I think three day weekends would be undeniably good for the health of our society and everyone living in it.
I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.
While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house.
I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.
According to the theory of constraints (on which I am expert since I read 1 graphic novel, The Goal, and 1 novel, The Phoenix Project) systems without slack become exponentially slower until no work is capable of getting done anymore.
The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day.
You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day.
You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system.
But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing.
What gives?
Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially.
Yup. And on top of that, my team does have slack time, but that doesn't mean we stop working when the mandatory tasks are done. We rather spend the downtime resolving time-consuming technical debt, automating some steps in the workflow. So, slack will actually make the regular tasks go faster.
This is a very good bit of information, but most modern workplaces are not factory floors 'processing work items', so the analogy only goes so far.
Also, it very well could be that reducing to 4 from 5 does nothing but simply reduce the number of hours 'the factory is operating'. Surely there'd be a bonus because people might be more relaxed, but it's hard to weight that against the lost day.
For example, my local coffee shop is open 7 days a week, let's say that their staff works 5 days on, 2 off so there's a steady rate of staffers.
If they just switched to 4 on 3 off ... I'm not sure anything would materially change in terms of productivity etc. - and 'all else being equal' (i.e. demand, cost of goods, wages/hour), the staffers would simply make less money and I doubt they'd chose that.
But maybe '3/4 days' would be better in some industries than others.
Productivity has increased ~250% almost linearly over the past 70 years. Wages increased only ~100% (adjusted) and only until ~50 years ago, basically plateauing since then.
Going to a 4 day work week would bring the weekly productivity to the level of a 5 day week from the early 2000s while also providing a "virtual" wage increase.
I used to work 4x10 hour days, I took the Wednesday off though - no more than two days in a row was great, and having a day off in the week while most were at work was so much more efficient
I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.
In the US, if you don't work, you don't get paid, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster for most workers here. Small to medium businesses would potentially be losing 42 days a year of production (52 days - 10 days std vacation time) and that would hurt the profits that they would need to increase wages to make up for that lost day per week just for the workers. Shareholders will still expect year-over-year increase in profits, which won't happen if you're paying people who aren't working.
Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.
1. There are very few jobs where doing them in a miserable state does not greatly reduce the quality and quantity of work you do.
2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners.
3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.
Evidence suggests that having more time off increases productivity. And let's be honest, most people working 40+ hours/w are not working at 100% all the time. So one possibility is to slightly increase the working time (say by 1h) for each of the four days. That loses you half a day for work, but the increased productivity takes care of the balance. The caveat is that only works for businesses that are charging for output rather than time.
We should all aim for 4 days as the ideal instead of 5, but we should also drop the M-F work, S-S weekend ideal too. For large chunks of the workforce they're already working something other than M-F anyway because we want 7 day coverage of our retail and service sectors. More professionals - dentists and veterinarians and insurance offices and you name it - should be open on the "weekend" or should not all dentists need to share the same "weekend", especially if we're dropping down to a 4-on, 3-off standard.
If for no other reason, we build a lot of infrastructure for "peak" usage, like rush hour traffic. If we all have the same 3 day weekend that means we have lower "weekend" traffic one more day but the peaks stay the same, but if we better distributed our weekends, overall peak would go down a bit.
It's a whole new set of coordination problems, of course, but we don't all go to church on Sundays anymore, we don't all need to be off the same day.
I get what you are saying, but presumably weekends still exist because families and friends want to do group activities at a time when all are available. If you have children younger than 12 or so you need to be available when they are not in school.
True enough except that you won't stop making a racket. I, and most other people I know, want a day when it is quiet, no rush and bustle, no noisy traffic, no noisy diy. Where I live it is normal to not mow the lawn or do any construction work outside the house on a Sunday and not do do any noisy work inside either if the neighbours could hear it.
Why on earth should an insurance office be open at the weekend? Come to think of it: why does such a thing even exist. I have not visited a bricks and mortar office to arrange insurance in the last forty years, I don't think they do exist here any more (Norway). Same for banks. And if I have a dental emergency then I go to the emergency dentist, otherwise I ask my usual dentist for an appointment during the week.
