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Comment by MEMORYC_RRUPTED | Hacker News Reader

This won't be valid for everyone, but I'm getting more and more convinced that most (a lot of?) people don't "work" work 40 hours anyway. I'm not even mentally capable of doing 40 intense hours of focussed work. Not saying I don't have other tasks besides coding/thinking in that time, but honestly not for the full slot of time.

It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share and pretend like it's fine, but being honest and just doing the same stuff in say 32 hours and cutting out the cruft in between would be great.

Or maybe it's just my add that likes a bit more pressure, I don't know. But what I do know is that, even with a very relaxed employer that allows you to take your time and chill, go workout or play a game for an hour, I can't fully relax or disconnect knowing that I'm expected to do those 40 hours, regardless of how often they say it's fine.

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I agree we don't put in a full 40 hours. Unless someone is working a 1950's style assembly line (meatpacking plant for example) few will put in those 40 hours even in manual labor ---you're chatting, playing around, etc. for some time.

White collar work, is of course, way worse. There is a lot of slack time in between tasks and meetings and so on.

So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing.

> So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing.

Perhaps in manual labor, but I don't think this applies to white collar work. The limiting factor in output for this line of work seems to be intellectual exhaustion/burnout, not pacing.

Exactly. Setting aside the "metabolic drag" of working in a company (time spent attending mandatory trainings, recurring stand-ups/all-hands, etc), I think everyone working in software has more productivity in their 1st hour than in their 39th. The question is where does the N * f(N) first derivative turn negative. I think it's lower than 32 hours/week for software development myself.

I would agree with that figure.

Personally I assign development to more of a "creative" role than a lot of people tend to. Your productivity can often depend on your inspiration, moreso the more senior/architectural your role is.

I've certainly had moments where I accomplished more at one 3am moment of clarity than an entire week before - and I think most experienced developers can say the same.

White collar work in the modern era is also very unrestricted. I can slack off during most of the day if I want (and nothing urgent comes up) and my manager will neither check nor care. Because of 24/7 systems, I can completely bunk fridays while pretending to work from home and just staying online from the phone. It is totally irrelevant to my job. I hate fridays and usually work Sunday to Thursday in reality. Many people I know have this level of flexibility in many fields.

My “work hours” in my pay slip say 75.8 for every 2 weeks. I work maybe 50 hours in a busy week. It is irrelevant to my organization. So we are already there in terms of intellectual white collar work.

I feel that we are employed above of all to be available when it matters rather than to do a certain amount of work for the hours you are paid for. Compare it to a workshop with some tools, you buy a hammer not because you use it for 8 hours a day, but because when you need it, you can't do without it. If you go a day without needing to use the hammer, it doesn't mean that having the hammer in your shed is a waste of money.

If the company cared only about getting certain amount of work done in the time they paid for, they would hire an external. And continuing the analogy, it's usually more expensive in the long run to rent a tool even if you use it only a couple of times a month, as well as having to get used to unfamiliar equipment, having no records of how well the rental tool performed earlier.

My pace of work is burn myself out in the first 1-2 hours of every day and then procrastinate / go to meetings.

I'm so happy to be out of the office. Being able to work whenever works for me (and my ADHD brain) has probably given me at least 50% more output on average. Hours don't mean anything to me and nobody has ever complained about my work pace (rather the opposite).

Pretending to be busy in an office was torture.

Ugh. I do the opposite, as I am VERY much not a morning person, so I spend the first hour or two each day just fighting to appear awake. But then get enough done in my peak couple hours after lunch that I run out of work to do.

Wish the promise of "Salaried means we pay for the job to be done" ideal was more of a reality.

Wife’s a teacher. 40-60 hours at school. 10-30 hours outside of work doing lesson plans, report card comments etc. Always responding to emails from parents.

She Has collapsed before when total was getting above 80 for several weeks.

They want to promote her to VP. They work even more hours then she does.

I make more then triple what she does.

> 40-60 hours at school.

This part doesn't make sense to me, can you please explain (I'm genuinely asking). My children are in elementary school, and the day is from 8:45-2:30. I can understand being there at 8am(i definitely have seen teachers showing up later than this though), and when I've driven by the school at 3pm nearly all the cars are gone from the teachers lot (if not all). I can understand that there's a lot of work outside of school, but I don't understand how you could ever get to 60 hours at school.

