Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?
Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours. Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
I think one thing people always misunderstand it: WFH doesn't need to mean separating work and home is impossible. Separate room that you can close if you have a house. Or going to a co-working space. Or in my case: Renting a 2-people office with a colleague.
Some of it was on the workers' end (including me). It just becomes so easy when you're in the same physical space at all times.
"My workplace used WFH as an excuse to get more labor out of us outside work hours" is not evidence that WFH is inherently going to lead to that. It's just evidence that your workplace is shitty. It is one anecdote, not actual data that can be used to describe trends.
When COVID hit, and we all switched to WFH, this continued. At one point, we were only working part-time, but were free to work as we liked. Some did a few full days and took the others off, others worked every day, but fewer hours. This worked fine, too, because there was flexibility on both ends. Need to set up a meeting at a time when Jim isn't usually working? See if you can move it earlier / later. Not possible? Jim'll see if he can work later / earlier and adjust some other day.
I think the lesson is that what counts is both sides trying to work together. Of course, if either party tries to abuse the situation, like slacking off day in day out, or always setting up meetings outside regular hours, this falls through because the good will is lost. I work operations, so I sometimes had to drive to a datacenter at five in the morning to replace a switch or whatever. But I also sometimes could clock out at 3 PM to attend to some personal matter because it allowed me to not have to waste time waiting in line or some such, without having to take the afternoon off.
Want to work 6h per week? Live on the strict minimum.
Want everyone to work less. Not happening.
Regaining time spent commuting is a pure gain of time without conceding on throughput.
An argument could be made that if all workers who can converted to remote but also went part time, all kids would truely have parents and environment deadlocks we face would be more half solved.
But here we are still debating which of hybrid, on-site or remote is best for some company cultures, whether the model benefits employers or employees most and how can we make populations and businesses swallow a carbon tax
It could. How did we settle on 40 hours?
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...
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The first demand of organized labor was 10 hours - the 10-hour movement. And they made a concerted effort and were successful, to a certain extent, to obtain the 10-hour day.
By the late 19th century, Hunnicutt says, the workweek begins to shrink to something closer to 60 hours a week for more and more people.
But it took the Great Depression to make 40 hours the norm. Government saw a shorter workweek as a way to fight the massive unemployment crisis by spreading the remaining labor out over more people. That led to a series of laws that eventually enshrined 40 hours as America's workweek in 1940. And it seemed like that trend would keep going. The most respected economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, famously predicted that improving technology and increasing efficiency would deliver a 15-hour workweek by 2030.
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A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.
Once we solved the production problem it didn't take long to invent new ones.
If his prediction is right we would already be at the 20h week. Not sure why we would suddenly get into sprinting sprinting for the next 7 years to catch up with the productivity gains observed in the last 93y. Efficiencies have many folds increased.
All the California bill will do is guarantee access to lower paid jobs. Not necessarily bad since so many low paid jobs dare to get workers to do 40 + non paid extra time.
Ironically the workers who delivered the bill and those who will vote in its favour all work somewhere between 60 and 80h per week. And will continue to do so if the bill passes.
Today, a lot of productive output goes towards supporting the elderly.
In France, the official workweek is 35 hours. It was brought in with the same argument: spread the work to more workers. Didn't exactly work out as expected.
Which people?
It's the ones with all the money and power who actually control this. Don't try to blame this on regular working people.
People who are advertised to, and told that they aren't good enough unless they use <product>. Ads create negative utility by attempting to make people less satisfied with what they were already happy with.
Obviously "not all ads", some ads do useful work of informing the public about a useful product when word-of-mouth isn't working "fast enough". I'm adding this line specifically to pre-empt nitpicker replies.
Most people are very much attached to consumption, it's been a bigger factor that kept the common 40h week than the employers very possible desire to keep workers hustling so much.
Which people? In term of numbers and total impact that would be regular people, more so than those possibly having more leverage on defining what a working week should look like.
In any case the control is over the regular people. If the latter change the other bunch will de facto have to revisit how much they consume, by rough as much.
Commutes are long. They also need to happen at specific times. It’s easy to start your day +/- an hour or two when working remotely. It’s not really an option if you’re expected to be on site by a certain time and have home obligations prior to that.
