact that he was allowed to do this unprompted...no-one could work out where he went)...
...there are real places like this.
This also works in reverse. If I work on Sat/Sun for some system maintenance then my manager tells me to swap time off during the week. But in my experience, What usually happens is I work my full week anyway because something important arose and I push that "time off" to the next week until I forget I had it.
Friday you are less inclined to start anything big because you've got the weekend coming up. Monday you are getting back into the flow.
My WFH has been weird because I'm basically unsupervised. I've found that my work productivity has fallen off a cliff.
Working in the evening instead of daytime.
Specially in hot ass countries/cities.
I mean really, do most modern jobs really depend on sunlight anymore?
Right now most people's daily cycle is "Rest -> Work -> Leisure -> Rest"
We should give "Rest -> Leisure -> Work -> Rest" a try.
Some other radical ideas: Let people alternate between 2 jobs every week. Like say being a waiter one week then a store clerk the other week. Most professions like cashiers etc could easily handle this. The benefit to workers would be the option to gain more experience/networking/mobility and a safety net of always having a backup job if you lose one.
That's not how the math would work out.
Suppose you make $100k in 5 days gross and pay 40k tax, keep 60k net.
Suppose you drop to 80k gross, and suppose that the 20k you lost would otherwise have been taxed by 50%. That means you'd drop to 50k net, from 60k. That's a 16% drop, not a 10% drop.
But agreed, your argument still holds on principle, due to the tax rate the drop in net income will be smaller than the drop in time, which is a great argument!
However, there are other perspectives you can take as well. One is favorable for your argument, e.g. the drop in net salary (16%) comes at an increase of 50% of your weekend (from 2 to 3 days).
But also unfavorable, for example, perhaps your 'fixed' living expenses (e.g. rent, insurance, basic food selection etc) comes out at 30k net a year. Dropping from 60k to 50k, means your disposable income for recreational expenses (or deferred recreational expenses, through savings) drops from 30k to 20k, or 33%.
That's the downside of the whole story I haven't seen anyone mention in this thread yet. Particularly at lower salaries, fixed expenses can swallow up almost the entire paycheck leaving very little for savings, trips overseas to explore the world, fun things like hobbies, gaming etc. A lot of people spend 70-90% of their paycheck on rent, healthcare insurance etc and have 10% left over, taking off 1 day a week can really cut into that disposable income much more than 16% or 20%.
I also feel it'd be looked down upon when I (30) would do it. If I was say 53, or say I had kids, it'd be much more normal. But if you're taking time off without kids at 30, you're really kind of signalling you value leisure more than work and more than money. That's a very normal thing of course, but for a corporate environment looking to execute on a long list of deliverables, they'll not be keen to put their trust in such a person to drive that process.
And of course, it must be recognised that purely for financial reasons it's not going to work for everyone.
I don’t think I can ever go back to the Silicon Valley corporate churn. I’d rather be careful with my cash than be flush with RSUs and dream of living my life. I’m 36 and I’m living my life NOW, not in some far off dream after two decades of churn.
I feel bad that most people don’t get this opportunity. I really think we need to change our work norms to allow for this. What is the point of life if we spend it always working? I’ve been very productive at work. I’ve designed and built a whole solar powered farming robot vehicle (no tools, just the autonomous vehicle so far) in 18 months working 20-25 hours a week. Does one individual really need to be more productive than that? (You can if you want, but do we all NEED to?)
We most often use this policy to take a few hours off during a day when needed to take care of errands. It's nice to be able to schedule around doctor's offices, bank and school hours.
My sister worked a 9/9s schedule at a previous job (9 hour shifts with every other Friday off) and also found it very useful.
In my experience most white collar businesses do a "wink and nod" sort of arrangement for the sorts of things where you need to be in late or out early so that you don't burn sick time on them. IMO the real benefit of PTO is that you can do things like take the mondays/fridays surrounding holiday weekends off without worrying about whether or not you will have the requisite hours to take a week of vacation in summer and around the holidays.
Poor retention and high churn is a HUGE problem in most tech companies as half the people generally know very little about what they're working on.
it was so good for my productivity and mental health that when we returned to full pay i negotiated to continue the pattern but switch from 4/8 to 4/10. No objections.
On the other hand, longer shifts mean fewer handoffs, and there can be errors there as well...
We are now off entirely on Fridays and we may stay that way. But currently that is my day to help kids with at-home schooling. It's still a blessing, but not currently useful time to get much else done. Hopefully schools can reopen here safely in the coming weeks and months.
My brother works as a paramedic, and instead of the typical 24 hours on, 48 off, his station works 48 hours on and four days off. It's a sleepier town, so they are able to get in sleep as needed while on shift. He seems to end up with one to two month-long stretches of time off each year just by taking a few shifts off.
There are some downsides, like working some holidays or some full weekends when others are off. But many of his co-workers have second jobs or own businesses to fill in their time.
Most of us have to heavily plan to get one or two weeks off in a chunk, and are usually used for vacations away that seem to add more complexity to life.
Having just that extra weekend day can help alleviate the rushed feeling of the weekend.
I also bet, business outcomes would be improved on a 4/8 for 80% pay system. At least some of that work output on the lost day would be shifted to the other 4 days--since work tends to expand to fit the time allowed.
Without a study of white collar productivity decrease from a 4/10, I cant accept the statement as a "common sense" premise.
I do better remote sitting on my coutch until dinner programming away and write off fridays...because nobody notices that most of the organization becomes nonresponsive after standups at the end of the week.
Otherwise it is probably a loss.
