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Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

This reads a bit like deliberately aiming for Parkinson's law. "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

However, I agree to some extent. I'm especially opposed to the concept that there should be 8 productive hours in a day. I sincerely believe that this is for most people not possible in creative knowledge work, which includes software engineering. So, if you have 5 productive hours of engineering and finished your goal and are in line with expectations, there shouldn't be a need to drain yourself to keep going, but rather spending your extra time on something else like job-related learning is a great way to prevent mental fatigue.

This is especially true as there can be very different "energy distribution" between people. One person can achieve in 4 productive hours what another can in 8. But one works in productive bursts and the other in sustained effort. The first can't just sustain or expand that burst to 8 hours.

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Honestly I feel like we could take it a step further. Most people are not going to put in five real hours of work every day either. Which makes the eight hour workday in some ways all the more ridiculous.

20 hours a week is pretty much the ceiling in my experience beyond big crunch times, special events, etc. If people really stepped back and thought about how much time they spend screwing around at work I think they’d be surprised, like how many people were surprised to discover how many hours they spend on social media apps when screen time tracking was introduced in phones.

I worked in the film industry for several years on the Hollywood side before switching over to commercial. 12 to 14 hour workdays were pretty much the norm. When I flipped over to the more commercial side, our workdays typically ended at 8 to 10 hours. And let me tell you, the commercial productions were exponentially more efficient. We got more done per day by a large margin, no matter the scale or complexity compared to the films I worked on. When you know there is less of a threat threat of the company extending the hours, you tend to get things done in the time allotted.

I think the norm of an 8 hour workday for salaried employees has more to do with excluding the possibility of your salaried “executives” taking on second jobs than it has to do with productivity.

In other words I think that the 40 hour work week is often structured more as a kind of quasi-indentured servitude than as a factory production shift.

There is also the alignment of schedules requirement for meetings, especially at higher levels. 8 hrs of productive work may not be required but calendar availability is to a certain extent, especially for higher-level roles.

100% agree.

Let’s be clear though: you may need 4 hrs but sometimes you may need 12. Creative professions can be that way. Reaching an understanding that both can happen and accepting that fact is important.

To a certain extent, it’s just recognizing the reality of what actually happens today anyway, rather than trying to fit into the 8hour workday concept.

> rather spending your extra time on something else like job-related learning is a great way to prevent mental fatigue.

Learning be as draining (or more) as work! Figuring out and internalising new stuff takes a lot of mental power. I don't know why people propose it as some lightweight way to fill the time.

I’d rather learn something useful that keeps me sharp then pretend I’m working.

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