I agree. State-enforced Monday-Friday is just bad. In Poland they pretend it's about the employees, while in reality it's the government throwing a bone to the Church. Polish Church is heavily engaged in politics. But to limit employee abuse (rampant in Poland), the working days would have to be fixed in the contract. Plenty of people want to get something done on weekends when they have the most free time, but can't. Someone who is not a catholic would likely have no objections to working on Sunday.
Working as a programmer, I already started de facto shortening my shifts without cheating on my employer: on 7th, and especially 8th hour, I don't write new code anymore unless it's in places I have very solid understanding of. My mind tends to slow down in the final hours, and it takes a lot of effort to come up with something new, and my bug rate increases.
What do I do instead? Binge read documentation to learn about new functions and parameters that may make my work easier. Tweak vim configuration. Experiment with new shell commands. Clean up my email inbox and various notifications.
These activities still push the work forward, but don't require as much creative juice and there's no consequence for mistake.
I would still prefer a 4 day week, but it's the next best thing.
Same principle applies in the gym - you start out the workout with the super strenuous squats and deadlifts, then move to the difficult bench press and dips, then finish with relatively easy bicep curls, tricep pushdown, and cardio.
Some things just can't be done effectively unless you're above a certain level of rest; other things can be done even if you're tired. It just makes sense to sort things into the period of time where you can actually do them.
In coding this extends all the way to watching lightweight YouTube videos about coding late at night when you're tired.
I think too many people are willing to take a pay cut to do this. If you believe you will be as or more productive, or that your skills and knowledge are more valuable than just your raw time, you should consider negotiating a 4 day week with no pay cut.
Since I am willing to take a pay cut, and even a pay cut per hour, here's my reasoning.
For every hour spent at work, I am not spending it on something of my own choice. Hours of my own choice are worth much more than hours of work to me, because they usually fulfill me more.
So, if I am to work couple hours a day, that's going to cost you little. The more you take from my "own" hours, the costlier they get. So, if I consider a normal work week to be 24h, anything above that costs non-proportionally more. I.e. 40h is not 40/24 more, but it's actually 24 x base_hourly_cost + 16 x own_factor x base_hourly_work, where own_factor is usually around 2, depending on how much I might like the base work.
So, in a sense, I am not taking a pay cut, I am just taking a reasonable salary for doing the work, but if someone insists on taking more of my time for little benefit to them and a lot of burden to me, it's going to cost significantly more.
To chime in here, I've only ever worked part-time as a programmer. I'm in the UK, so YMMV, but if you're looking for part-time programming roles (i.e. 4-day working week, what I work) just ask. A lot of places are pretty open about 4 day work weeks. Some places jeer and it's a firm no. But it's worth a stab. Generally, the atmosphere is improving and the stigma seems to be dying off.
Yup, went contracting for this reason. Code is a passion of my and I love that it's also my trade but I have other personal ventures I need to focus my attention on and I have absolutely no juice left in a regular 5day/40hrs engineering week.
So you point is since programmers can negotiate preferable working conditions (which include both salaries and work schedule most of blue-collar workers can only dream of) they need unions to negotiate for them because otherwise they can't get working conditions they'd prefer, even though there's evidence they're already getting it. I think you broke my logic parser.
I've long argued for a 4-day 6-hour-day work week. I've even questioned a few potential employers about it, citing research: I've even offered to take a pay cut (per hour, i.e. hourly rate was cheaper than for 5-day 8-hour day weeks), but nobody was interested.
They would frequently say how they are not interested in "part time" work. I'd counter that this is full time work, with efficiency higher than the full time work, because people can focus on intellectually hard problems only for a short while sustainably. Sure, I can put in a couple of weeks of 12h days, but after that, I'd struggle to put in 4h days of quality, focused work (well known as burnout). Similarly, 8h days are not sustainable either, though it takes longer to burn out.
As people have noted, the extra time I get would not be spent in pyjamas watching netflix: it would be quality time with my family, working on projects and research, etc (if it wasn't for miserable pay and state of academia, I'd probably be doing research exclusively). Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter. And as stated numerous times, even employeers would benefit.