Another fascinating thing about teacher claims of working hours is how technology apparently hasn't moved the needle at all. Lots of schools have moved to more and more online assignments that can be in large part automatically graded yet the time spend grading remains constant, or so they claim.

I bet most of the software they use just sucks. I've had some first hand folks tell me some of the bad stories of using various online grade book systems, and years ago I built one myself, and the accommodations people were requiring were... fairly complex. I suspect that at least in some cases I'm aware of, the vendor just lies and says "yes, we support X", gets the contract, and the end users (teachers) have to deal with the lie.

That's probably because IT busywork replaces manual busywork.

Before: you take a stack of papers, and go through each one with a red pen.

Now: you log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait... the stupid tests are auto-graded, but chances are there is still something you have to grade student-by-student, and that's now slower to do. Plus, obviously, the usual annoyances (got to update this, got to reboot that, my typing is 5WPM, etc etc).

"you log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait..."

You know, if someone wants to write The Next Great JS framework, give me one that above all else prioritizes latency and expert-level usage. There's no fundamental reason we can't have most of the nice things from the modern graphical web, and get to the legendary efficiency of those text-based consoles... but it will take some work and thought. (For example, you're going to need to insert yourself in between the user and the browser's concept of events, so you can buffer up commands the user is typing while their target hasn't quite loaded yet. This is one of the fundamental reasons why GUIs are less efficient than TUIs, though by no means the only one.)

This framework won't take over the world, but it sure would save a lot of people a lot of time.

Sooooo tiiiiirrrrreeeeed of programs that take seconds to do every... little... thing!

Also, the UX is usually awful.

I remember having to use educational software in college for a discussion board and it was terrible and sucky. I could only imagine what the teacher end of it looked like.

—-

For a comedic look at how this affects teaching, the new comedy show Abbott Elentary has an episode on this. It’s like Parks and Rec but at an inner city Philadelphia public school.

Ugh, should say Elementary.

Have you ever worked with education software? I have. It's awful.

Until 2011, my local school district was using a DOS-based attendance and grading system. No GUI.

In 2011 they switched to an internet-connected system that looked like it was built on Windows 3.1. Non-resizable text fields. Inability to tab from one field to the next. A tiny non-resizable window that you had to scroll manually with the scrollbar to enter data in all the fields, so to enter attendance for a whole class you had to scroll left and right with the mouse for each child.

It crashed every morning for months. Teachers would coordinate with each other to ensure they didn't overload the system.

If that's true, person in charge of purchasing is asleep at the wheel. With the most politically powerful union in the US, teachers could replace them if they wanted too (although the same union likely protects the jobs of the people who can't buy software).

Office hours, tutoring, mandatory training, meetings, clubs, etc. can really add up.

My wife’s school is big on community, which is great in some ways but leads to long days with staff expected to attend dances, games, etc.

My dad and ex-wife were both teachers.

My dad was up at 6 and at school for 7am. Worked 7am-3pm (8 hours). He did marking for an hour or two most evenings, and a solid chunk on the weekends. Probably 50 hour weeks. And that's after 20 years of teaching the same classes, so he had all the materials.

My ex-wife was brand new to teaching so had to develop curriculum on top of this. She worked 7am-5pm every day plus weekends.

Calling parents, dealing with kids with special needs, developing curriculum, marking, department meetings, making lesson plans, running extra-curricular activities or clubs, private lessons, doing paperwork or photocopying, etc etc, it all mounts up. There's a lot of behind the scenes work.

Now, some teachers simply don't do this. You can easily skate by, work the bare minimum 6 hour days, and not give two shits about the kids. But most teachers care about children and education (I mean, you don't become a teacher for the money).

Is there a consensus among teachers if year-around schooling will help or exacerbate this problem?

I haven't talked to any teachers about this specifically, but based on my impression of the school system and public philosophy around schools and teaching that I've gleaned from my wife and many friends who are teachers, I think it might help in the short term but be worse in the long term. The one thing that seems nearly constant is that expectations of teachers are always increasing. So I think eventually we'd end up back in a similar place except teachers would have to keep the pace year round rather than getting a couple months off in the summer.

Musk posted screens of his Elden Ring progress a couple weeks after launch. Given other players had to sink 60-80 hours in to get to the same point Musk was broadcasting, he was working 48 hours a day at his companies and on Elden Ring.

Bezos has given interviews about his habits. He works maybe 10-20 hours a week.

