
Productivity and the Workweek (2000) - kamiYcombi
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/misc/worktime/
======
UglyToad
I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current
working hours are good/positive?

From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and
highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to
the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And
that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely
I'll leave software for good.

Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires short
burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up the
remaining 4-5 hours looking busy. My experience of software work is that it
doesn't scale linearly with number of hours. Unless you reach flow which is
extremely rare in a business setting (thanks open-office / scrum) you can get
the work done very quickly and then have large periods of unproductive time.

It's my experience that at most 2-3 hours is productively spent, the rest is
wasted.

I meet software developers who advocate for, or don't mind, 8, 9, 10 hour days
and I simply don't understand it, it's alien to me. Are they being productive
all that time?

Edit: to clarify (since I've posted on this topic elsewhere today) the 8.5
hours include a 1 hour lunch break and Fridays are slightly shorter.

~~~
dustinmoris
> Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires
> short burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up
> the remaining 4-5 hours looking busy.

Well said! I haven't met a single software engineer who hasn't described
something similar to me. I'm the same, I like to wake up early, enjoy my first
coffee and then I feel the most productive for the first 4 hours of the day.
In those first 4 hours in my morning, often exactly between 8 and 12 I get a
shitload of work done. I get so much done that it feels like a real milestone
every day. The feeling of being contend afterwards makes it really hard to get
into the same focused mindset back again after lunch. After I had my lunch
meal I often spend no more than 1-2 hours just doing minor post-real-work
tasks, email replies, etc. before mentally signing off completely and calling
it a day.

Asking a software engineer to work a certain number of hours per week is
useless. It's better to agree on a certain scope of work that one would like
to see get done and then let them off the hook as soon as it's done. Some
people can do a 3 day burst of 8 hours, but then are so destroyed on a
Thursday or Friday that they won't get ANY work done. Others like me are
productive every day, but only for ~4-5 hours. Either way, only a fool will
think that they will get more out of an SE than they are actually able to
focus on. They will just say that something took longer, a bug was holding
them back or whatever.

Moreover, the salaries which SE get are so high that an employer isn't paying
for the time anyway. They pay for the skill which is being applied during that
time, so what's the point in making them commit a certain amount of time.
Absolutely useless... well... hopefully one day things will change..

~~~
scroot
The future struggle for people in these kinds of jobs is to get the wider
culture to admit to itself that the latter 4 hours are unnecessary and even
detrimental to workers.

~~~
nostalgk
I think it's rougher for people to understand that aren't in this industry,
and there are so many jobs that _do_ benefit from this in a numerical way,
i.e. more parts per hour, more accounts created, sales made, etc.

~~~
scroot
Can't deny that there are some industries where more hours are better and that
beyond the 4-5 hour range they don't suffer from diminishing returns. But I'd
point to David Graeber here and just say that there seem to be a lot of people
out there making themselves look busy for much of the day, and in the process
wasting a lot of their lives and needlessly taxing their own emotional states.
And together we've tacitly made a decision that this is all OK and normal.

~~~
nostalgk
Yup, it's certainly a punchline in seemingly every office job I've ever
worked. I've worked a lot of retail and cooking jobs though too, and I think a
lot of people come from these fields as well and have trouble distinguishing
intellectual work from physical, utilitarian work.

------
scottlocklin
Let's reduce economics to its barest rudiments: I'm pretty sure a worker could
buy a house and support a family in 1950 on a single, average 40 hour a week
salary; this was probably also true even as late as 1970. How many workers in
the modern economy can buy a house and support a family on 1/4 of a 40 hour a
week salary?

Those "productivity" numbers are obviously cooking the books bullshit. Either
that or they're not measuring the right things. If the bare rudiments; food,
housing, family creation cost the same or more, but we claim productivity has
increased because ... I dunno we can sit on our fat asses and watch netflix
instead of going to a movie theater: that's not measuring the right things.

Edit add: even assuming all the productivity gains have only benefitted, say,
the top 10%, you'd see more people who could buy a house and make a family
working 10 hours a week.