But alas, when there's the next guy willing to submit to the "norm", it's hard to get the ball rolling.
> They would frequently say how they are not interested in "part time" work. I'd counter that this is full time work, with efficiency higher than the full time work, because people can focus on intellectually hard problems only for a short while sustainably.
Is it really true? Can you prove it? I mean you can argue that, but if you're absent 20% of the time compared to other workers, is it true that your value is still the same because you're so much more productive? Maybe yes, but can you prove it to an employer? You're asking them to take a risk on supporting unfamiliar approach - which their familiar approach probably worked for them for years and they are fine with it. What do you offer them to justify taking this risk? I mean, maybe you are so spectacular that employing you is worth any risk. But naturally most people aren't that exceptional, by definition. Their experience shows 5-day weeks works great for them, how much better would be 4-day week to justify the risks?
> Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter.
Is there any proof that there's significant marginal increase compared to thousands of existing research institutions that have tens of thousands of very smart people already spending years attacking practically every important problem? Would amateurs spending one day a week on side projects significantly change the picture here - and offset the above-mentioned professionals not spending one day a week on their area of expertise (instead doing their hobbies in turn)? I am not sure this is that obvious.
I've done a 4-day work-week, and I was at least as productive, and definitely happier. I found myself screwing around less at work, because I had less time and there were things I needed to get done. And then, when I was really engaged in the project I had at work, I had enough slack that I was able to 'over'-produce for a short while (4-6 weeks), which was not sustainable but I didn't care because I loved it. When I'm working 5 days a week, it doesn't leave room for that kind of love; I spend my too-short weekends recharging and begrudging that I don't have enough time for the things I really want to do.
People argue it here all the time but I'm certainly skeptical. The hardest intellectual work of my life, my undergrad at MIT, I spent far more than 8 hours a day, 4 days a week on. The idea that all the undergrads there burning the midnight oil are just being foolish and don't they know they could get all their work done in less time doesn't pass the smell test for me.
Let me flip this around: Employers are terrible at measuring productivity of certain kinds of knowledge workers, so they just try to squeeze as many hours out of us as possible to compensate.
It's hard for me to prove the first point in relation to me personally: basically, I've done an experiment where I've worked mostly 6h days (still 5 days a week) and have been consistently rated higher than my coworkers at a software company with pretty good developers overall. OTOH, when I worked usual 8h days, I mostly compared as average. But that's me comparing myself to others and in distinct time periods with different projects and opportunities, and different life circumstances. For an actual proof, I'd need to compare myself with shorter work week to myself with a longer work week, working on the same projects at roughly the same time and similar external circumstances.
So, it is certainly anecdotal, and I am aware of that.
However, in a similar vein, they don't have proof that 5-day weeks work well for them. They just "work" for them because that's the law in most places and they never tried anything else. Actual proof would require a number of long-running experiments, so it's pretty much out of the question for any one company.
As for the second point, my experience and opinion of research institutions is not as high as yours. What you get in academia are ~5% of very smart people very much interested in the subject, another ~15% of very smart people not very much interested in the subject matter, and the rest who simply went with the flow. I've tried to find data for "best in class postdoc student retention", but nothing turned up, so I can't back up my out-of-my-behind numbers with anything. Other than adding that if you look at most research papers, a lot of it is simply bull (i.e. not research at all or just one thing repeated ad-nauseam with slight modifications, for the purpose of getting appropriate academic points to keep grants and funding going).
You might also note that I've argued for a shorter work day as well, thus allowing for significantly more non-work work to be done by amateurs than just 1 day per week.
If the premise of increased productivity for shorter work weeks applies to research work as well (can't find any study on this in particular), then we'd see no drop in their productivity, and only an increase on whatever we get from amateur work.
But, for now, these are mostly "thought experiments", and surely not "science". It's mostly a simplistic, idealized view of where the civilization should go, and it's hard to prove benefits either way.
I am VP engineering in a 100 person company with 30 engineers. Noone is asked to work more than 40 hours and <5% do actually work more.