Billing 40 hours every week to run scripts that generate a Github repo structure in minutes has been profitable for me though. Not going to knock Musk and Bezos optimizing for themselves by gaming others agency.

Picasso offered a drawing in a napkin for $1M dollars, even though it took him 1 min to draw it. You know the gist. Bezos might do 20 hours a week of “work” because he scaffolded a giant organization around his brain, so he only needs to provide certain input. Besides, much of the non-work time, such as public speaking and so forth, is actually work.

Also the ultimate test is whether after confessing to your real contribution, people are ok. I don’t think any amazon employee was annoyed after hearing this so called interview, whereas is your company knew what you were charging them for, they would fire you.

He had 50 people invest tens of thousands each to build that scaffold.

He’s not a genius just well networked.

Idle idolatry of normal human beings with no effort to verify their real outputs creates an unfalsifiable truth Bezos is a lynchpin to reality.

Ooo oo I heard it through the grapevine, Bezos is not what you might call “divine”…

The rich did not invent science, engineering, and economic activity. Human behavior gives rise to those things organically. The rich are merely playing information awareness constraint games; a man named Farmer is a farmer, an engineer is an engineer, and there’s no reason to allow them agency to learn other things.

His value is rooted in traditions of political correctness to buy into that narrative, not immutable laws of nature.

Every worker faces the risk of their livelihood vanishing tomorrow. One slip of the tongue costing their job. Why are these guys insulated from the same?

Bezos parents were teenagers of no significant means. After they divorced, his mother married an "uneducated" (in the sense he had not attended college) Cuban immigrant, Miguel Bezos, again of no significant means. After Miguel graduated from the elite University of New Mexico, they moved to Houston so he could work for Exxon. During high school Jeff took on an elite internship working the morning shift at McDonalds.

It's not entirely rags to rich because gramps indeed did well for himself and had a nice big ranch out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. But it's pretty close to it, and overall a pretty cool story.

You stopped short of detailing the well documented part of 50 people chipping in 25k.

That alone is a testament to how the country has changed. How many McDonalds burger flippers have that social network now?

His childhood and his family greatly benefited from pre-Reagan social programs.

How sad if the mega-mega-billionaires were mega-mega-millionaires. The rich of their childhood got through high taxes ok.

If such taxation is immoral, let’s discuss then the advantages immoral taxation in the past provided them and accept them as less uniquely gifted and successful on their own then.

He didn't found Amazon in high school. Instead, alongside working at McDonalds, he also graduated valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and so on. He then graduated from Princeton (almost certainly on a full ride scholarship), and again graduated near the top of his class (a member of both Phi Kappa Beta and Tau Beta Pi) with degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science. From there he worked for 8 more years until he set upon founding Amazon.

That's a power balance issue far more than a fairness argument.

If my boss is happy to pay this amount for my level of work output, why should it matter whether I'm spending 40 hours or 4 doing it? In fact, to suggest otherwise is downright Marxist, asserting that the value of my labor is the time I spent doing it, rather than the value someone else is willing to pay.

Do you subscribe to the labor theory of value for goods, or just people?

If we "actually work" 32 hours out of 40 (80%), what is the likelihood that if we shift to a 32 hour max week, that the average person will only "actually work" ~26 hours (80% of 32) in this hypothetical future?

What if at least part of the 20% is spent doing social activities, water cooler conversations, etc. that enable the remaining 80% to flow more efficiently?

I’m all for a shorter workweek, but I definitely expect that the social aspect of a job is good for overall productivity. Maybe I’m weird, but I enjoy asking my coworkers how their weekend was prior to a meeting starting or (back when I was in the office) as we ran into each other in the hallway.

Same! You're definitely not alone, even if I do feel like a rare species these days. I really wish we were all going in two or three days a week. This constant wfh is driving me crazy.

People will tell you only lonely people think that way, but I think office socialization is a different kind of thing. At the office you meet and chat with people of all ages and different types. When you're with friends, you're probably hanging with a bunch of people more like yourself.

You're not weird. I am not like you, but as a manager it's been important for me to recognize that this isn't at all uncommon.

> I enjoy asking my coworkers how their weekend was prior to a meeting starting

It's foreplay but for work. Forework?

Reduce the hours in the day.

