The Case for a Shorter Workweek
bbc.com
bbc.com
Everybody knows how 5 day work weeks are. You get back to work Monday and it may take a little while to pick up where you left off Friday but surely by midday you are back in the groove.
Your two days off for the weekend seem like barely time to get your own stuff done.
When we went to 4 day weeks it was a great boon to my weekends. If I wanted I could take a day to completely goof off and unwind from my work week and still have two weekend days for my own projects.
Monday though took more effort to remember where I'd broken off on Thursday. It might take all day to get my mojo going especially if I had been working on something trick like hunting a difficult big.
At 3 day work weeks and 4 day weekends I've got more "me" days than "work" days. It no longer feels like work is the main thing I do and my personal projects have to be fitted in the cracks. Now my projects are the main things and work feels like the side project.
When I get in Monday I will have completely forgotten what I was working on Wednesday. I have to end Wednesday by writing a detailed note to my future Monday self explaining exactly what I was working on. If I don't write that note it might take until sometime mid Tuesday before I'm caught up to where I was last Wednesday and making progress.
Not suggesting you’d want to do that, I’m just wondering how you think it would play out.
I've thought of trying a schedule of working a 5 day week, a 5 day week, taking a week off, working a 5 day week, and taking a week off, and repeating that pattern.
When I first started contracting full-time, I took a presumably similar route to others who made the transition and brought on my old, full-time employer as a new, part-time client for three days a week. When my "Monday" rolled around (was contracted Tue-Thu) I was so amped to get into work that I had previously felt largely indifferent about. Since I was suddenly able to focus my own time on my own projects, it was easier to stay motivated and involved when it came back to "working". The next few months consisted of some of my post productive days with that company.
I'm not really good for more than 6 hours of any sort of challenging mental work in a day, anyway. I also don't think that "hours" are a particularly good thing to track for software engineers -- we have ticket tracking and project management software that track effort already.
The bit about being rewarded with a Friday off reminded me of how I'd try to get my homework done during study hall in school, so I wouldn't have to do any at home. In the real world, the reward for getting your work done early tends to be more work. Maybe that shouldn't always be the case.
The friend group I hung with treated me like an outcast and out of about 6 only one is still friends with me some decade later. I also had to pick and choose family get togethers and some of the last years of my parents life.
I did it because I saw their health ailing and I wanted to be able to fully support myself and my brother by being more than a minimum wage retail worker, it just sucks that that coincided with them all ailing so rapidly and eventually passing by the time I was a senior in college.
That's because in a well managed business there's always more work than workers. Schools on the other hand aren't designed to fully load students (perhaps they should be to keep advanced students from getting bored).
If you are constantly putting out more and better quality work than the average, the reward is you ask for more pay or you switch to a higher paying job.
I don't see why that's a problem, provided there's not a lot of constant sandbagging when giving estimates.
Hours based work isn’t perfect but it means you can put in the average amount of effort and have consistent work hours without stressing over every task and if the estimate is perfectly accurate.
This essentially leads to the same result as when estimates are actually estimates, except that I might feel free to overestimate my capabilities a little, but I'd never want to overcommit at all. In other words, if you just let me estimate instead of commit, you're likely to get more work out of me most of the time.
I pretty much agree with the article. Especially in knowledge-intense office jobs, people can't really be fully productive across the day or week. People have different energy cycles throughout the day, and we're biologically just not designed to focus this stretch of time. So a number of hours is "busy time", sitting out the hours. A collective form of madness that serves nobody.
Anyway, in my case I noticed that in this line of work, your work load won't scale down by 20%. You still need to output the same productivity as somebody working 5 days.
This does mean that the 4 days become more intense. There's little slack in it. Further, it forces you into a more aggressive stance in rejecting distractions, items of low importance, and so on.
One thing I learned in doing so, is that I was much too afraid before in rejecting time wasters. I now generously decline meetings, and if truly of low importance, don't even explain why. Your problem, not mine. Only my direct manager can lay a claim on my time, others must convince me of the purpose.
I'm in the lucky position to work in a fully output-based role, based on sprints and clear deliverables. One week before the new sprint, we agree in detail what gets delivered. And then I deliver, consistently and reliably. I take this extreme reliability very serious, as I don't want to be seen as some part-time worker or somebody not doing their part.
Once this reputation is established, barely anybody can even tell that I'm not in on Fridays.
I strongly wish for a better work balance at a societal level. We have plenty of people to divide work amongst, combined with automation it would only be a logical and humane progression.
It is a type of progress we've ignored. We work longer, not shorter. We work as a couple, not as a single breadwinner. We have less job security than ever. The combined stress of a life long quest and grind for economic relevance is the greatest source of human suffering remaining. Which is not to imply that all work is suffering, rather the long hours, conditions, insecurity and imbalance of it.