There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too). That means the economically optimum equilibrium is still to concentrate knowledge into select employees and have them work hard. Imagine that to achieve a certain outcome we can do it with, say, either need X people working Y hours or 10X people working Y/10 hours. Of the two, X people is usually a much better choice for employers because it reduces the per-employee overheads.
People also seem to misjudge their own preferences. Many might say that they'd like shorter days, but when tested they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff. Employees would like to work less hours in principle, but if you offer them more hours + more pay they take that deal.
In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.
If that were true our workday would be something like 6 hours.
>they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff
My paycheck is the same whether I work 40(45) hours per week or 90. I've actually reduced my productivity rather than increased it because there's no point in being more productive as an employee. All that will do is give me more work to do for the same wage.
The answer is that we (I speak as an American) hate lazy people and view anyone not working full time plus as lazy. That's it. There's no additional overhead that magically appeared as productivity went up. It's greed and presenteeism. Work hard so your boss notices you so you can get that sweet, sweet 1% raise and a promotion that entails 200% more work. Why?
Everywhere I've worked promotions are handed out by brown nosing. While, yes, you need to have a baseline of skill it's not nearly as much as one might expect. You can hit senior while being a junior if you sniff enough of your boss' farts.
>You’d be surprised how few employees really understand how their work translates to business value
That's really irrelevant in my experience. Sure some places may be different I haven't worked at every single employer. I've done the enterprise, mid-sized, mom and pop, and start up gauntlet both as a contractor and a full-time employee and it's not been much different regardless of the company.
>how things could be done better with the same amount of effort will make one much more upwardly mobile.
I don't care how much better something can be done. I care about a paycheck. I've pushed myself to near burnout for jobs before (plural) and you know what happened? Nothing but more work added to the pile.
So at the end of the day I do the bare minimum required to hit my metrics. The people that put in the hours are surprised when we get the same raise. In some cases, people that do less than me get promoted and then have to figure out why they took on so much more work and responsibility for barely an increase in salary. It's laughable.
Butt-in-seat time, as you put it, is the metric nearly everywhere actually cares about. Status go yellow? Where were you and why were you AFK?
So, sure, I guess you could say that I've only ever worked for clueless management but in my experience all management is clueless. I've never worked anywhere IT or not, nor have I ever known someone personally who has worked anywhere, that management could turn the lights on in the morning without help. That's just what management is. The people who can do the job are doing the job. The people that can't get promoted to management.
Broadly speaking, that isn't correct. In the short term, over maybe a few months, the logic works. But over the longer term money tends to move away from unproductive workers and towards more productive workers. People don't make hiring, firing and pay decisions every day but when they do relative productivity is a consideration. Thinking this way leaves you open to being outcompeted.
Your experience may differ and that's fine. In my experience having worked at numerous businesses from startup to enterprise it's all the same. Hiring budgets are always bigger than retention budgets. 1% raise vs 10%+ salary increase. I know which one I am going to pick.
The more significant overhead is internal communication. Recently, after coming back from a week-long vacation, I spent an entire day catching up on unread chat messages and e-mails. [1]
In a group of N people where everyone needs to communicate with each other, you will have N(N-1)/2 lines of communication, i.e. communication overheads per person even scale quadratically instead of just linearly (like the things that you mention do). Having a hierarchical org structure alleviates this somewhat by centralizing the flow of communication, but this introduces a different set of inefficiencies which most people around here are intimately familiar with.
I used to work 70% part-time (i.e. 5.6 hours per day) for a while, accepting the trade-off of less money, but more free time. However, as I ascended through the ranks, I ended up going back to full-time because my current position as senior IC involves so much communication work (meetings, mails, workshops, etc.) that I would not be able to do any actual programming if I were still on 70%. And the programming part is what I like the most about the profession, and also where I feel like I produce the most value, so I'm not quitting that.
[1] I opted not to "Mark all as read" because I have learnt over the years that it's actually very valuable to be up-to-date on what people in adjacent teams are up to, even as an IC.
Someone who works 25% more than you will make 25% more wages and will afford a 25% more expensive apartment, etc.