I work definitely more than the average in my company, although not by much, and the weekend/holiday bit not many people do, although some do it. I find it that I am extremely productive the whole time: I constantly create new things and I get a lot of ground covered. It often happens it is 6pm, I have an idea, and instead of going back I push it. 2 hours go by but the idea is finallized and I know tomorrow I can start something new.
I don't feel burn out, but genuinely interested in my job. I read a book every night before sleep, exercise for 30 mins after work, and spend time with my partner. I thoroughly enjoy weekends, I often work on side projects and hobbies, and I do chores with my partner, and also speak with relatives.
The only reason I would ever need more time is if I have kids one day. But otherwise if I had to work 9 to 5 I would feel like shit because I will be watching netflix for like 3 hours in the evening, which is what I used to do in my first job. So constraining myself actually is great for not wasting: I am direcrly converting my time for knowledge and money, until I need to have kids.
Long story short, some people find extra free time pointless unless they have something meaningful like kids to spend it on. I do believe a lot of people are not willing to work so much, but to those that want free time, I will tell you this: be honest with yourself if you are making the most of it.
But we had to take either monday or friday off and we had to work together with our teams to make sure we weren't all off on the same day.
It was great! 3 day weekend every week, the ability to do chores and errands that are much easier to do on a weekday than a weekend, and cutting out a 1/5 of the commute made a big difference in both sanity and money.
But the best part about the whole thing was that because there were some people out on mondays and fridays all meetings were scheduled on tuesday, wednesday, thursday - and you knew that if you had fridays off then your monday was free and clear to get actual work done. It made a huge difference to productivity and morale.
I have tried to convince every company ive worked for since to do it and none have, but I will keep trying.
I don't understand the rationale behind this, doesn't your Thursday then become your "Friday"? What is it about Friday that makes Monday harder?
That same job had a two hour commute, but the 4-day thing meant it worked out fine. A two hour commute 5-days a week would have been miserable.
The reason I nominally worked 30 hours/week might also be interesting. It was supposed to be less, but it turns out that none of the systems at work - payroll, insurance, PTO, stock vesting - were set up for a permanent salaried employee working less. I get the impression that many companies in the US are like that. You're either salaried, full time (or close to it), full benefits, or you're hourly with no benefits at all. We need to get better at supporting work arrangements other than those standardized in the early industrial era.
It still seems to come down to circumstance and whatever an employee manages to negotiate with their employer. "I'll take a 20% pay cut to work 4 days a week!" could just as easily be met with "No, our investors won't be happy with a longer roadmap."
Wish me luck.
Unlimited holidays means that on top of the 30 days that most companies provide, you get 5-10 extra. At most I took 43 days in a year.
- arrive Monday 4am, work 24h
- rest for 24h tuesday, stay at nearby hotel
- work 2nd 24h shift wednesday, crash at hotel for a couple hours Thursday morning
- drive home Thursday, recouperate
- friday, saturday, sunday off
So firstly, a lot of this is incredibly subjective (so far) and somewhat difficult to measure accurately (again, so far), however based on past history of movements to decrease work days (probably most famously Ford), I'd wager to say there's a good chance that this is true now, as it was then. My personal bias would definitely lean on the side of it having a positive effect on productivity.
With that said, while the jury is out on the actual productivity increases, I don't think there's any doubt about the benefit of the extra weekend day. For example, it would probably be difficult to find anyone that would find positives in Saturday being a work day again, and having to work 6 days instead of 5.
Anyway, that being said... There are some subjective and anecdotal observations from my perspective that I feel are important to consider in this discussion, and to me even more important than the elusive "productivity" aspect. What I've observed is that taking time off to distance from the daily issues, especially during times of stress tends to have a positive effect on being able to solve problems effectively. The instinct while faced with a problem is to keep hammering at the problem until it is solved, and while that works for a while, over a longer period of time, or over prolonged periods of working without a break, I've usually witnessed either myself or collogues get frustrated and less engaged in their work, or making poor decisions that wouldn't otherwise be made.
My intuition based on this tells me that it is important to give the brain time to rest and disconnect from a problem in order to come up with better _quality_ solutions. So my hypothesis would be that if you want better _quality_ results, it's better to give people more time to rest and disconnect.
But that's just based on what I've read and observed so far. I would love to see more research into this, especially more nuanced takes on it. We need to be clear about what we mean by "productivity" in these discussions, and also realize that sheer output does not give us a full picture of this subject. _Quality_ matters just as much, if not more in some circumstances.
Especially if my meetings are condensed into TWTh, I can have a 3 day workweek at FT salary with proper planning & practices.
Fun game, I can't believe commissions are free now!
I know it is off topic, but please explain this comment a little. I'm fascinated as to why anyone would trade butterflies, nice as they are.
I would say it is purely entertainment because as a saying goes, "if your options trading strategy involves the name of animals, just walk away"
I once walked into a mall (pre-pandemic) in the middle of a weekday and all the retail stores were open...but empty. It seemed like a massive waste of resources just to keep the stores open when customers were all at work.
Can you imagine what the uproar would be like if a government service was only offered 1AM-9AM?
In my particular case, I loathe the company I work for; I get to work on and lead interesting projects and work with good teams and customers, yes - but the system behind it all is absolutely rotten to the core, laden with bureaucracy, brimming with ludicrously rigid rules, and filled with daily demands to comply with this or that, making life difficult for developers in particular, and never, ever valuing individuals. Yep, I'm a little bitter ;)
Truth is, aside from inertia, I stay with the same company for 2 reasons: I'm fully remote (or near enough), and have a 4-day week with 7.5h days.
Personally I'm on a '7 hour day', lunch isn't counted (they changed it a couple of years ago, some shenanegans over overtime and extra holidays or something). My actual worked hours are somewhat different, it's outcome based and self scheduling.
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1209-forbes-misses-the-point-...