Most people structure their days based on what they want to accomplish (goal driven), rather than how to spread out work evenly across a fixed number of hours (time driven). So if someone knows that they are expected to deliver task A + B in one day then they will do it. If they have a 4 hour work day they'll do it in 4 hours and then happily clock off. If they have to do it in an 8 hour work day they'll do it in 4 hours and then waste time for the remaining 4 hours.

How does this align with the near-ubiquitous feelings that people generally feel overwhelmed? I.e., they have more goals then they have time

Given what I've seen during the pandemic, I'd think that part of the reason people feel overwhelmed is related to commutes. Getting an extra hour back in my day made me feel better. I'm not sure if working 5 days a week, but only 6.333... hours would have the same effect as working 8 hours a day for 4 days a week where you also have one less hour of commute time per day. On the 5th day, if you don't go into work, you don't just have 8 fewer hours of work, you also have 1 fewer hour of commuting.

I feel like this should be the norm.

Also, when we consider capacity to focus instead of just time spent at work, I think normal rate is 2 focus bouts of 1.5h each per day. You can get to 3 if you train, but not much more. (I got this from Hubberman's lab podcast, not sure what's the underlying research)

So if you decrease work time to 5h, you give 2x bouts of focus + 1h break between bouts and have 1h left for marginal stuff/meeting.

Maybe going up to 6h would allow for the extended stuff (email, meeting, discussion, lunch) But I feel like 8h just create a world where you need to waste time in the end, just because of physiological concerns.

I don’t think that would happen if there is actually a job to be done.

Because burn-out is the main driving factor behind the productivity changes, not the hypotheticals you are talking about. In engineering, people are burned out by friday, and even outside of engineering, people tend to phone it in by that point in the week because they are just done. They are operating at less than 50% mental or physical capacity. If you instead just give them that time to recharge, they'll get that much more done early in the week the following week. They'll also be in a better headspace because although you are only decreasing the days they work by 1/5th, you are increasing their uninterrupted weekend/family time by 1/3rd. In a more egalitarian society, you might imagine that ratio to be more like 1:1 to be fair.

At my previous startup we saw an 8% productivity _increase_ from moving to a 4-day work week, and this was across a variety of metrics like issues closed, lines of code, etc. We don't even know if 4 is optimal, it could be 3. Only way to find out is to try it.

My anecdotal experience doesn't support this. I worked in an org that shifted to a 9/80 schedule with a three day weekend every other week. Prior to this, Fridays always seemed to be the days where people coasted...they would come in kinda late, have a coffee break, then have a breakfast break, then an extended bathroom break, maybe get an hour of stuff done before an extended lunch. And of course, Friday afternoon meetings were frowned upon. After the change, this same behavior shifted to Thursdays, which used to be normally productive day.

Maybe they were burned out from the extra hour of the previous days, but considering the Thursdays of the remaining 5 day weeks didn't display this behavior, I doubt it. Now there was the complication that once management saw a dip in productivity, there was a near mutiny at the mere suggestion of going back to a normal workweek.

The implication is no matter how long/short the work week is, people will adjust to make the end a slack day.

Imagine the flipside though. Imagine you work every day of the week. Surely this would have lower productivity than having one day or two days of weekend unless we are to believe weekends don't have a rejuvinating effect. If you have a problem where a segment of your workforce is slacking off on the last day (whatever that may be), that is its own problem that will exist unless you have no days off (which would obviously be pathological and most likely illegal for other reasons). So I find this argument a bit trite, because it either already applies to your situation regardless, or you work at a company where people simply don't slack off the last day. And I do think this whole "people slack off on the last day" thing is very trumped up. I've seen plenty of examples of people finishing what they were expected to get done and tuning out at the end of the week, but I've seen much more scenarios where people have an unending mountain of work and their efficiency goes way down later in the day on thursday and for all of friday. I think this is the norm in most industries, and it can be solved with a 4-day work week.

>Surely this would have lower productivity than having one day or two days of weekend unless we are to believe weekends don't have a rejuvinating effect.

This seems to land in the area of untested hypothesis. Sure, we can speculate on all kinds of mechanisms. I could speculate that by going to 3 day weekends would lead to a bigger "rejuvination effect" and more productivity. But the data gathered from my org showed the opposite. Productivity went down. And now management had a lot of pushback to just get back to their baseline (more productive) schedule.