So long as you’re comfortable living in a suburb with lower desirability, you’ll be fine. But you might get priced out of places where people work more…
In fact, it doesn’t take a law for you to decide to start working less. Plenty of people work part time… You just need to balance how much you work with the affordability of the lifestyle you want to live.
Here's the thing. Right now, it's difficult to work 25% less for only a 25% pay cut, especially when you include other benefits. And that's because people who work less than 40 hours are considered more temporary and less dedicated—because the market of "part-time" job seekers usually is more temporary and less dedicated, as of today.
But I think that's cultural.
I'd like to encourage more people to re-evaluate how they're spending their time. If a certain mass of workers decided they'd prefer to work 30 hours, it would become easier for others to work 30 hours as well. Not entirely unlike how normalizing remote work allows more people to do it.
Someone who is at work for 40 hours is not necessarily "working more" than someone who is at work for 30 hours, it just means they are less efficient. If both workers produce the same output, they should be paid the same.
In many cases, it's easy to make a 40 hour job into a 5 hour job with proper planning and automation. But since workers are required to be at the office for 40 hours a week anyway, the work "expands" to fill the time with useless meetings and time-consuming manual processes.
I mean, citation needed. I know that e.g. Japan is having issues with an aging population but they could probably fix that with more immigration if they wanted to. The US certainly could.
At minimum you should make up plausible-sounding fake reasons for why you prioritize parrotless applicants over me.
This is how a person like Mitt Romney can be both a ruthless private equity capitalist and also an advocate for natalist policies. There is no capitalism vs. socialism binary. Both things are good for a society in different ways for different things at different times.
Citation needed.
> Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours.
It this some plot from employers? "We are forcing you to the office for your own sake so we won't make you work from home on weekends"?
> Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
Is this a serious question? Because I have other more interesting things to do on Saturday.
But broadly speaking we in the US view down time as somehow the greatest sin imaginable. Take time off? Better be sick. Don't want to spend 3+ hours of your day in waste? How dare you, you entitled commie!
WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have. I get to lose two hours commute and an hour lunch that wasn't really mine anyway. My work week isn't going to be reduced so the time I have around that is what I can reduce. Given that I see no other way to do that besides working from home. When we work from home we must be diligent to create boundaries. Don't install Slack on your personal phone. Don't put your email on your personal phone. At the end of your workday shut the work machine down and leave it until the start of your workday.
>so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
I don't work on my personal time without additional compensation. If you want that task done on Saturday you can do it yourself. If you want me to do it then you can wait until Monday.
Is it? WFH is great for many reasons but the normalization of WFH is also bringing a lot of pressure for more hours. Some (many?) companies are using those hours you are no longer commuting to do more meetings.
Nobody (at least in Silicon Valley) would do 8am meetings because commutes made that impractical. But if you're sitting at home already.. hey let's meet at 8am.
Everyone had to leave the office at 5 to 5:30 to go sit in traffic. But now you're home already, so let's run this meeting to 6:30 or 7pm. You're not commuting after all, let's be productive with the time.
We shouldn't be required to work less. We should get the benefit of our productivity. If you are more productive you get punished by getting more work thrown your way.
>Anyone can find an arrangement where they work less.
Sure, anyone can quit their job. I don't see how that's helpful.
But an important corollary is that you absolutely do not have to be at the tip top of that competition to live a good and successful life. It's a global competition, but there are a lot of slots to be filled out there.
1) add an 'r' at the end and pronounce it in your head (looser, loser)
2) convert to past tense (loosed, lost)
not lose gose
If offices, schools/nurseries and housing are all within a 20mn cycle radius the question of remote or in-office work becomes different
Even if a close cycling trip, that's still a burden most don't want to deal with anymore. Just think about cycling in a heat wave or thunderstorm (they're common where I live and dense enough to where being outside for just a second is the equivalent to jumping in a lake)
It is a little nicer from an efficiency standpoint to have more experienced workers around to train the new ones, but that doesn't change the fact that those experienced workers are now quite mobile and can get a new job with little effort. When my old company went to hybrid we started immediately losing the best talent. It was a trickle at first and then a dam bursting. They're finally accepting remote-only because they don't have a choice. Their engineering staff went from an average of 8+ years of service to like maybe 3, and that has huge inefficiency losses.