I will happily have someone work 4 days 8 hours and 30% of our devs are in such a model.
But I would not go below this (especially not less than 4 days in the office). Devs aren't working in total isolation, but are heavily involved in their cross functional product teams. Reducing availability further has an above linear hit on team productivity as colleagues become more and more blocked in their own tasks.
So: just saying this is more complex than looking at increased per-hour productivity of a single person
Why? Remote work is a thing. If your processes demand having people on premises all the time, your processes may need improving. If a programmer want to work one day from home to cut down on their commute and be able to focus on a task, why would you want them in the office unless they aren't trustworthy? For colleagues to break his concentration when they need him?
Meetings can be scheduled, work coordination can be done electronically, and you surely have something like Mattermost or Slack set up?
I am in a not too dissimilar position to yourself (role/team size). I am working 4 days one week, 5 days the next (90% hours). It work out to be a nice compromise. The cross functional does not take too much of a hit, but the boost in productivity (IMHO) is still present.
I have some push back about the arrangement from people two or three links away from me and my team output and I have not got metrics to prove that this is effective.
Do you have any push back about your devs - 4 days 8 hours and 30% ?
Do you have any other evidence/metrics for the benefits ?
Sure, though a solution is simple: just have everyone work the same shorter hours :)
I've actually worked in primarily remote company, and the challenges there are even greater: no offices, hand-offs and hand-overs have to be well documented or you are wasting time, timezone differences, discussing architectural documents over video and voice calls...
Basically, I wasn't asking for full flexibility in choosing one's hours: I think that's harder (for all the reasons you bring up) than just shortening the hours.
I recently read Sebastian Junger's Tribe, which had many memorable takeaways for me.
One, in particular, was the assertion that, historically, subsistence farmers and the like generally only needed to work, on average, 12 hours per week.
While I know modern farming practices require copious amounts of work, it is nonetheless an interesting idea.
Imagine all the remaining time to just sit in sun or socialize.
> One, in particular, was the assertion that, historically, subsistence farmers and the like generally only needed to work, on average, 12 hours per week.
I’ve seen this claim before, and it typically revolves around careful definition of the word “work” rather than any fundamental difference in how we structure activities and priorities. iirc altering the definition to “any work that provides utility” puts the time at 30-40 hours a week. Still very much for a 30 hour/ 4 day work week, but I’ve found that particular argument to be very weak.
Granted, the west never seems to count reproductive labor when talking about work, which is itself a problem. Most Americans spend the vast majority of their waking hours in some form of labor.
> the extra time I get would not be spent in pyjamas watching netflix: it would be quality time with my family
why would it matter where the extra time goes. you're saying that caring for your kids is more important than a single guy working at the gym or watching netflix. everyone has his priorities and none are more important than others.
You are right: I should have not been so judgemental. Watching netflix might be a net win for someone because of their improved mental state (relaxation, self satisfaction, maybe even education, hobby or as you point out, whatever...). For me it's not, but I understand people do differ.
In The Netherlands /a lot/ of people work 4-day workweeks already [0]. It's not that novel. But it'd be good if more countries could largely make the switch.
Due to the progressive tax in The Netherlands, working 5 days instead of 4 doesn't earn /that/ much more money and if you have toddlers, you will spend a day less for daycare, a day extra with your kids and probably have more time for the fun things in life as well.
As a salaried employee I often chose a 4-day workweek as well when living in The Netherlands. But once I started freelancing, the 5-day workweek seemed the better choice for me. As freelancer you are taxed a bit less compared to a salaried employee, so there's more incentive to make as much money as possible during the workweek.
At my small (Dutch) company the standard contract is 36 hours, so most employees work 4 × 8. I have a four month old son, and my wife normally works 4 × 8 as well, but she does 3 × 8 + 4 until we find our bearings with the young one.
That means two days of daycare (partly subsidized by the government), one day, each, at home with the child, and one day where she works from home for four hours.
This is fairly typical for white collar workers in the Netherlands. Four days is more than enough for me.