Now I'm willing to concede that it's going to be different industry to industry. It may very well work well in SWE and I think we see a lot of that bias in tech-centric circles. I also think it’s an error to assume it holds for most industries. My example was from an R&D area and not strictly software engineering. Do you, for example, think your doctors office would have more patient throughput if they went down to 4 eight-hour days? Or manufacturing? I'd be skeptical until I see the data. And I concede that a lot of work cultural differences also matter. And leadership matters. My original post was not claiming some definitive answer, just giving some pause to the sentiment that reduced hours is a generalizable rule to increase productivity*. I think a lot of people let their cognitive biases get the best of them and run with the idea.

* I also think "productivity" is the wrong way to frame the problem. Some things, like work-life balance, are a net good and worth a hit on productivity. The economy should serve society and not the other way around.

> I also think "productivity" is the wrong way to frame the problem. Some things, like work-life balance, are a net good and worth a hit on productivity. The economy should serve society and not the other way around.

I mostly agree with what you're saying, especially about going across industries, but I do believe it is quite easy to lower productivity, regardless of the industry, by dramatically imbalancing work-life balance. Put another way, having good work-life balance is a net good, partially _because_ people with good work-life balance are more productive than people who are burned out.

Your medical doctor isn't going to be very good at diagnosing patients when he's in his 140th working hour of the week, if he were to attempt such a thing (with ~3 hours of sleep per night and no time off other than that)

>having good work-life balance is a net good, partially _because_ people with good work-life balance are more productive

This is actually what I'm pushing against. I don't like productivity being a primary principle. I'm saying it's worthwhile irrespective of the impact on productivity. (the use of 'net good' was a bad choice on my part because it implies a balancing act).

It's quite common for healthcare workers (particularly surgeons) to work extremely long hours, but that's being re-thought in some areas (esp. in regards to residents). To your point, though, I think a lot of the rethinking is driven by trying to reduce medical errors. It's more related to quality than productivity, but I don't think they can be easily parsed.

Given that 32 hours is still far too long for someone to be doing active mental work in a week, what you're likely seeing is not the same number of slack hours, but the remaining slack hours being shifted around

Does this change if it’s not SWE work? The example in my anecdote is from R&D work that involves a lot of wrenching on hardware.

Because I’ll have a week day to do everything I need to do. Also I would push back or not attend meetings where I’m not needed. Team meetings and collaboration would still happen. A lot of people have to do late or weekend deployments and it would take the stress off of a lot of IT workers in all areas.

Exactly. The whole modern trend of working less hours will somehow equate to more work being done is ridiculous.

I don't think anyone is necessarily saying more work will get done although that's possible I guess, my understanding is that in a humanitarian sense cutting down expected working hours would increase employee satisfaction/happiness without affecting productivity much if at all and that's the main draw of the movement.

The only thing that's ridiculous is a simplistic sweeping statement like that. For one thing, no one even said "more work" necessarily, although that is absolutely perfectly possible and valid, but better work, and better overall performance as in morale, loyalty, effectiveness (better imagination and problem solving), longevity (less turnover, more return on training investment, better institutional knowledge retention), etc.

About 0% probability.

They will work more than 80%, less than 100%, say 87%. And that is what you want: keep some off time for conversation, recovery, etc..

You don't want 100% (very short hours) and you don't want too low a percentage (long hours). There is some balance in between and no slippery slope.

I mean someone could gather this info, the average working hours in China are ~10 more than the US and some European countries average lower.

Given humans are highly adaptable I imagine we will adjust to the new normal and keep finding time to mess around at work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Most remote jobs I've worked at, I can't reach anyone on Friday. Probably not a coincidence.

Even years ago when I was in the office, everyone would go on insanely long lunch breaks on Friday instead. If you work an office job, I can assure you that the number of people actually working on Friday is statistically irrelevant.

"Never buy a car built on a Friday or a Monday."

People don't work for 40 hours but they are available for 40 hours, being available is also "work".

My most recent job is billable and time is tracked in tight increments. Because I now pay much more attention to when I am and am not 100% engaged, it's been eye opening how much 40 hours really is. I've found that I'm about 2/3 efficient. So if I designate 6 hours for "work", I'm really working (and thus billing) for about 4 hours.

I would bet those 2 hours you aren't billing for are still actual work. You are available, you are probably thinking about the company/the job/the work. That is all WORK, and should be billed.

I used to do a lot of walks (before I moved from Upstate NY to Houston) where I would escape the code and think about the product. That was all billed time, and understood by my clients. Just because my fingers are not furiously typing, doesn't mean I'm not actively engaged in my work.