But it's not only that. Kids need more than just being transported, fed and put to bed. You need to rush home to cook, do chores because you didn't have time to pick up the mess in the morning, take care of them. Then once they are asleep, more chores, and then your free time starts at 9-10pm, until you crash.
Being at home, especially flex time, nothing prevents you from doing laundry, and because you eat at home, you can do a bit more dishes after lunch, start cooking something for supper, etc. It alleviates my routine a lot and I also work more time with less stress.
I can't choose when Janet or John taps me on the shoulder whilst I'm in the middle of something important.
I take breaks when in the office too, I just can't spend that 5 mins putting the washing on. Usually I just look out of the window.
You'd think for once the money people would think about the money, not the method.
If I do laundry and quick groceries in my worktime it's a lot less of an issue if I have to log in to quickly flag an error outside my worktime. Balance is still needed, but that's a world of difference when flexibility goes both ways.
(inconsiderate workers are an issue however you turn it)
Edit to add: Whether I'm at an office or at home, I go on at least one 20 to 30 minute walk and ideally two or three each day. I've been doing that for over a decade. I have no qualms saying that in public. Any employer or manager who sees this as a negative habit because I'm doing it while I'm "on the clock" is not one I have any interest in working for, and I'm very happy if they'll filter themselves out of my set of prospective employers.
If you do computer work, it's important to move your legs and extend your gaze into the distance, often. What you're advocating here and are "startled" that it's "controversial" is just strictly unhealthy. Don't kill yourself for a job. There are many many employers who won't require it of you, because they know that happy healthy employees are more creative and more productive than unhealthy burned out zombies.
I prefer my water cooler chat to be with my family, not random coworkers.
Therefore, you're just traded the time for money.
WFH solves both problems at once. AKA, it increases efficiency of the entire system.
Also, most of us change work more often than where we live (wasn't true for me in the past but should be from now on, and I think I was an outlier).
Another point - moving kids older then say 6 between schools/locations is pretty harsh on them too. For every single one that thrives with such dramatic changes and finds new friends easily there are tens who struggle.
Having a quick chat when your kids get back from school, taking a 10 min break with your family, spending 15min cooking a fresh lunch instead of waiting in line at the restaurant etc.
Of course not everyone wants that proximity, but if you do that's a big deal.
What if they are at home?
Because even with Star Trek teleport WFH means do not need to dress up accordingly to some common social dress code, enough for traveling outside depending on the season and so on.
I WFH in my underwire in a dedicated, locked, room at my own home in my own environment. So the problem is ALSO the office, not just the commute. The problem is the absurdity of keeping up models that was needed in the past, but have no reason today for most, they are needed only by some giant capital who profit pasturing humans like cows.
This is the problem: a society not centered on actual tech levels and for the people instead of for exploiting the most for the interests of a very little cohort.
I don’t want to cycle 20 minutes when it’s 105F outside (today), or 30F outside (February). Frankly it could be a 5 minute cycle and it’s not going to happen in those temperatures.
Secondly, when I get there, I don’t want to sit in an open plan hell hole listening to other people on video calls talking about things which are irrelevant to me because there aren’t enough meeting rooms with AV equipment.
I like the office more than most of my coworkers like the office. And I hate the office.
I'm lying there detecting the foul odour of my neighbours diet wafting through the overflow hole in the bath and basin!
At least my supplements are improving my olfactory bulb, who would have thought being on a mains water supply is a low level neighbourly germ warfare zone.
No wonder the water companies tell us to spend no more than 4mins in the shower!
You have a plumbing problem - both the drain and the overflow should be protected by the trap, preventing intrusion of sewer gases and other odors.
I can watch the water in the toilet rising and then receding when the basin and sink gurgle.
I also would not put anything past the US and UK military around here.
Basically, the sewer line should be vented to air on top of the building somewhere, or in some cases air could be let in via an air admittance valve. This should prevent the creation of a vacuum that would cause gurgling or odors.