If I may rant on, a sane work life may be the only way out of the climate crisis. It will inevitably lead to pressure on our material wealth, our lifestyle, our stuff. People won't accept this sacrifice, unless...
...you exchange it for a better life in other ways. More economic security and a less existential stressful life in return for less material wealth. I'd take that deal.
Is the nature of your work very predictable, or, do you tend to work overtime if you're not able to get a task finished when you estimated you could?
Our estimation process is quite mature by now. I break down a larger technical solution into smaller pieces, which are then individually estimated by the team. Any potential pitfalls, risks and challenges I already researched, so they're calculated in. It leads to very few surprises.
In the rare case that me or the team was way off, say something takes twice as long than expected, then we just move the second half to the next sprint. Some might find that a "luxury", we do not. Because we know that when we double load people, they stress out and make mistakes. Quality isn't optional in our game, we deploy to millions of consumers.
Our rhythm is so predictable, that if you'd take away my agenda entirely, I'd still know exactly what to do on any given day.
Make more bricks!!
Soon, the games started on inflating story points, etc, and i soon made my way out of there...
> Soon, the games started on inflating story points, etc, and i soon made my way out of there...
Are you saying your response to your manager's observation was to crack the metaphorical whip and demand more from them? And that they adjusted their estimates upward in response?
Do you think they were actually at their maximum sustainable velocity before?
Would you have done it differently if you could go back in time and change what you did?
However, the team did inflate the points for some stories, and then moved some stories across sprints from time to time.
i hated the slavedriver attitude, and it was one of the reasons I left.
> barely anybody can even tell that I'm not in on Fridays.
> I took the pay cut myself.
Why take a pay cut here? Why is your effort worth less then the guy who uses his time less efficiently?
It seems such large sweeping changes require a culture shock. Covid did that for remote working. All the age-old remote work skeptics (read: conservative managers) now were forced to do it themselves. Even if they considered it to be terrible, they were forced to find a way to make it work. And it would work. Now you can't dial it back. People with job options will demand it going forward.
I have no idea how to do this for shorter work weeks at equal pay though.
It's going to be a very tall order. Even with WFH and demonstrable positive effects on productivity metrics almost across the board - there are still companies clinging to the old way of doing things and employers demanding return to office.
The most common response to a 4 day work week is going to be "no one else is doing so we can't afford to either - if anything we need you to work harder!" (may be familiar sentiment to some who advocated for WFH over the years).
Unfortunately, like you, I can't think of a scenario to force companies to wake up and realize that reducing hours can actually increase productivity. Similar to WFH, even when companies look at the data themselves, they decide against it.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...
We really are in some kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare where workers time is being sucked away for no reason at all.
There's also huge differences in work culture between the US, Europe, Asia.
For the individual worker, I do think there's room to stand your ground. People are too afraid. If you prove your value consistently and reliably, you may still not be irreplaceable, but it allows you to defend the line, if only you're not afraid to do so.
When my manager tells me to work harder, I tell him to fuck off. I'll have a box of ammo ready to show my large contributions. Not only will I tell them to fuck off, I'll them they're a shitty planner.
I flip the burden. They can now fire a good worker which will be very costly to replace, or respect my boundary.
They tend to respect the boundary. It's all bluff. And you even gain respect for not being a pushover.
Should it not be bluff, I'm unafraid. I live by the words of my father. They can take your job, but you still have your hands and brain.
But they won't fire you. When you stand like an oak instead of a twig in the wind, people will respect you.
Can you do this at McDonalds? No. But you can in a high-value complex job.
I feel like a part of the issue is a belief that competition is necessary for an economy to function. Some people say to themselves, "I need to work longer because I need to be competitive against other people doing the same work".
Moving from a competitive mindset to a cooperative one would help everyone. What's the point of being in competition if anybody loses? We all win when we help each other win. Why can't economics function from a starting assumption of cooperation instead of competition? How about instead people just do what they need to for its own intrinsic value instead of maximising income.
I find that there is a wealth in life that is not dependent on economics at all. Relationships with others and a relationship with myself. In my experience people are generous by nature, with their time, company and help.
Competition is completely unnecessary and is a choice that people choose to believe in. It is possible to work from a mindset of just helping others instead.
[0] https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/culture/the-longest-ec...
If there was an unlimited supply of desired resources, then people would not compete. But a limited supply of the desired resource will necessarily lead people to compete.
Unfortunately, it might be human nature that that desired resource is power, whether it be on a micro or macro scale.
The competition institutes we have today are very recent and made up.
