I got nothing against 4 day workweeks - I myself work part time, but I rather work 2-4 hours for even 6 days a week and I'd like to see this approach more popularized. Anyone else feels like this?
Some people get everything done first thing in the morning and are useless in the afternoons.
Some people can't get started until noon whatever their local time is.
Some people can commit to 10 or 12 hour days, and if so, it's not fair to ask them to work 5 days a week at that rate.
Some people work best in private offices, some at separated workstations, some at big collaborative tables, and some at home. Some do best standing, some walking, and some lying down -- all different from the ones who do best in a nice supportive chair or on a stool with no backrest. Some need an ergonomic keyboard, some need macros, some need a giant screen or 2 screens, or six. Some need screenreader software and some need speech-to-text.
The relevant questions:
* are they productive in some arrangement? I have seen a very very few people who seem to be always rearranging things and changing equipment and hours in a constant pursuit of distraction. The vast majority of people figure things out and settle into a steady state of productivity...
* is the nature of the work conducive to the desired arrangement? If the position requires customer or vendor contact or operations response, the coverage needs to be maintained (and handoffs need to occur smoothly).
* is the company culture amenable to alteration or accomodation? At one workplace, most of the people I worked with didn't come in until 11am and liked to schedule meetings at 6pm. I liked to leave around 5:30, having been there since 8 or so.
I'd rather work full 8 hours a day but have 4-day workweek. Ideally I'd prefer Wednesdays to be non-working days - this way I wouldn't have to spend more than 2 days in a row working in the office. For me this would feel even better than just 3-day weekends with 4-day contiguous workweeks. 5-vs-2 feels like you live in the office and go to visit home. 4-vs-3 feels the same although notably better. 2-1-2-2 (office-home-office-home) would actually feel you live at home and go to the office to get the job done. I even feel almost sure this would boost my actual office-time productivity.
Excerpts below taken from the website https://996.icu/#/en_US
What is "996"? 996 working, ICU waiting.
A "996" work schedule refers to an unofficial work schedule (9a.m. ~ 9p.m., 6 days a week) that has been gaining in popularity. Serving a company that encourages the "996" work schedule usually means working for at least 60 hours a week.
In early September 2016, it was said that 58.com (58同城, a classified advertisements company) introduced the "996" work schedule, without paying employees overtime who worked on weekends. The company later claimed that the schedule was only practiced managing extra workflow during peak season - September and October, and that the schedule was not compulsory.
In early 2019, Youzan (有赞, a Hangzhou-based E-commerce company) announced the company would adopt "996" work schedule in the annual convention. Bai Ya, the CEO of Youzan, responded: "This will definitely be a right decision when we look back in a few years."
In mid-March 2019, it was reported that JD.com (京东, a major E-commerce company) started adopting "996" or "995" work schedules in some departments. The PR posted that (Our culture is) to devote ourselves wholeheartedly (to achieve the business objectives) via Maimai (脉脉, a Chinese real-name business social network platform).
Gaining more publicity only recently, this work schedule, however, has long been a known "secret" practiced in a lot of companies in China.
Hey employers reading this. Having a hard time finding software engineers? Offer me this and I will come running. I’ll be banging on your door with my resume. Think about it.
When they get older and go off on their own, though, I would agree with you - a short daily working routine sounds good for me personally.
I'm not sure that having two more hours a day will free up your weekend, I'm kind of leaning to 4 days a week because you can actually have useful time.
Personally, I wouldn't object to 3 days of non-stop working till the midnight to have 4 free days a week. Things won't pile up and instead of having just evenings, I will be able to leverage full days which will give me better freedom of movement away from where I live.
The 5 days a week schedule is my primary reason that I'm not in a full time job since a while. I was at home at 18:20 max, yet I never had time to do anything for myself.
Monday: 4 hours
Tuesday: 6 hours
Wednesday: 10 hours
Thursday: 6 hours
Friday: 4 hours
total: 30 hours
- Monday: The second half of your day is work. Your morning is open to sleep in, get chores done, run errands, eat brunch with friends. Second half of the day should be meetings to plan the work for the week, and catch up from the previous week.
- Tuesday: Very few meetings, planning and gathering items to work on for Wednesday.
- Wednesday: Heads-down work, no meetings allowed, period. Turn off all communcation; this is "productivity day". You've had 2 days to get your "mise en place", and now you have 10 hours uninterrupted to churn away.
- Thursday: Shorter day than wednesday, wrapping up what you didn't finish.
- Friday: The first half of the day is work. Meetings to recap the week, complete any last minute details, documentation. Second half of the day enables you to get more errands done or get an early start to your weekend.
The time you save allows you to rest your brain, ruminate, get more sleep, exercise, pursue a hobby. This rest time recharges your brain to enable it to do more work when you are working. The roller-coaster nature makes you think the week is pretty easy most of the time, but you know you've prepared for the hard part and can tackle it in one go. Because of the forced planning and dedicated work time, you'll be more productive than if you only got drips and drabs of interrupted work done for 5 days.
Not the ideal; work less, have more fulfilling lives - I am all in.