~~~
dcolkitt
In 1950 the average new home was 983 square feet and the average household 3.8
people. Today it's 2500 square feet and 2.6 people. That's a 270% increase in
home space per person.

And that doesn't even get into all the other ways that modern housing is
fancier. Central A/C, attached garages, swimming pools, high ceilings, granite
countertops, finished basements, more bathrooms, massively decreased fire
risk, higher capacity electrical circuits, improved water heaters, builtin
appliances.

Median home price in the US is $123/square foot. To house a family of four,
under 1950s standards costs about $125,000 in America today. That's easily
affordable to a single earner at the median full-time wage of $45,000/year.

I'm not saying that housing policy doesn't artificially inflate the price of
housing. There are many easy reforms that would drastically increase
affordability. Especially in high-priced metros. But to pretend like people in
1950 had it easier than today is just ignorant of the historical facts.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States)
[2] [https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-righteous-small-
house...](https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-righteous-small-house-
challenging-house-size-and-the-irresponsible-american-dream) [3]
[https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/average-price-per-
square-...](https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/average-price-per-square-foot-
for-a-home/)

~~~
Bootwizard
That salary price is nowhere near the minimum wage in the US. $45,000 is
around $21.63/hr. Although most places pay more than minimum wage, the current
federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr.

Also, you'll be hard pressed to find a livable house for that cheap. The
average price of a home in the US in 2019 is $226,800 [2].

The numbers just don't work. Most people can't afford a house right now.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States)
[2] [https://www.businessinsider.com/cost-to-buy-a-house-in-
every...](https://www.businessinsider.com/cost-to-buy-a-house-in-every-state-
ranked-2018-8)

~~~
dcolkitt
> The average price of a home in the US in 2019 is $226,800

Yes, because the average home in America is 2000+ square feet. The OP
explicitly made the comparison to 1950. And in 1950 the average home was 980
square feet. It'd be like me complaining that cars have become unaffordable
because I decided to double the number of cars that my household owns.

You can easily find a 1950s size home for less than $125,000 almost anywhere
in America. For example check out the Zillow listings for Omaha, Nebraska.
There's a plethora of 2 bedroom/1 bathroom homes (typical 1950 sized house)
priced around $100,000. (Many actually built in the 1950s.)

Omaha has the third lowest unemployment rate in the country, and Nebraska's
educational system is ranked above average. If your benchmark is 1950, which
entails a four-person family, a 1000 square foot house, a job, and decent
schools, that's easily achievable today, unless you insist on living in a high
cost metro like New York, San Francisco or Miami.

> Although most places pay more than minimum wage, the current federal minimum
> wage is $7.25/hr.

Only 2% of full-time workers make less than minimum wage. And of those ones
that do the vast majority are under-25. Not exactly the typical 1950 head-of-
household. You're trying to compare the poorest segment today to the upper-
middle of 1950. You can't compare advertising executives from Mad Men to
modern-day dishwashers, then declare that things have gone backwards.

If you do want to look at the poorest Americans, instead of the middle-class,
then 1950 looks even more bleak. 25% of homes didn't have full plumbing. 15%
didn't have a toilet. 20% didn't have electricity. A third of were heated with
coal (which is filthy, unreliable and terrible for the respiratory system).

Without a doubt the bottom quartile of Americans had much _much_ worse housing
conditions in 1950 than today.

[1] [https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-
wage/2016/home.htm](https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-
wage/2016/home.htm) [2]
[https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS04_Pa...](https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS04_Panel1_Paper17.pdf)

------
firepoet
The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has
increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over
time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum
wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they
are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.

~~~
tc7
Is this (wage stagnation) true for tech? It seems a special case.

I wonder what the exec-pay/wage/productivity growth charts look like if we
exclude tech. (Less disparity? More? Less productivity?)

