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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather five day workweeks but with shorter days, to be honest. I feel I have about 3 hours of peak mental acuity each day that I'd like to spend on my work. It seems like a better time-for-value trade for my employer.

To be fair I work more remotely than not these. If I had to commute in more often I'd almost certainly prefer 4-day workweeks.

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Por que no los dos? For lots of jobs peak productivity is probably around 20-30 hours of work. Could easily be 5-6 hours, 4 days per week. Gives you time to warm up and cool down from your more intense work.

peek productivity not means peek output, i'm agree than the possibility for 30 or 20 hour work week should exist but i'm working 20 hours and even when less productive i will make more in 30 hours, i don't want so i work 20, but i will make substantially more output in 30 hours not 50% more but 35% so my compensation make sense being lower , the 4 day work week means that productivity compensate the loss of hour so the output and to consequence the salary don't change.

You're speaking my language here.

4-day weeks have a lower cost than 32 hours spread over 5 days, because some of the days you’re off would have been off anyway due to holidays or whatever. You can also get away with offering fewer days off without doing any harm—all weekends are three-day weekends, and you see fewer parents taking days off because of e.g. a Friday school in-service day.

The cost of having Fridays always off is a fair bit lower than 20% of actual hours worked in most 5-day-a-week workplaces.

We are stating subtly different points here. Holding 32 hours a week constant, you are arguing that 4-day workweeks reduce cost to the employer, and I think your arguments are at least situationally true quite often; however, I am stating that shorter workdays would lead to greater average value per hour spent for my employer from me, which I think is also true in my case.

The deciding factor is whether the difference in value generation is greater than the possible cost reduction you propose. That is a difficult question to give a definitive answer to, especially because there are large groups of people who want to spend as little mental effort as possible at work, to whom my personal preferences obviously don't apply.

TLDR: You bring up an interesting point. Thank you for your reply.

I do think a 6 hour 5 day schedule could see zero productivity drop, sure. At four 8s I’m gonna be zonked out short of 8 hours, anyway, just like with a five 8s. That’s a good point.

I've worked 4-10s for 3 years at an aerospace contractor but after 8 hours I felt done. I worked 5-7s during COVID as WFH and really enjoyed it. Sometimes we would do 4-8s around holidays and vacations and that was also great. It's really about defining a culture that supports quality over quantity of work.

> I've worked 4-10s for 3 years at an aerospace contractor but after 8 hours I felt done.

Same thing here - I enjoyed the day off, but 10 hours was definitely too long, and the day off wasn't really worth the trade off.

My current employer has "my mondays" - half the Mondays are days with no meetings, half are completely off. From an employee retention perspective this is a pretty sticky benefit - it would be difficult for me to go back to a normal schedule.

one thing I’ve realised is working style is really something that is highly preferential, you cant possibly satisfy everyone.

Working from Office, Working from home, hybrid- working hours, lunch hours.

you cant ever hope to satisfy everybody.

In my case for example, i bloody hate commuting, I feel like any work I do in a day eats disproportionately too much of my day (like going to the gym, where if you work out for 45 minutes you should allocate 90 minutes actually due to prep, shower, travel etc).

I’d much rather have longer fewer days.

Best is to just have core hours that work for everyone. Ours are 9-12 and 1-3.

I'm a big fan of this. Having an idea of the "golden hours" for different parties is even moreso the way with geographically separated teams.

I'm currently operating out of Finland as a software lead for a quite complex product (the displays on your bus/train that show you the next stop - a smorgasbord of bespoke hardware, embedded Linux, and everything you can imagine at the border of software and electrical engineering) and I keep a laser sharp eye on what hours I work so that I can efficiently communicate with my colleagues in North America. If I need to get ahold of my man in Chicago I thankfully have the clearance at work to come in an hour or two later in exchange for having an hour or two which matches his timezone. There's a golden window where my evenings wrap around to his mornings that I like to try to use for high bandwidth communication before I close out for the night.

