The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

Off topic: I think that’s generally true in an 8 hr work day, but I find in a 10 hr work day I can actually be productive for up to 7 hrs. It’s a non linearity due to chunking.

When I worked 8 hrs, I spent mornings reading news, did a bit of work (1-2 hours), then it was lunch time, then surfed a bit to ease my way back to work, and worked a couple hours (another 1-2 hours) and then it was time to go home —- leaving at 4:45 because if I left any later I had to fight traffic. So you’re right - about 4 hours.

Nowadays, I work a 10 hr work day, and I can actually squeeze about 7 productive hrs in. I do a bit of work in the morning (2 hrs), then lunch and then some news reading, and then back to work (3 hrs) until 3pm when I go for a walk. When I get back at 4pm, I still have 2 more hours so I manage to get more work in because 2 hours is enough time to start something substantial. In an 8 hr work day, I’m already getting ready to go home so am not inclined to start anything new.

The chunking works so much better in a 10 hr work day. Humans are poor context switchers, and it’s hard to start back up. But a longer work day lets me account for the startup time, and gives me more productive chunks of time. Traffic is also better after 6pm. 10 hr work days are also more leisurely because there are two long breaks (lunch and afternoon)

Of course I’m not advocating for this - folks have kids and other hobbies, and you shouldn’t have to give your employer more hours than contracted. But I’m just saying if one has to extract more productive hours in a work day, this seems to work.

Or do as the Germans do. I worked out of Germany once and saw that everyone worked 3 hrs, then 30 minute lunch, and then 4 hours. Coffee breaks sprinkled in between, but everybody was almost robotic in their focus.

You may be less productive after 5 hours of work, but even if your output 50% less in the next 5 hours, you'll still produce more by working more.

Employers don't care about productivity, they care about your total output. And it's not only employers, if you want to improve or pass a selective test or anything, you have to put the hours.

There may be some threshold where more work becomes detrimental, but it's definitely not 5 hours.

That depends very much on your work

I agree with you in general regarding personal productivity. However from the capitalist perspective, even if you aren't as "productive" in the later hours, it's still a production cost that they no longer have to hire another person for. Every person hired is not just an "hourly cost" but an extra capital incentive. It's why they love to fire people and make more people take on a heavier load. To us, on the bottom it feels like less productivity (and man do I feel you there!), but to them it's one less cost. And that's what "productivity" is in their eyes. As long as they can extract enough value without having to take on the extra expense, they will call it "productivity increase".

Another interesting book about some of this is a stochastic approach to economics (from a left-wing perspective) - The Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy: http://symbioid.com/pdf/Politics/laws%20of%20chaos%20probabi...

I do however hope my surgeon stays focused for longer should their services be needed.

Often starts at about 1-2pm in the afternoon, just as I start to understand and work through issues blocking me.

Meanwhile, some managers and even teammates seem to care more about the hours you clock than whether you crossed the finish line. I’ve never fully understood that mindset. Why glorify effort over results, especially in knowledge work?

There are plenty of us who became extremely productive and can finally enjoy life rather than constantly play the spectacle in the office or sit in traffic for hours. And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.

* Don't install any company apps or log in to any company accounts on your phone.

* Set your working hours in your calendar and stick to them.

* Set your Slack status to automatically show you as away and snoozed outside your working hours.

* When you're done with work, shut down your laptop and walk away.

I've never received any complaints from sticking to this pattern. When I'm in my working hours I'm consistently reachable and I do my job, when I'm not you can't get hold of me if you try. This is how it was in the office, I don't see why the expectation should be different in WFH.

I do think that a key thing that makes this work well for me is that I'm consistently online during (and only during) my specified hours, rather than mixing and matching my schedule on a day to day basis. I'm not always reachable, but I'm predictably unreachable.

But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

We're living in a mad world.

If anything remote work gave me flexibility. There might be some days I'm cranking code for close to 8 hours straight and others where I work maybe 3-4 hours because I have other things on my plate.

Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).

Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):

- Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)

- Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing).

- Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory).

I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.

Aren't the lower European salaries to be considered not compensating the worker?

Having happy workers is, obviously, worse for the company than literal days of useless chit chats and coffee breaks.

It was indeed WFH and, during the lockdowns, more or less a dream job. The supervisors were lasseiz-faire and there was minimal surveillance of our activities. They repeatedly explained that the quality and attention to our work was more important than the speed or efficiency we could achieve.

However, I was operating at a rather advanced level, and my talents permitted me to absolutely burn through that piecework at an accelerated rate compared to anyone else. I could do dozens, hundreds in an hour if they were uncomplicated. And I could finish them with accuracy, attention to detail, and a personal touch in the feedback each time.

But going at the speed I did, there were mistakes made, and I tended to be a bit sloppy in overlooking things, when reading for comprehension would've improved if I slowed down. My colleagues offered gentle feedback about this between the lines, except the main feedback was focused on their KPIs and metrics, which I was far exceeding by every standard. But the haste took its toll on my intellect. I could barely catch my breath after some long sessions. I could fill a Slack channel before anyone else had a chance to chime in. I felt numb and drained, and I forgot every student's name, and they all blurred into one.

Thankfully, we rarely came together for meetings. They just weren't seen as necessary and it was true. Meetings were reserved for special trainings. At one point, some of the coworkers were putting together short self-care sessions, like yoga instruction, which was really cool of them!

But I was being paid by the hour! If I finished 50 pieces of work, I was paid the same as a guy who plodded through three of them! Was that unfair? I don't know. Because the time scale did matter; we were often slammed with a huge amount of work, and we did operate with deadlines. But other than kudos and verbal recognitions, there was never an incentive to clear backlogs or work priority tasks as they were publicized.

So in the end, I felt a little underappreciated, you know? But, I loved the company so much, and my colleagues and supervisors were great, and it wasn't really about the money at the end of the day for me; it was about the company's mission and my own fulfillment by doing something valuable for them.

This is probably the biggest productivity shift I seen in my career, async communication is just so much more normal these days and it is enough for ~80% of the cases.

And this is not only about text chat, but the tools and practices like issue tracking, PR reviews, shared file drives, collaborative editing (google-docs/ confluence/notion/etc).

Issue tracking has always been there since I started but it feels it has gotten a lot better compared to back then. Even Jira is not nearly as bad as some of the tools we used to use.

Bean counters want their cake and eat it too.

I guess their brains go something like this: "if you're done already then work some more, I pay you for 8 hours!!!11" (when you're done early) and "we're not hitting deadlines, work more than 8 hours! I pay you for output, not for hours!!!11" (when you're not)

Written communications skills are a superpower in a remote working environment. Unfortunately, very few people have it.

Lack of typing skills, ESL, Gen-Z slang, and internal acronyms makes for the perfect storm.

Where I work, the budget people like to have at least some idea of how much different projects actually cost. And they like to know time spent on capitalizable vs not things, which I guess has something to do with taxes.

Employees shouldn't theoretically exist - everything should just be subcontracted, but for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs).

Companies don't have perfect plans, contracts, and KPIs, and never will, unless someone like Jeff Bezos manages to turn the extraction of profit from human assets into an exact science in the company.

Fixed time employees have to hit their deadlines and also have some slack time to use their initiative. KPIs effectively means a much more rigid adherence to a plan, rather than trusting employees to invest their time at work on things that the employee (not their boss) thinks is valuable, with minimal friction. I guess this will be changing though, since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.