But apparently no one has stopped to analyse this paradoxical result. Because no system whatsoever creates more work the less it operates. So how do people break physics?
The hilariously obvious reason people are more productive with fewer hours is because of sleep. Every 24 hours we start afresh and hopefully rested. Every 24 hours we top up in caffeine, affection, calories, and get a few more chores out of the way. So it makes no logical sense to cram as many hours of work in a single day if you can leverage the restful effects of sleep and having a circadian cycle.
Taking this idea to its extreme, why do we even have weekends? Why do we cram all our creative efforts in 5 days and hope that we recover over two of them? This is not how our body works. I posit it's just a concept borne from modern employment structure and the Judeo-Christian idea of the Sabbath and Sunday, not an actual physiological need.
I know many of you with families or salaried employment have good reasons why you might want to have some time for yourself over those two days but, assuming you are working for yourself and are free from the strict rules imposed by an employer, my question is:
Would it not make more sense to spread your work over the full week, and have more free time for everything else every single day, rather than fit work into 5 days a week and then fit all your hobby and family time into the remaining two days?
Would it not make more sense to work 8-1 every day, have time for your hobbies, the shopping and quality time with loved ones, than 8-4 (with 1h lunch break) Monday to Friday? Would one not prefer having one hour for their favourite hobby every day rather than binging on it only on weekends?
Any search result for "work a little every day" or "work 7 days a week" is totally useless to explore this idea further.
Also, there's value in every day not being the same as every other day, and in being able to mentally reset at the beginning/end of every week.
Schools need to be available, groceries etc.
That being said, it does work if you are a contractor (in most cases). That's exactly what I have been doing for the past 4 years.
I don't have a family, I am working 4 hours every day. I don't take unnecessary weekends. I just work from 8am to noon and call it a day.
Afternoon is spent for sports, reading, social activities or just tinkering.
When you're loading a mill, say, a grinding mill in a mine, you want to put enough rocks to maximize output of the mill against energy use. It's a complex optimization problem as the geometries involved are rather complicated.
Occasionally, a mine operator will have the bright idea to decrease energy use by adding more rocks. As they're not very smart, they 'realized' that as they added more rocks, the energy used to spin the mill actually goes down; the mill seems more efficient, as the mill has filled up and the internal movement of rocks creating turbulence inside of it is diminished. There are cases where mills have been filled up entirely with rocks in this way and then they need to be shut down, dug out and repaired.
In principle, you are right, but I would offer that it is possible to find corner cases like this where it seems like a system is doing less but achieving more. It's about optimizing and finding balance. The appearance of operation may not actually map to desired outcomes.
>Taking this idea to its extreme, why do we even have weekends? Why do we cram all our creative efforts in 5 days and hope that we recover over two of them? This is not how our body works.
Because that is how our body (and brain) works. We need a break from the drudgery of daily work.
I think you could probably make that schedule work well for you, but I think the future of remote/asynchronous work is just choosing your own schedule instead of standardizing a new one.
Is a siesta. 2 hour lunches, 12-2. Just like France and our Southern neighbors do.
But at least it has a few thousand years of growing and evolving civilization to back it.
And it’s not just a random lucky civilization, it’s the one that made most of the modern scientific and cultural breakthroughs to date.
It doesn’t mean the work/life schedule played a major role in it, but it at least mean this approach is not that bad to dismiss in an instant.
And what evidence do you have to support your alternative ideas?