~~~
zanny
There is substantial wage stagnation in tech. I'm pretty sure average
compensation hasn't really risen much in 20 years (50k-75k entry, 125k after 5
years, average dev peaks around 200k). This is while many of these developers
are making the companies they work for millions in value. Of course there are
outliers, and a lot of big blowout top-of-HN companies qualify, but the number
of developers has grown substantially and thus diluted the income pool to
largely maintain the status quo.

And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate
that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still
getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge
profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair
share of the value they create.

Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for
the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they
aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that
snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or
productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the
dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or
how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as
a trick of good fortune.

So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of
their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it
because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive
devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are
guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces
tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in
short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the
only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be
made.

------
Lynbarry
I reduced my time at work to 80% at the beginning of July. Every Friday is my
day now. This week I had to switch it up so today is my day off. It's 1pm and
I have already worked out, ran some errands that had been bugging me and am
now reading this in one of my favorite diners which I for some reason almost
never found the time to go to before.

If you have the chance and it seems intriguing to you I encourage everyone to
try it out. I guess not all workplaces support it in the same way as mine
does, but it was possible for me to have a three month trial phase after which
I can go back to 100% or decide to continue the 80% for a year. Maybe your
workplace would be open for that but you just don't know!

Of course it's quite the pay cut, but as a developer with few obligations I
can still manage quite well. I feel much more relaxed over all and I enjoy my
work more when I'm there. It even subjectively feels like I'm getting more
done at work. The weekend feels so much longer and relaxing, because stuff I
normally do on the weekend often is already done.

One problem for me is that I tend to cram a lot into my Fridays. I feel like I
have to use them to their full potential. Then when the weather doesn't work
out or something else falls through I'm pretty bummed. But I think that is
something that can be improved over time.

~~~
diveloper
I would do this in a heartbeat. Life is too short to believe that we seriously
need to spend 5/7 days working for our entire adult life, no matter the type
of labor or how much you enjoy it. If you can live comfortably with 20% less
income, do it. Money ain't everything.

------
Expez
I work 60% now. Instead of having two days off each week I've opted to work
4.5h each day. I can only focus intensely for about 4h each day on coding, so
this works out well.

It's always been this way for me and to get to 8 hours I'd go through the logs
each day (important, but not taxing at all and something better left to an
intern most of the time) and attend much more meetings (low intensity but 90%
of them were completely pointless) as well as take more breaks for stuff like
hn.

I'd guess that I'm producing about 90% of the value I used to, but putting in
way less hours. This isn't a bad deal for my employer, I think.

The pay cut kind of sucks, but I'm still making the national median salary
because developers are paid so generously.

A lot of people opt to take whole days off, when they work less hours, but I
find this arrangement works much better for me. It gives me more time for
hobbies, friends and family, working out, eating healthy etc in the day-to-
day.

~~~
Whygul
Where do you work that gives you this option if you don't mind sharing a
little more?

~~~
tadzik_
Not OP but I have a similar workstyle: I work half-time for one client
(remotely), 4 hours a week for another (also remotely) and occasionally take
side gigs like teaching or something. The remote work is mostly in Norway, I
live in Poland, so the pay cut is not noticable – the fact that "I could be
making twice as much if I worked “normally”" is something that always is in
the back of my head, but is somewhat dimished by the fact that I still make
more than a typical fulltime salary would net me here in Poland.

Being a contractor in a niche technology (in my case it's Perl) is great for
this, because the companies involved can't really say "work more or we'll find
someone else" – we both know that they won't ;) Also, beyond 4-5 hours a day
my (and afaik everyone else's) productivity is diminishing anyway, so it's not
like they're losing much because of it.

------
perfunctory
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real,
his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares,
how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won
for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into
the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep
alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do
not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the
abundance when it comes.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the
age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too
long to strive and not to enjoy.

\-- John Maynard Keynes

[http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf](http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf)

------
bubbabojangles
Perhaps if we were not handing over most of the productivity gains of society
to CEOs, the rest of us would not need to work so many hours.
[https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-
compensation-2018/](https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/)

~~~
chrstphrhrt
What really gets me about this as a sometimes-entrepreneur, is that management
is not even taking personal risks. Besides narrow cases of torts and their
need to have fiduciary duties, they are no different from other staff workers.

