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Comment by waihtis | Hacker News Reader

Gee, are you saying wages are somehow tied to output? Why didn't anyone think of this before suggesting a 4 day workweek?

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Proponents pretend like 4 day work weeks don’t reduce output with all sorts of dubious motivated reasoning.

A lot of it is “we can be more efficient” and therefore we don’t need to work as many hours, overlooking the obvious fact that if everyone can be 20% more efficient then logical thing to do is downside headcount by 20%, not keep 100% of the workforce at 80% of capacity.

It takes so long for a woman to go through the gestation period before giving birth. But when you get 9 women you can get 9 babies in the same period. But it still takes 9 months. I think the women just aren't working at full capacity for those 9 months. It should be possible to just get the 9 women to produce 1 baby in 1/9th of the period.

This analogy doesn't work because women cannot accelerate the 9 months - mother nature has set the time period.

Reducing the hours whilst retaining output is an efficiency improvement for the businesses.

The 200 companies is simply a list of those who have successfully achieved this efficiency target.

The person I replied to made it sound like there's a magic switch you can press to make your workforce operate at 125% efficiency after getting rid of 20% of it and that it's idiotic to reduce the working week from 5 to 4 days.

I thought this was so absurd of a statement that I re-stated the 9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month saying to jokingly point out that it's just not how these things work.

... Except the obvious argument for a 4 day week is that in a knowledge economy, downtime is more critical to meaningful work. People like Tolkien don't just write 9-5, there's no reason consultants or programmers should work that way, it just doesn't scale.

Knowledge work does require time where you are mulling over the problem, rather than executing, but that isn’t downtime. Reducing working hours, in most cases, will reduce time spent doing both those tasks.

If Tolkien took an additional day off each week, it absolutely would have increased the time taken to complete his works.

... are you not at all more productive the week right after a holiday than when you've been crunching for 5 months straight with no time off? Because I bloody know I am. Knowledge work really can't just be conveniently bundled into units of productive vs unproductive time like making widgets.

There’s no quality evidence that reducing hours worked below 40 hours increases productivity per hour.

All research done to date shows that productivity per hour is flat until about 60 hours or even higher for low skill work.

What you’re doing is called motivated reasoning. You want to believe that you can work less and still get the same amount done, so you cling to whatever nebulous explanation you can find to support it.

The reality is that you work less hours, you get less done.

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