
Microsoft Japan tested a four-day work week. Productivity jumped by 40% - mojuba
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/04/microsoft-japan-four-day-work-week-productivity
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merricksb
Discussed yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433710)
(540 points/205 comments)

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ptah
I wonder if it is the novelty factor at play here. it will be interesting to
see if these effects last long term

EDIT: I found a company that did a six month trial and had the same effects
[https://www.prweek.com/article/1596231/pr-agency-
implements-...](https://www.prweek.com/article/1596231/pr-agency-implements-
four-day-week-successful-trial)

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fbnlsr
It's been tested already, and proven to be working really well.

Here's a similar experiment from last year:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-
workw...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workweek-new-
zealand.html)

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mojuba
To be completely honest, how this can give positive results is beyond me.
Personally I use my free time for side projects except only for social events
on weekends. If my work time was reduced to say 6 hours, or alternatively to a
4-day work week, I'd use more time on side projects which are the same in
nature as my main job. I don't think that would affect my productivity neither
for the main job nor for the side projects, it would just change the time
allocation and therefore the amount of work done on each side. That's all. I'm
in my early 50s and I just can't stop doing this.

While I can imagine a lot of people in the world would only applaud to any
official reduction of work time, again, I just don't understand how that can
increase their productivity at work.

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gridspy
"Work expands to fill the time available"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law)

Basically with less time, people focus instead on what really matters. A lot
of the fluff that was actually a burden is dropped.

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mojuba
So the fact that the experiment worked at Microsoft only says that Microsoft
is terribly unproductive otherwise. Which should be true for the majority of
large organizations.

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reportgunner
This was posted here yesterday.

The "experiment" only took one month and the employees were paid for the day
off every week.

The results are inconclusive at best.

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TsomArp
So you were expecting the person not to be paid for the day off even after
increasing productivity 40%?

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reportgunner
No. I was expecting the productivity to rise.

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tsukikage
So, since the trial apparently worked so well, why haven’t they continued with
the 4-day week? Anyone know?