------
d4nt
I think many people would work less if they could afford to. But we're not
getting paid for all this extra productivity[1].

[1]: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-
wages...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages-have-
been-rising-faster-than-productivity-for-decades/#279de59b7342)

~~~
knightofmars
Ah yes, Tim Worstall. Every time I read one of his articles I end up thinking,
"He touched on this important related aspect of his topic but then failed to
actually detail how it impacts his claim, both for and against." I this
article, he mentions "total compensation" includes benefits and suggests that
those benefits somehow make up the missing wages. From a pure numbers
perspective, the increase in benefits is an increase in total compensation.
But it doesn't call out that most of those "missing wages" have been absorbed
into handle rising healthcare costs. The people who are receiving these
"increased benefits" haven't received anything other than the same healthcare
but now they pay more for it.

------
astonex
Something like 30 hours a week, 4 days a week cant come soon enough.

Right now I work 40-45, 5 days a week and it feels like all I do is work and
chores.

~~~
quickthrower2
Two questions

Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes.

Can people afford to live off a 4 day week salary? I’d guess no in general.

~~~
tc7
Offering 4-day weeks: Do you see this often? Just curious -- I feel like it's
rare, so my guess would be the opposite. (I do know several people that work 4
10hr days as machinists or window installers).

My intuition is also the opposite of yours on affordability :), at least in
tech...

~~~
quickthrower2
I live in a country I where yeah it’s common enough (let assume for good
workers not borderline ones) but we’re not paid as highly as the US, so
supporting a family on a 4 day senior dev salary is a push unless you end got
a paid off house.

~~~
yabadabadoes
The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40
hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible <20 hour employees or salary
+ forced-overtime is basically throwing money away.

 __edit oops- <20..

~~~
quickthrower2
Can you elaborate on why? Is this a tax related thing? Or benefits related?

~~~
yabadabadoes
Tax code relating to benefits and labor laws (which kind of assume the
environment encouraged by the tax code.)

As an example, benefits have fairness tests between highest and lowest paid
employees. Fail those tests and the benefits are taxed, possibly as normal
income. Companies find tricks to get people out of the group of normal
employees under the IRS rules to beat these tests.

------
blunte
Cost of living increases almost every year. Value of money decreases somewhat
from inflation. Worker salaries have not been increasing on pace with
inflation, much less cost of living increases, since oh... the Reagan years.

What has increased dramatically since the Reagan years is executive pay and
wealth of top 1%. What has also increased is consumer debt, particularly
during the Clinton years. At the same time that consumer debt was increasing,
interest rates (for consumers, not the prime rate) were climbing quickly to
their legal limits. Also, those legal limits were occasionally being
increased.

Yes consumers are consuming more stuff, and yes most of that extra consumption
is rather wasteful and provides decreasing benefit in terms of quality of life
or happiness. But the rate of some consumption is going down. Modern
computers, TVs, and even mobile phones now can do so much more than most users
need that there is less and less reason to upgrade frequently. Buying a new
car every couple of years is a great way to waste money. But generally
speaking, "the people" aren't living larger than they did 20-30 years ago.

There's very little doubt that the vast majority of the value of the increased
productivity output has gone to the top 1%. That's factually visible even
without exposing the many sources of hidden offshore wealth that is sometimes
estimated to be multiple times larger than the known wealth.

------
amiga_500
People aren’t motivated because work is an endless treadmill. Financial
independence a roll of the loaded startup dice.

The British model of a financialised economy doesn’t work for the many. Just
the rich, like YC VCs.

All the questioning “how do you stay motivated “. By retaining your surplus
value.