"In thirty years America will be a post-industrial society with a per capita income of $ 7,500. There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With weekends and holidays this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days. All this within a single generation."
From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967. Too bad this will never happen since most managers are workaholics.
The most famous prediction along those lines surely is Keynes' essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren from 1930 [1], in which he entertained the notion that "a hundred years hence" "the economic problem may be solved", "the standard of life in progressive countries [...] will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day", and would work "Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week", but mainly to stave off boredom.
This inspired the book How Much Is Enough? by Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky and his brother [2].
Keynes' essay had some non-PC parts: he feared
> a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations — who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.
It also had some utopian dreams:
> The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
)
I'm my estimation - you can almost live this way if you limit your expectations to someone from 1967 - limited food choices, single car, small home, frugal car-based vacations and heathy living.
There us nothing to disagree with here, but I feel like America is so far to the right that an idea like this will be answered with "people are so lazy" and "you signed a contract" or something similarly ridiculous.
My response to all this is wasn't the goal of our forefathers to give us a better life? Doesn't that mean less hours working? Even if my parents grew up in the best economic period of the past thousand years, shouldn't my life be marginally better then their's?
Maybe I am a "wuss" compared to the people who stormed Normandy, but maybe those people are wusses compared to medival people, and those people are wusses compared to cavemen, shouldn't you want to create the type of world where your wuss children can survive?
The problem is there are so many over-demand jobs and under-demand jobs because schools stole so many billions from students learning information that could not be put to fruitful use. And those jobs are so unequal in how much work they take. So you have many jobs or situations where people are paid to sit and many like in medicine where more people might die if you want to sleep a healthy amount. The time should fit the job. But the pay should fit the time, and then that's the next problem to sove, and on.
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I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.
While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house.
I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.
The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day.
You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day.
You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system.
But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing.
What gives?
Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially.
Efficient systems have slack.
Also, it very well could be that reducing to 4 from 5 does nothing but simply reduce the number of hours 'the factory is operating'. Surely there'd be a bonus because people might be more relaxed, but it's hard to weight that against the lost day.
For example, my local coffee shop is open 7 days a week, let's say that their staff works 5 days on, 2 off so there's a steady rate of staffers.
If they just switched to 4 on 3 off ... I'm not sure anything would materially change in terms of productivity etc. - and 'all else being equal' (i.e. demand, cost of goods, wages/hour), the staffers would simply make less money and I doubt they'd chose that.
But maybe '3/4 days' would be better in some industries than others.
Going to a 4 day work week would bring the weekly productivity to the level of a 5 day week from the early 2000s while also providing a "virtual" wage increase.
I don't really see companies flocking to sign up.
I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.
Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.
2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners.
3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.
This is essentially how Tom DeMarco defines it in his book Slack.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack
If for no other reason, we build a lot of infrastructure for "peak" usage, like rush hour traffic. If we all have the same 3 day weekend that means we have lower "weekend" traffic one more day but the peaks stay the same, but if we better distributed our weekends, overall peak would go down a bit.
It's a whole new set of coordination problems, of course, but we don't all go to church on Sundays anymore, we don't all need to be off the same day.
Church has nothing to do with it.
> we don't all need to be off the same day.
True enough except that you won't stop making a racket. I, and most other people I know, want a day when it is quiet, no rush and bustle, no noisy traffic, no noisy diy. Where I live it is normal to not mow the lawn or do any construction work outside the house on a Sunday and not do do any noisy work inside either if the neighbours could hear it.
Why on earth should an insurance office be open at the weekend? Come to think of it: why does such a thing even exist. I have not visited a bricks and mortar office to arrange insurance in the last forty years, I don't think they do exist here any more (Norway). Same for banks. And if I have a dental emergency then I go to the emergency dentist, otherwise I ask my usual dentist for an appointment during the week.
What do I do instead? Binge read documentation to learn about new functions and parameters that may make my work easier. Tweak vim configuration. Experiment with new shell commands. Clean up my email inbox and various notifications.
These activities still push the work forward, but don't require as much creative juice and there's no consequence for mistake.