A business or organization does not naturally occur, and hasn't for 99.99% of our existence. Same for countries.
Perhaps the most telling sign of it is the increasingly old age at which people have children, if at all.
So I can only agree. Life value, for lack of a better word, has been ignored too much. We race to acquire stuff and invent new stuff to acquire. Family, arts, personal health, nature...the very core of our humanity is side-lined as a "hobby" at best.
That's why I believe in a UBI-like solution. Consider it a technical belief, not a political one. I believe that we should have the technical capability and scalability by now to provide most people on this planet at the very least a humane existence.
Let's for the moment assume it to be a reality. A secure bottom. This eliminates the need for cut throat competition which people engage in as an economic survival instinct.
Instead, people are free to naturally align with their true interest, passion and skills. Now combine this with free education. Education is mostly just content, there's zero need for it to cost so much.
You'll probably consider it an utopia, but let's continue our day dreaming. In this world, people are not subject to the lottery of nations. Your place of birth deciding on your economic faith. Or the economic status of your family. At an elementary level, you're equal in access the opportunities.
The only variable part being genetics, the unique talents (and flaws) given from birth. The little boy from Nigeria might become a rocket engineer. The variability in given talents aligns beautifully with evolution theory.
Imagine the untapping of human potential currently lost. Imagine the natural motivation people would have if they could align with their passion without being distracted by basic survival. You wouldn't need a whip to force a contribution, it would come natural. You'd then discover that people are good and want to contribute to the world.
It sounds like a John Lennon song, and a cynic can think of a million reasons why it won't work. And that's exactly our problem, a cynical world view. Accepting that the world is dark and will only get darker.
I'm asking genuinely : is it become acceptable for peers to expect a ability to request and get meetings with peers with such a expectation - even without any justification, as I have understood the above - that it's not usual and even difficult to refuse?
I think people have a natural goodness in them, a will to help or contribute when somebody asks for it. And opposite to that, they feel bad when declining such requests.
That's why I decline based on the type of request. When somebody rudely plans over my lunch and calls the invite "meeting", I don't respond at all. Not even with a decline.
If the request is polite (we are blocked in our progress and really could use your help), I would go out of my way to somehow help them.
If we ever got to a 3 day work week would mean that (gasp!) work isn't the main thing we do! Our entire culture would change.
Most people are too boring to evade the allure of climbing hierarchies though.
Realistically, if you’re a salaried employee working from home at a fortune 1000 or startup in the US, you’re basically always kind of working; nights and weekends, when there’s important stuff happening or you don’t have plans.
This gives you a 239-240 working days per year. This is only 15 fewer days than a standard year, which can easily be made up by working 2 hours more per 4 days or 8.5 hours per day.
People talking about macroeconomics often talk about how markets respond to certain pressures - as this gets further from the academics it gets watered down and that response is assumed to be instantaneous - but it isn't. In theory a payroll tax on the employer and income tax on the employee have the same long term economic outcomes - in practice that long term realization takes so long to work through the system that the effects of decreased take home usually end up being swallowed many times over by inflation before anyone feels any affect of it.
So I'd take a look at senior employees which tend to be a pretty curmudgeonly bunch that have been through wage freezes and non-monetary compensation circuses before and will jump ship if they get a wiff of it happening again. Companies won't feel any loss of revenue for a few years after work weeks are slashed - it takes a while for consumer spending to adjust to lower income - instead we'd likely eat a fair bit of inflation (which has been unhealthily stagnate for a while now) and everything would move on from there.
If the companies are responding to a natural decrease in effective revenue it'll be staggered and upstream companies will be shielded from it for longer - so you'll likely see a value shift from customer facing companies to B2B companies aaaaand - any wage slashing that goes on will just reinforce that value shift as valuable employees jump ship.
All these ripples that go through the economy do so slowly - and no MBA worth their salt is going to say (on the monday after switching to a reduced workweek) "Welp all our employees know this will eventually impact us so lets just slash their wages now". No, they'll wait and see if their business is able to ride out the shifting terrain without decreasing wages since that's a more stable approach and puts the company at less danger - and if that company happens to need to adjust employee costs it won't be evident until multi-year contracts are re-negotiated to lower rates and customers refuse to renew since their pocketbooks are empty.
Economics moves sloooow - maybe it'd be better to imagine the invisible snail of the market!
You mean, as long as we're personally beyond entry-level? My own career and compensation isn't my only concern.
I hasn't really thought about the zero experience folk though - thanks for mentioning it!
Later, I learned that full time employment is 35 hours, and insurance/benefits for part-time work gets really complicated for the stupidest of reasons. So despite the stupid responses, employers actually do have some obstacles to overcome even if they want to implement shorter weeks.