But all of these initiatives are focused on the wealthier office workers and sometimes factory/shift workers who are non-customer facing. But it totally ignores the service industry which is a huge part of our society (and arguably even more so if we end up working less!).
You will still want an Uber after 5pm, or a shop or restaurant to be open on a public holiday. 4 Day work weeks, shorter hours - all great ideas but all ideas that either negatively impact the poorest portion of our society. Even universal basic income, which ostensibly would have a positive impact there would still not allow those individuals to work less.
Which is why my challenge is always; first we need to automate out the poorest roles in society (and then give them UBI obviously) before we solve our own lengthy work weeks.
It could be just me, but I find the value of stopping around 3-4pm versus 5-6pm to be pretty limited. You still have this feeling that the main part of the day is almost over and you can't do any substantial personal tasks or serious relaxing before the dinner ritual.
Also, when you're the exception in your team to leave early, you're effectively "disappointing" your team every single day that you work. Where others might have 4PM meetings, you're never available. This invites a feeling of guilt, where you start to make exceptions, and incidentally stay longer. Others are learning that your 4-6pm unavailability is quite soft. Further, every single morning you're behind in email and chat, needing to go through what happened late in the previous day whilst others are already up to speed.
With a real day off (4 day workweek), you have a full day to do something really substantial. Time feels plentiful rather than scarce.
A full day off is a barrier that is much easier to defend. You're just not available at all on that day, and work and expectations easily adapt to that.
Overall, I think the problem with modern office work is that it's far too collaborative. We've normalized being in meetings for half of the day and having hundreds of emails and chat messages to wade through, whilst the actual work takes a back seat.
If you'd have a clean and clear work package, you could do the work in that package at your convenience in whatever way fits best in your life. But we don't have that. We start the morning fresh with an idea of goals for the day in mind, and at the end of the day we did almost none of it. Everything changed throughout the day. Too many dependencies, too many moving parts. That's the real problem.
That vs the proposed 6-hour 4-day week some people mentioned in this thread, it'd be very happy with either obviously, but I still think I'd go for 3 days if I had to choose.
If your office hours are officially 09-18, but you’re working lunchtime and until 19:00, I don’t expect that officially reducing hours is going to help, because I expect you to unofficially keep with the longer hours anyway. On that basis, I think you personally would be better off with fewer days than shorter days.
On the other hand, if you keep to the shorter hours, I think either shorter or fewer days would both be an improvement, though I don’t know which is the better quality of life.
Most super prolific creatives (painters/composers) do a routine of between 1.5 and 3 hour sessions, one or two sessions per day. Depending on the person, but very consistent once the person figures out their routine.
That means 1.5 - 6 hours total. But this doesn’t include meetings and correspondence and all that jazz.
I like to wake early, work a bunch, then take time in the afternoon to do non work stuff.
Then I can come back at the end of the day and do another few hours. This lets me experience the world when things are less crowded, make time for family etc, while still having plenty of time for work.
A four day week, six hours a day sounds like bliss to me!
I do get the feeling of wanting way more flexibility but I also think that maybe contracting is the way to get that?
You could also go crazy and get a second or third job.
I do my very best when I'm at work. But, it's dead time to me. I have a lot of ambitions, projects, I write music, I'm trying to learn to draw, I have kids, and I yet have to give 8 hours of my day to just keep the lights on. Life is too short for that!
It's employee evaluation time at work right now. I always wonder: what would happen if I sat my wife down and had her write a document defending her performance as my spouse? And then I ranked her and told her whether it was satisfactory. And I had her record what she was doing with her time every day. I wonder what her reaction would be. That's pretty much how I feel about employee evaluations.
If you build your house on your own, cultivate green land etc. the four day workweek is more important as these kinds of work require a lot of preparation time.
Opt in models?
I get kids, go to park, pool, etc. Bring sandwiches or pick up junk food. One kid is baby, so usually drop him at home with mom.
Sadly most parents especially dads work late. So I am not able to make plans with moms for after school playdates. And my wife is not very social and she doesn't like Texas afternoon heat.
But there are a few dads who leave work early and we try to arrange pladates after school.
Not sure if one whole day off would create as many opportunities for play as shorter work days.
It minimizes context switching. I could get my head fully into work then fully out of work.
My company does a version of summer Fridays, where it's very easy to take 3-day weekends every week and I very much appreciate the "extra" day and would strongly not like to go in the other direction.
If you're answering emails and having meetings where everyone has to sync up during the day - I'd opt for the first one. If you're developing or coding where the time of day is irrelevant - I'd go for the second.
Instead of sitting inside all day while its sunny and then having free time just as its getting dark and everything is closing, I can enjoy (most) of my day, hang out with the kids for a bit while working, and then get some solid quiet work time in the evening.
I ski, hike, bike, do admin etc during the week, then have my weekends completely free for family.
I think this is because I mostly use my leisure time for studying or coding. I reckon that a parent would prefer 6-hour workdays to spend more time with their kids.
