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Comment by superfrank | Hacker News Reader

> Knowledge workers are wasting their lives at work when they could get the same amount done in fewer hours.

I'm curious what job you have. I'm a SWE who is in the process of moving into a manager role. As an IC, I am 100% certain that I could get the same amount of work done in a 24 hour work week. In fact, I was probably working less than that already and still meeting my deadlines and getting great reviews. As a manager for the same team, at the same company, I am now working a full 40 and there's no way I could cut 40% of my hours without a massive drop in output.

I'm not against a 4 day work week (in fact, my manager is talking about trying it out in Q4 for our department), but not everyone is an IC knowledge worker. There are plenty of roles where time does directly correlate with productivity, which is why this discussion is so complicated.

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> I am now working a full 40 and there's no way I could cut 40% of my hours without a massive drop in output.

I expect the following has at least in part occurred:

1. Your participation in "meetings" has increased significantly. Management tends to conveniently forget that interruptions have follow-on disruptions on focus. This is compounded by the Doorway Effect [0].

2. You don't trust your direct reports to handle the level of autonomy you had as an IC. You're being pushed by your management to provide status updates so you have to scurry around poking ICs.

3. You're still expected to have at least a portion of your IC output in addition to your management duties.

4. You've discovered the productivity of your team is a bell curve. Some can get work done quickly while others are much slower. This may be related to their skill/experience or their particular tasks.

5. You're pressured by management to split up work to deliver a baby in a month. This causes you to take on even more IC work to try to accede to such stupid expectations.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorway_Effect

Based off my interactions with my current management and my previous role where I straddled the line of IC and manager, the biggest identifiable time suck has always been meetings. Too long, too many, not well-enough defined agendas (or no agenda at all!), no action items, etc. Does that sound accurate? I'm curious as to where else the time could go.

I also do believe that this is somewhat intentional; to keep people too busy to think freely and effectively, so that a status quo is maintained.

Learning to manage is a lot like learning how to write a novel - at first you think you need all those words but then you can learn to cut fifty percent of what you wrote and still get the same point across. It’s kind of the same deal with the hours spent at work - identify and eliminate time sinks and suddenly you’re doing the same work in half the time.

I think this is a trigger for looking at the work you're doing, if it's actually necessary, or just busy work created by bureaucracy. If it is needed, should it be spread out among more people.

> If it is needed, should it be spread out among more people.

I agree, but that's kind of my point. There are plenty of people doing 40 hours worth of needed work right now. If we switch to a shorter work week, that work will need to be distributed to more people.

It's not an impossible problem to solve, but OPs comment seems to imply that there are no trade offs to be made if we switched to a 24 hour work week and I'm just trying to point out that that isn't the case.

Could you give me some productivity tips? I would love to become better at managing my time. I seem to always be able to fill my 40 hours and still feel like I didn't accomplish enough.

I'm a SWE working on a small team.

If you are working hard as a manager then you are doing it wrong. Your goal is to make sure the team is highly qualified and are moving in the right direction. And then shield the team from external BS. That’s it. It isn’t rocket science.

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