I would still prefer a 4 day week, but it's the next best thing.
Same principle applies in the gym - you start out the workout with the super strenuous squats and deadlifts, then move to the difficult bench press and dips, then finish with relatively easy bicep curls, tricep pushdown, and cardio.
Some things just can't be done effectively unless you're above a certain level of rest; other things can be done even if you're tired. It just makes sense to sort things into the period of time where you can actually do them.
In coding this extends all the way to watching lightweight YouTube videos about coding late at night when you're tired.
More broadly this is one of many good reasons for programmers to unionize; even if salaries are high, working hours are still far too long.
For every hour spent at work, I am not spending it on something of my own choice. Hours of my own choice are worth much more than hours of work to me, because they usually fulfill me more.
So, if I am to work couple hours a day, that's going to cost you little. The more you take from my "own" hours, the costlier they get. So, if I consider a normal work week to be 24h, anything above that costs non-proportionally more. I.e. 40h is not 40/24 more, but it's actually 24 x base_hourly_cost + 16 x own_factor x base_hourly_work, where own_factor is usually around 2, depending on how much I might like the base work.
So, in a sense, I am not taking a pay cut, I am just taking a reasonable salary for doing the work, but if someone insists on taking more of my time for little benefit to them and a lot of burden to me, it's going to cost significantly more.
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2. Some people are less willing or able to negotiate for various reasons.
Thus, while individuals can and should negotiate for themselves, negotiating for everyone is even better.
They would frequently say how they are not interested in "part time" work. I'd counter that this is full time work, with efficiency higher than the full time work, because people can focus on intellectually hard problems only for a short while sustainably. Sure, I can put in a couple of weeks of 12h days, but after that, I'd struggle to put in 4h days of quality, focused work (well known as burnout). Similarly, 8h days are not sustainable either, though it takes longer to burn out.
As people have noted, the extra time I get would not be spent in pyjamas watching netflix: it would be quality time with my family, working on projects and research, etc (if it wasn't for miserable pay and state of academia, I'd probably be doing research exclusively). Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter. And as stated numerous times, even employeers would benefit.
But alas, when there's the next guy willing to submit to the "norm", it's hard to get the ball rolling.
Is it really true? Can you prove it? I mean you can argue that, but if you're absent 20% of the time compared to other workers, is it true that your value is still the same because you're so much more productive? Maybe yes, but can you prove it to an employer? You're asking them to take a risk on supporting unfamiliar approach - which their familiar approach probably worked for them for years and they are fine with it. What do you offer them to justify taking this risk? I mean, maybe you are so spectacular that employing you is worth any risk. But naturally most people aren't that exceptional, by definition. Their experience shows 5-day weeks works great for them, how much better would be 4-day week to justify the risks?
> Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter.
Is there any proof that there's significant marginal increase compared to thousands of existing research institutions that have tens of thousands of very smart people already spending years attacking practically every important problem? Would amateurs spending one day a week on side projects significantly change the picture here - and offset the above-mentioned professionals not spending one day a week on their area of expertise (instead doing their hobbies in turn)? I am not sure this is that obvious.
Let me flip this around: Employers are terrible at measuring productivity of certain kinds of knowledge workers, so they just try to squeeze as many hours out of us as possible to compensate.
It's generally accepted that longer work hours decrease cognitive performance (see eg. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727184/), but the base is usually 40h a week.
It's hard for me to prove the first point in relation to me personally: basically, I've done an experiment where I've worked mostly 6h days (still 5 days a week) and have been consistently rated higher than my coworkers at a software company with pretty good developers overall. OTOH, when I worked usual 8h days, I mostly compared as average. But that's me comparing myself to others and in distinct time periods with different projects and opportunities, and different life circumstances. For an actual proof, I'd need to compare myself with shorter work week to myself with a longer work week, working on the same projects at roughly the same time and similar external circumstances.
So, it is certainly anecdotal, and I am aware of that.
However, in a similar vein, they don't have proof that 5-day weeks work well for them. They just "work" for them because that's the law in most places and they never tried anything else. Actual proof would require a number of long-running experiments, so it's pretty much out of the question for any one company.
