The non-linear workdays changing the shape of productivity

Something that the software industry has to assimilate eventually is that unless your organization is very efficient, there's not a big difference between working for 6 or 10 hours a day.

Scrum / agile / whatever as understood by most companies does not prevent context switching, synchronous work that could be done asynchronously, and interruptions. When added together, those things shrink your team's capacity massively. I'm talking real capacity, not some magical number made up at some meeting.

Work could be relatively linear. The people who can make it happen just don't care or are clueless about it.

Honestly I’ve been longing for a linear workday. Before kids, and before the pandemic, I used to work 9-6 and I had the most fantastic work life balance. Distance running, rock climbing, etc.

Now I have “flexible” work hours, and it’s all cramming in whatever I can late at night so that I can accommodate the schedule of kids’ daycare. If we didn’t have flex hours, one of my wife or I would have no choice but to quit to manage the kids, and we’d have less income but probably be happier. But since we have the choice it’s all too tempting to keep burning the candle at both ends and the middle.

>In decades past, non-linear workdays used to be fairly uncommon.

They still are fairly uncommon. Source: traffic jams.

But for real. There is a trend to be a little more flexible, yet most places in the world continue to require the most obvious candidates for both remote and asynchronous work to function 'hybrid' and synchronously. It's incredibly telling Tuesdays and Thursdays are the days everything ends up jammed here.

If that wasn't enough, the 'we are doing Scrum' movement heavily pushes synchronous stand-ups and other meetings in the morning. Since most places also require video (yuck), good luck trying to just sit at a meeting and then go back to bed. If your ideal is to work the latter half of the day, we're still a far cry from normalizing it. I'd wager you can replace 'Scrum' with something else equally applicable in other disciplines.

Worst part is, we're still forcing the workerbees to fit the 9-5 rhythm, but the services are also working on a 9-5 rhythm. So how does Worker Bee use a service only available when they should be working? Not their problem, that's your problem (no seriously, who designed this structure?)

A great way to get burned out as work encroaches on every aspect of your life. No thank you.

I struggle immensely with that. Knowing that I will "have to" work tonight is a source of stress and I'm incapable of loosening until I am done for the day. Iwl want to go to work, do my duty, and be done with it. I don't see this as an improvement, but as a work around instead of effectively moving towards less work.

To be completely honest, with cognitive labor, i.e. what programmers and other "knowledge workers" do, the relationship between time spent working and productive output is completely erased. In contrast with the factory and plant work, where it's pretty easy to say that in N hours a worker can produce Y units, knowledge work can't be reduced to value/time spent.

Anyone who has been programming for very long and been asked to give and adhere to time-based estimates knows this problem. The best we can do is look at a task and say how big or complicated it looks, but putting an hour or day number on it is impossible.

non-contiguous?

I know I’m being puerile, but who figured out how to proceed through time nonlinearly? How did you do it?

Something can be *lazy synchronous* for instance you can write some code now, stop for an hour and start again, but you still need to be sync-ed with others in a few-days time frame in general. You can pack customers orders at an irregular peace but they want them delivered so you should anyway produce something fast enough. Something MUST be synchronous, a doctor can't cure a patient asynchronously. A dentist can't fill a tooth cavity asynchronously with the patient.

That's can be called flexible scheduling, the opposite of the most current industrial just-in-time model. Drop the just-in-time model means more smartness, knowledge, decision power is needed at every level of the process, like Toyota win against Ford, like we have done in the past and we have tried to stop in the relatively recent time to centralize power.

The centralization theory was designed basically because some see automation as a way to satisfy their thirst for power, cutting intermediate hierarchies and rule as ancient absolute monarch, formally with the justification that dictatorship make decisions faster then Democracies. Such theory prove again to be a scam, we can't sustain for long. Complex hierarchies of course have their issues, but thanks to automation and TLCs we can overcome many of them. Only we need *distributed* knowledge, culture, power, like the ITs of early pioneering days have foresee for a bright future. Unfortunately modern management/politicians/finance cohorts hate such model as they hate Democracy.

The real fallacy is that yes, dictatorships are faster IF they came from a non-dictatorship background. Nazi scientist realize a big advance in knowledge BUT they was not born/educated under the nazi regime. That's the point. It's about time to switch from the "infinite growth model" to the "infinite evolution model".

small but important correction...

> However, when society industrialised, a rigid, five-day, 40-hour workweek arose in factory settings

ummm... no. More like the 6 day 16 hour per day work-week arose in factory settings.

The five-day, 40-hour workweek was fought and died for by the labor movement.