This seems like great news. I know several guys who've recently opted to earn less in exchange for more time off at home with their young kids. They are happier and the kids love it.
>But as staff cut back their hours, it costs medical organizations money
it's just companies screeching that they are making less money because salaried employees are doing less unpaid work. I think the pandemic had a large effect on people in terms of
1. Having to face potential mortality much earlier than expected and thus putting lower priority on long term career stuff
2. Gave lots of people a glimpse of how much they miss out on due to commuting and being in office when in reality they can do most of their work from home and get benefits like more time with family, more time for hobbies, etc.
That depends on how many of these jobs are positional and therefore cannot be easily supplemented. In my kneck of the woods we are having an issue with judges. There are only so many jobs for judges. But in recent years more than half of them switched to reduced hours. That lost time cannot be just replaced with a part-timer. This is probably true for many senior doctors too. Not every profession has a substitute pool of qualified people to step in every time a senior person decides to not work Fridays.
Why are they switching to reduced hours? This sounds like the value/output equation is out of line. Why not pay more, or hire more judges to reduce the workload?
Lol. Try telling a pregnant judge that she cannot reduce her in-the-office hours. Or a judge suffering long covid. Or an older judge with medical issues. The dynamic is very different when dealing with very senior and qualified people, especially ones unafraid of courtrooms. And any elected judges are basically untouchable.
You can vote them out; judges can be imoeached for nonperformance. You can increase the number of positions for judges (mayors are obviously different) to account for trends in capacity, to the extent that the reduced hours are appropriate and nonabusive. Etc.
There is a scarcity of judges created by (lack of) funding for courts. Which effectively erodes people's sixth amendment rights too.
- Have team events/other activities which encourage the team to stay late at the office for social reasons.
- Off-sites where everyone is in the same place for 3-5 days.
- Stop by peoples desks and check on what they are working on.
- Walk around and see who has an editor open, ping people who don't for progress reports.
- Check if employees are actually putting in 8+ hours per day. Assign more work to those who seem to be leaving early.
In the remote world you really can't tell how many hours people are putting in. Some engineers do 12 hour days.. some do 4 hours. Some do 12 hours but get nothing done.
Once it stops becoming a “potential” thing, and it’s accepted as reality, then you start making real choices.
The outcome is telling but not surprising. It’s among the oldest human wisdom.
Mayhaps you have found evidence that you are not the earliest-born person to have eternal youth?
Even with official work hours only, it's cheaper to hire, train, and manage one person for 40 hours a week than two people.
One reason for the decision was I figured in 20 years looking back, I doubt I'll regret sacrificing my career (to some degree), but I can imagine I'd seriously regret missing out on the time with my kids, which you can never get back.
Before I had kids, I remember someone on a podcast saying some thing like 'I'd give anything to go back and have another day with my kids when they were young'. It had quite a big impact on me, and I still think about it often (especially when we're having a hard day!)
It's common knowledge - or should be - multitasking is a productivity loss, not gain. And the last thing the world needs is another headless-chicken culture where working hard and frantic is confused with smart and efficient.
Guard your calm...no one else will.
And unless the work is literally a matter of life or death, then excessive multitasking - to point you list it as a desired skill - is simply a sign of poor planning, poor priority setting, and so on.
The job ad might as well say, "Must enjoy working at a shit show, or at least has had a life-long dream of working at a circus."
Multitasking from the brain's POV is intensive and a form of distraction. If it's work, then chances are some level of focus and attentiveness is required.
Deep or not, work is work. And focusing the brain to be not-what-it's-wired-to-be is a proven fool's errand.
This phrase made me laugh out loud - literally. Thanks for this!
Also, this thread is spot on.
edit: Oops, that 5 hour decline is for the highest 10% of workers, not the highest 10% of earners.
Given that they are discussing the hours worked by people making 90th percentile income, I wonder how much of the shift is due to changes in the population that ends up being in the top 10% (there's similar declines in the 80th and 70th deciles, which sort of points away from that concern).
The guy in the article cutting back to 60-70 was and still is an outlier (during short weeks, still a long workday a week more than the mean).