This is of course dependent on each individual's needs and circumstances. My manager has three kids that need feeding at lunchtime for several weeks at the end of and beginning of the school year because his wife is an assistant principal so the kids get a longer summer break than she does. He seems a bit frazzled after lunch during those periods.
However it's also nice to work with more energy and never have any dreading late hours where you'd rather rest a bit some days.
I have a 4 day week but flexible enough so I can move hours over, but I only move 1-2h to my free day on average.
Some people work on ships and work six months in twelve hour rotation and then be on vacation for six months.
Having said that, I live in Spain where restaurants don't even open until 8:30pm or so. So it suits not only myself but my environment. When you describe restaurants closed at 7pm, that sounds a bit like the Nordic countries. They're really 'early birds' in my experience, which I find very odd because of the long sun hours there in Summer. When I visited a small town in Sweden, it was deserted in full daylight. I can't wrap my head aorund that.
Also for my my best work is done after hours when things quiet down and I can actually concentrate... My worst hours are the mornings when I struggle to wake up.
A retail clerk can likely do a 10 hour shift with little to no loss of productivity in the later hours - and some jobs basically just need a human there to monitor the process - those likely would do well on 4/10 shifts.
But other kinds of work can't get much beyond six hours a day anyway, in which case spreading it out may make sense.
But there's also a weird "fairness" aspect - even if everyone would be better off with varying schedules, people would think it "unfair" - and it's visible. If Sally gets paid half what you do, you never know. But if she leaves after 4 hours each day, you start to feel annoyed.
If we’re shortening the work week by 4 hours, I’d rather take that as a single afternoon off. 4x8, then Friday is a half day (vs shortening 5 days by a fraction of an hour).
If we were to go to a 32 hour week, I’d probably want to just do 4x8 and have a 3 day weekend. That allows so many options for short trips, major home projects, camping, going downtown, etc. With the current 2-day weekend, I always feel torn between doing things that are fun vs doing chores. It’s never quite enough time.
Would the work days suck? yes. But in my opinion working 8 hours a day already makes the rest of the day useless. I think in the end a schedule where you work to get it out of the way and then enjoy the time off would feel like I am taking more time off than I am working. I know every industry couldn't do this, but for some it's possible. If you get do it by pay month you could work 4 on the front and 4 on the back and get 21-ish days off for 8 days of work.
Would be curious to see if any HN companies have gone ahead and implemented this, and if so, why!
And I am also curious to know people's strategy when feeling burnt out and not getting ample time to rejuvenate/rechArge between bursts of being vErry productive!
I wouldn't. The problem with that schedule is that you never get a break. Every day is a work day. You're always thinking about work. You always have to spend time getting ready for work, spend time commuting, spend time (or money) getting lunch. You can't just chuck some stuff in a bad and disappear to a different country for a 3 day long weekend break.
The beauty of a 4 day week is that you don't have to think about work for 3 days a week. That gives you far more freedom than shorter work days.
If you have 6 hour days you might find yourself still working more. For me its no contest.
I know people (in IT) that work 6x6hours. And both they and employers are satisfied with this arrangement.
> Standard work hours here
The fact you assume we know where 'here' is implies you're in North America, but that's not a foolproof heuristic. Where are you where that's standard?
> stay 10+ hours
If standard hours 'there' were 9, why were you spending > 10?
For context -- I am in Australia, it's a week away from winter, I would prefer a 4-day work-week be legislated as default rather than a 6-hour workday.
If you mean in terms of productivity, I agree with you. Having a clear boundary between workday and free-time is a clear productivity multiplier for me. This is much better than one more extra day-off.
I can also maintain peace of mind throughtout the week if I do not do any work at all agter designated boundary.
This is true, when you want to do what you do. But when you work mostly for a paycheck, I will disagree with you. Then an extra day-off is so much better than a shorter work day.
8h/day sitting in front of a computer is a lie and a bad way to measure productivity.
My company's return to office policy is a hybrid deal. I am very productive when I'm in the office and I use the remote days to refresh myself. On those days I generally only "work" by replying to messages and listening in on remote meetings. I've never been more productive. I get more done in my in-office days now than I did during a full week either during the pandemic or before it.
Early day lets me get stuff done uninterrupted. It also means I get stuff done by 3 PM, instead of 6, so there's more time to toss it to someone to look at.
I'm all in for either shorter working days or fewer working days, provided that stuff is still done. I think I can do what I do in 4 hours at most. At least 4 hours are lost.
So, next time you negotiate a raise with you manager, ask for less hours instead of more $$$.
At my company which is a very typical big sv company, no one is watching how long you work but the work needs to get done.
Shrinking the window of days I can meet with them is very effective though.
6 hours feels more productive and 6x6 feels less hard than the normal 37 over 5 days...
Have activities after work, near work place, especially with work colleagues? 5-6 days with low hour daily.
More time to do chores and rest at weekend? 4 days work weeks
There is the main problem already. Stick to your working hours. Don’t do free overtime.
Even 3 hour days should be enough - to interact with your peers. Other than that, performance is a measure of work planned vs work done. Time to sit on your ass should not even be a thing.
And that generally seems like the amount of Time we can be productive.