~~~
mlevental
you're going to get downvoted the all the protestant work ethic people that
think labor is virtuous per se - "an honest day's work is reward in and of
itself" type thing (forgetting or conveniently omitting that these
values/virtues were defined by capital not labor). I agree with you and many
more would too if they didn't see themselves as "temporarily aggrieved
millionaires".

~~~
yourapostasy
As Iain Banks put it his The Culture universe, "money is a sign of poverty".
We're hopefully still in the tricky beginning of a transition phase to a post-
scarcity civilization. Just need that fusion reactor to start with...

------
nbrempel
The number of times this topic has come up on HN recently is really
surprising. It seems 1 or 2 posts on this topic hit the front page just about
every day. I run a newsletter and job board called 30 Hour Jobs [1] – I
started the project about 6 months ago and it seems like my timing couldn't
have been any better.

Usually, I try not to shamelessly plug my own projects too often but I can't
help but share it in the comments when the topic is so relevant!

[1] [https://30hourjobs.com](https://30hourjobs.com)

------
Majromax
Unfortunately, the mid-noughts vintage of this page is showing. After about
2010, productivity growth has not kept up with the page's 1.7% estimate
([https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn)).

Also, this page neglects the influence of heterogeneous productivity changes.
Some fields don't experience the same kind of productivity growth that we've
seen in manufacturing (and services aided by technology); for example a doctor
now is not seeing four times as many patients as a doctor in 1940. A barber
now is not cutting the hair of four people at once.

You can't productivity-gain your way out of the costs of dedicated attention
from individuals.

------
sweeneyrod
> The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a
> worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker
> in only 11 hours per week.

The logical conclusion from this seems to me to be "productivity doesn't mean
anything". If we all have four times as much stuff as in 1950 (rather than
working fewer hours) then where is it? Obviously there have been a lot of
amazing technological developments since the fifties but most of them aren't
that expensive: if you sold your computer/phone/etc. you wouldn't be four
times richer.

------
twodave
My work/life balance has changed a lot in the last 5 or so years. I've done
all of the above (in chronological order):

FTE 100% in the office FTE 100% remote (same company, living in the same city)
FT Contract on-site plus consulting FT Contract on-site minus consulting FTE
100% remote (HQ 4-5 hour drive away, quarterly-ish visits) FTE 100% on-site
FTE* "wherever" plus 10-15 hours/wk consulting

Right now I'm a FTE at one place where I probably _actually_ spend about 35
hours/week working and then I am on monthly retainer for my old employer
(through my consulting corp).

I wake up before 6 most mornings and either put in a few consulting hours or
go do crossfit. Then 9-noonish I try and be productive at my full-time job. I
usually a long lunch/run errands after that, and then a couple more hours for
the full-time job in the afternoon. I'm usually done working by 4:30 or 5pm
and then it's time to either cook or go to the in-laws or order food depending
on how I feel (I'm the cook and we're a family of 6).

I have found the variety of doing multiple jobs keeps me much more productive
in general, because I can basically work on what I want whenever I'm motivated
to. The end of the month/sprint can be rough sometimes if I have
procrastinated (or just not felt motivated at one job or the other), but every
month when I get a check in the mail I feel freshly motivated haha.

------
coldtea
Someone wrote here about whether 3 hours or so out of 8 being productive "is
not just peculiar to software work.

There's an old post from a photographer blogger and funny guy if somewhat
controversial [1]:

> The Two-Hour Rule is a law of American business which states that "no
> salaried employee, employed by a business to work in an office, may exceed
> two hours of actual work in any business day."

> The Two-Hour Rule does not apply to government workers (police, fire,
> military, libraries, public works, etc.), independent contractors, services
> billed hourly or apply outside the USA. I'll cover these at the end. The
> Two-Hour Rule applies to people working at government subcontractors because
> they are businesses.

> The Two-Hour Rule was created to ensure that American business thrived on
> efficiency, not on dumb hard work, so that Americans could enjoy the lives
> they had earned."

[https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-
rule.htm](https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm)

[1] Naive amateurs with religious feels about photography and its "rules" tend
to hate him, for such advice as "just shoot JPEG" (as if shooting RAW, and
squeezing that extra quality is not a tradeoff of file size/storage/post
processing, but a holy duty of everyone who photographs, even if it's just BS
family/travel/pet pics nobody would ever really care about - not even the
family/pet).