Sometimes. And in past jobs that's how I justified myself, sure I'm not hands on keyboard all the time but I'm "on" 95+% of my awake time.

This company's policy is the clock is only running if you're 100% engaged. I try to stick with that. As time has gone on I've gotten better about mentally turning the switch more all the way on/all the way off. There's some grey area on both sides that I figure comes out in the wash. And if I have a serendipitous moment, it's not hard to turn the clock back on and have at it.

It'd also look more different if the billing increment was wider. In a very past life I billed at 15 minute intervals. So if I was "on" for 12 minutes but stepped away to clear my head, the full 15 was billed.

I disagree based on personal (anecdotal) data.

When I get into a “flow” on a project I can work 12+ hour days. My productivity dwindles as the day gets old for sure, but I don’t think it ever gets to zero or close. I dream/think about the project and the first thing on my mind in the morning is the next step on the project.

Last time I was in flow, I single handedly built the next generation of a tool in 2 months. It’s currently taking the other team about 6 months to do the same but for another platform. The complexity is roughly the same and I think the engineers are as smart, if not smarter than me. I think the difference was that I did 12-16 hours for 2 month (including weekends).

This is not sustainable of course. I developed my back and wrist pain at the end of the 2 months. This is something I consciously stop myself from doing ever again because health is all you got at the end of the day.

Very realistic, I one had a different idea of how we would build a retool-like tool for a company I worked at. I spent 4 days to reimplement our app from scratch, I didn't include even 10% of what we had, but the framework was much more powerful.

I typically code for like 3-4 hours a day, maybe 6-7 when I'm super into what I'm doing. BUT, I very frequently think about my work when I'm not working.

I've also done this before. After I was done, I couldn't focus properly for several weeks. Turns out I was largely just pushing back rest that I desperately needed, and I had to pay that back in the end.

The more your work is in creative output, the more likely you are to be working 100% of the time you're on the clock. Cognition is complex and most of it happens under the covers. Once you wake up, you load up your brains with concerns and don't stop thinking about it just because you aren't in meetings or actively coding. Your conscious thoughts are only one layer in a dense system.

Arguably, you can't turn it off when you clock out either. It's why I argue for a retainer model on intellectual workers.

Spot on.

Do you have any books you'd received recommend that have any additional tricks?

You're probably not wrong. The data supports it.

> In October, the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was 34.5 hours for the fifth month in a row.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm

And this is the time they at least pretend to be working. The amount of hours they actually do something productive is going to be much less.

The pessimist in me has to wonder how much of this is employers manipulating schedules to keep employees from classifying as full time?

I see the report calls out part time workers at 3.7m yet still I wonder.

That's a great point. I interpret that there's a difference of "assigned 40 hours" and "works 40 hours" that is being called out in this data.

That doesn't mean they actually work for 34.5 hours, that's just how long they get paid for.

A UK company did a study which showed the average office worker, who is in the office 40 hours a week, is only productive for less than 3 hours a day.

https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-product...

I would guess the average workweek, only counting the time people are actually productive, is 10-15 hours a week. The rest of the time people waste procrastinating, posting on social media etc.

I'm at least online 40 hours. Actively doing effort is harder but it's easier if I'm doing something interesting. I try to not beat myself up if I'm having trouble focusing some days. Some days it just ain't happening. Get a coffee read a magazine and try again a little later.

> It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share

Yeah this is a pretty interesting phenomenon. I feel like as a kid I had no idea it would be this way, but every job I've worked, blue and white collar, has involved a lot of "time wasting." It's very surprising at first.

This is why Remote is great. You have the flexibility, and as long as you get the work you say you'll get done done, who cares if you're literally sitting in a chair from 9-5?

Which is exactly how salaried work was supposed to work, not “40 hours is the minimum and we won’t pay you if we pile so much work on that you need to work 60 hours instead.”

Cruft will build back up in the 32 hours though. In 10 years people will be saying "does anyone else feel like they don't work the full 32? We should cut it down to 24!" There is always going to be some percentage of working time that isn't fully productive.

I'm not sure what the problem with this is. It sounds like utopia.

Eh, diminishing percentages.

40 -> 32 -> 30 -> 29.5 -> 29.3 -> 29.2 -> really, we are talking about minutes(?). Just keep 29-ish and check again in a century.

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