This is why working in a company with async communication is quite nice as you can do whatever works for you. I'd do 12h*3 and ~30min on the other days to answer any urgent questions from people working on a different schedule. Sadly I don't work in a company with that culture anymore :(.

That sounds amazing. I often do my best stuff at 2-3AM (mega night owl), but I don't necessarily want to work that schedule - not least because it's a shared house so it's not a time frame I'd ever want to be, say, having to take a voice call.

I used to work 5 days a week, 9 am to 2pm. I quite liked it, but my employer would often call or ask for "urgent" stuff to be down after my hours, which meant I could not be fully present for family or whatever I had planned. I have now switched to a 3 days workweek at another job, and I find it much easier to set effective boundaries. If I'm not there I'm not there and that's it. I don't think I could ever go back to working 40 hour weeks to be honest. When do you get anything personal done?

> When do you get anything personal done?

This is why my stomach drops when this discussion turns into "the whole organization should shut down for another day". That's what I need a day off for. To go to doctor's appointments. To watch a contractor when he's working in my home. To talk to the lawyer planning my estate. Those people need to be working for me to get the full value of my extra day off.

We don't all need to shut down on the same day, and if we do, we'll schedule around it or use shift work. As you can plainly see, service work still gets done even with two days off in a week. Three won't make a difference.

That's my point. I think the vast majority of adults have some amount of personal business that already isn't getting done. Shortening the week is going to make it worse.

Depends on the job I'm sure, but genuinely only have 3 good hours too. After 5-6, I may as well just not be working. I'm writing garbage code and I'm grumpy.

I interviewed with one place for a kernel dev role that was explicitly 12-4pm. Yes you read that right. They were in the “defense” space and lowball salary so I didn’t take that offer but always thought it was interesting idea

That is a fascinating idea. I could easily see myself going for that if I loved kernel hacking and they were willing to let me work remotely.

I imagine you'd have to have a really stripped down warm up and cool down routine for such a role. 30 minutes to get into the flow, 3 hours flow state, 30 to step back down and do any documentation you needed to.

I like this better in theory, but my experience is that, given my current hours, work tends to very frequently spill over until later in the evening. If my day was supposed to end at 3 or even noon I don't think it would make a practical impact on how late I worked.

Work spilling over into extra days does happen during crunch times, but is much rarer. Though I likewise fear that 4 day work weeks would simply mean you end up working 8-8 everyday to get the same amount of stuff done.

Interestingly -

I went on ADD meds (Dexedrine, 10mg) ohh 6 months ago. I used to be like you and now I'm the other way around - it's easier to Just Keep Going.

Note that I would totally support you getting "five sixes" (~30hours); I'm just finding it interesting that with the meds, for myself I'd now want "three tens" (or whatever).

PS - It helps a lot that I freakin' love working in Ruby/Rails, so I kinda... want to just keep going anyway.

I could see that as being a quite straightforward effect from taking a drug that increases your ability to focus for prolonged periods at a time.

I don't have ADD myself, however, and I find that even a stimulant as low grade as non-decaf coffee generally messes with my ability to stay focused. Different strokes, I guess.

Oh, it's more than that, I think!

Dexedrine feels like it (1) increased the "volume" on the outside world, so that it could compete with whatever's happening inside my head and (2) increased my ability to choose what I was focusing on.

Contrast with Adderral, which felt like cutting off my peripheral vision (like wearing blinders, or a costume mask), only for my sense of focus and awareness instead of literal vision. (I hated it).

Caffeine "just" ups overall energy levels, so it would give me more energy to direct focus... but it also amped up the things that would generate distractions.

Huberman Lad has a good episode going into the brain structures, which aligned with what I think I've experienced.

But yeah! It's well known (AFAIK) that people with ADD have "opposite reactions", although it's more about the complex engine under the hood.

This!!! Kids (where i live) go to school 9-2, and it is a true nightmare to extend those hours to fit with parents longer work schedule. Let's just make both the same!

Also free afternoons every day, better than a longer weekend.

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