Ask HN: Have you effectively reduced work to ~4 days a week due to remote work ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you effectively reduced work to ~4 days a week due to remote work ?

18 pointsmam310 comments

Self explanatory I guess. How many of you are in some way "playing the system" by effectively having less "effective work presence", whether it's procrastination, or a conscious decision.

In some works, such as research work, i've personally discovered that it can actually be beneficiary, since forcing yourself to do stupid task to fill time is worse than taking time to think so it's really only half a "judgmental" question.

Share your experience :)

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Personally, I feel like I've become a bit "manic" about it. I'm "idle working" (ie sitting and not working, but also not enjoying myself either), and then I feel guilty about it and tend to work longer hours. I'm not sure what's wrong with me. I guess it's hard to find motivation, since the nature of my work at the job hasn't been rewarding mentally... So everything is a chore, even the stuff I used to enjoy.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a manager that doesn’t care at all about about how much time I’m working, as long as I’m consistently delivering what’s expected of me.

This has allowed me to optimize my day and at the end I end up working about 3 focus hours and that’s it.

Analyzing my days I realized that I’d spent way too much at “at work” but “not working” (i.e. time in HN…) so I ended up cutting all of that time, and if I’m ever not focused I don’t even try to be and switch to some other activity.

The end result is that, 2-3 hours of focus programming time a day, ~5 hours of meetings on a regular week and that is that.

The bane of this is managers that want a response from you at any time of the day within 5 minutes… but if you have somebody that is understanding and you are able to reach an agreement to compartmentalize your time (i.e. I won’t answer to messages until after lunch because it’s my focus/productive time) then good agreements could be reached!

I switched to a 4 day work week (8h a day) with a 20% gross cut, which is about ~17% after tax, in February.

I had some wrist pain/discomfort (especially on Thursdays and Fridays) which was distracting for me. Since then it completely stopped. Way more effective than all other approached I tried (more exercise, more sleep, healthier eating, frequent breaks).

Since then I have had one evaluation meeting with my manager and we both agree that I have the same or even slightly better performance since. I have never felt that time was the limit of the quality/quantity of my deliverables.

Not worrying about pain, and most important not having the pain/discomfort is the main factor on the improved productivity. And to be honest, I feel like I got a raise, I have more free time for myself and spend less in health and in peripherals or gadgets to try to reduce my discomfort/pain.

And I have motivation to learn tech stuff and create projects of my own after hours and in the weekends, which I have slowly lost since it was physically painful to do so on a 5 day work week for me. This is important to me because I have always had the curiosity and interest to learn and create outside work.

You have the same performance as when you were working 5 days or you are 4/5 as productive? If it’s the former, why did you take a pay cut?

My work hours can vary quite a lot - but I’ve been working remotely (mostly from home, I used to go to cafes sometimes when I first started out) for about a decade and a half.

These days I am about ~12 hours ahead of most clients (assuming us clients), so working the same hours isn’t really applicable all the time, and I’ll often do other stuff during the day and then work in the evening and get some overlap at the end of my “shift” as theirs begins.

I work 4 very intense days, including evenings, then prefer to disconnect over 3 days.

To me this is a better WFH model. It’s hard for me to “disconnect” and just walk away from the laptop for a few hours in the evening. So I’m like, why fight it? Just go all in on work 4 days (still total 40 hrs). Then begin to slack off on Fridays and begin to disconnect. Eventually going “all in” on disconnection over the weekend.

We gave our people the option of working 4 10 hour days instead of the usual 5 day week. Remote or in office, we dont care. Several people tried it, but all except one went back to the usual schedule.

The feedback was that 10 hours is just a bit too long.

This could probably work for some jobs,but if it requires strong mental focus, anything beyond 5-6h a day is just running on empty batteries.

I mean yeah, 10 hours is too long. That should be quite obvious. Why not just regular hours for 4 days?

Not really. First we never have a 4-day policy. Second, when WFH I tend to slack more or get impacted by housework frequently, ending up actually spending more time "working".

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