As for the second point, my experience and opinion of research institutions is not as high as yours. What you get in academia are ~5% of very smart people very much interested in the subject, another ~15% of very smart people not very much interested in the subject matter, and the rest who simply went with the flow. I've tried to find data for "best in class postdoc student retention", but nothing turned up, so I can't back up my out-of-my-behind numbers with anything. Other than adding that if you look at most research papers, a lot of it is simply bull (i.e. not research at all or just one thing repeated ad-nauseam with slight modifications, for the purpose of getting appropriate academic points to keep grants and funding going).
You might also note that I've argued for a shorter work day as well, thus allowing for significantly more non-work work to be done by amateurs than just 1 day per week.
If the premise of increased productivity for shorter work weeks applies to research work as well (can't find any study on this in particular), then we'd see no drop in their productivity, and only an increase on whatever we get from amateur work.
But, for now, these are mostly "thought experiments", and surely not "science". It's mostly a simplistic, idealized view of where the civilization should go, and it's hard to prove benefits either way.
So: just saying this is more complex than looking at increased per-hour productivity of a single person
Why? Remote work is a thing. If your processes demand having people on premises all the time, your processes may need improving. If a programmer want to work one day from home to cut down on their commute and be able to focus on a task, why would you want them in the office unless they aren't trustworthy? For colleagues to break his concentration when they need him?
Meetings can be scheduled, work coordination can be done electronically, and you surely have something like Mattermost or Slack set up?
I have some push back about the arrangement from people two or three links away from me and my team output and I have not got metrics to prove that this is effective.
Do you have any push back about your devs - 4 days 8 hours and 30% ? Do you have any other evidence/metrics for the benefits ?
I've actually worked in primarily remote company, and the challenges there are even greater: no offices, hand-offs and hand-overs have to be well documented or you are wasting time, timezone differences, discussing architectural documents over video and voice calls...
Basically, I wasn't asking for full flexibility in choosing one's hours: I think that's harder (for all the reasons you bring up) than just shortening the hours.
I recently read Sebastian Junger's Tribe, which had many memorable takeaways for me.
One, in particular, was the assertion that, historically, subsistence farmers and the like generally only needed to work, on average, 12 hours per week.
While I know modern farming practices require copious amounts of work, it is nonetheless an interesting idea.
Imagine all the remaining time to just sit in sun or socialize.
Progress, what is that?
I’ve seen this claim before, and it typically revolves around careful definition of the word “work” rather than any fundamental difference in how we structure activities and priorities. iirc altering the definition to “any work that provides utility” puts the time at 30-40 hours a week. Still very much for a 30 hour/ 4 day work week, but I’ve found that particular argument to be very weak.
Granted, the west never seems to count reproductive labor when talking about work, which is itself a problem. Most Americans spend the vast majority of their waking hours in some form of labor.
why would it matter where the extra time goes. you're saying that caring for your kids is more important than a single guy working at the gym or watching netflix. everyone has his priorities and none are more important than others.
Due to the progressive tax in The Netherlands, working 5 days instead of 4 doesn't earn /that/ much more money and if you have toddlers, you will spend a day less for daycare, a day extra with your kids and probably have more time for the fun things in life as well.
As a salaried employee I often chose a 4-day workweek as well when living in The Netherlands. But once I started freelancing, the 5-day workweek seemed the better choice for me. As freelancer you are taxed a bit less compared to a salaried employee, so there's more incentive to make as much money as possible during the workweek.
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[0]: https://www.equaltimes.org/a-four-day-work-week-is-only-a#.X...
That means two days of daycare (partly subsidized by the government), one day, each, at home with the child, and one day where she works from home for four hours.
This is fairly typical for white collar workers in the Netherlands. Four days is more than enough for me.
From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967. Too bad this will never happen since most managers are workaholics.
This inspired the book How Much Is Enough? by Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky and his brother [2].
Keynes' essay had some non-PC parts: he feared
> a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations — who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.
It also had some utopian dreams:
> The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. )
[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Is_Enough%3F_(book)
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