~~~
raihansaputra
I was an avid reader of his blog, but never read that. Genius.

On the footnote: reading his advice over and over again made me a better
photographer. I still shoot RAW, as I like editing, but his advice on just
sticking with AUTO is what made me far more productive rather that fiddling
with trying to get the best shutter speed/aperture.

------
franciscop
I want to note that there's something that has been rarely mentioned in these
threads and I wonder why: longer education time (and earlier retirement).

On my parents generation a small percentage of people went to university, and
on my grandparents generation most people started working on their early teens
(post-war, I'm from Spain). In contrast, today having an undergraduate degree
is very common, and a master or even doctorate is no rare. This makes a 10-15
year difference of no-work time to our lives, which is ~1/4th of our work
lives. Where before we were expected to work from 16 to 66 years old (~50
years), now we are expected to work from 22 years old to 62 years old (40
years).

Only this is a reduction of work by 20%, or a full work day.

To add on top of that, our life expectancy has been increasing in all
developed countries (except, USA). While this does not take away work time, it
does add leisure time to our lives.

To be clear, I agree with the article and sentiment here and we should be
working shorter weeks. Only wanted to note this since many people seem to
ignore it when discussing work week.

------
akavi
It's a little odd that the link doesn't mention that average working hours has
in fact gone down over time in the United States, from 1989 hours over a year
in 1950 to 1,757 hours in 2017[0]. That's a decrease of roughly 12%. Not _as_
much as if all of productivity increases had gone into increasing leisure, but
I'm not sure you'd expect that to have happened.

This trend seems fairly robust across countries and extending even further
back in time. The average work week in the USA was 62 hours in 1870, and was
40.25 hours in 2000, a decline of 29% [1].

My suspicion is that this actually understates the increase in leisure time,
as many household chores are presumably easier due to modern tech.

[0]:
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG)

[1]: [https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-
work...](https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-working-
hours-per-year-after-the-industrial-revolution)

------
muzani
Tech actually seems really optimal for this.

I get assigned a 8 hour task. I spend 4 hours trying to get it done in 4
hours. The next time I get the same task, it takes 4 hours. I can optimize it
even further if it happens a lot, get it done in 10 minutes.

I can 'siphon off' time this way, lowering estimates a little, cutting time
spent by a lot, then basically reinvesting the saved time into rest or
productivity. The other day we had a meeting; I got all the work done before
the meeting ended then waited an hour before showing the result.

There are lots of tricks, like figuring out keyboard shortcuts, IDE plugins,
or simply refactoring staging/production builds into a single button. It's
surprising how much mental effort and time a shortcut like CTRL/CMD + SHIFT +
F saves.

The long term goal is to be so productive that I can probably negotiate a
shorter work week or more vacation days instead of a raise, as I already get
paid a comfortable amount.

~~~
tacostakohashi
You can absolutely do that to a huge extent, but good luck actually capturing
the productivity gains as an employee. You won't be rewarded with shorter days
or salary increases, certainly not in proportion to your productivity
increases.

At best, you can use the siphoned off time for learning new things, or
networking your way into management.

Employers don't value that kind of thing, possibly because although it
increases _your_ efficiency, it also leads to a complicated, brittle
environment that is difficult to scale to many employees, and staff that are
less interchange and harder to replace.

------
jswet
“Productivity” means something very different for assembly line workers than
it does for retail workers. As productivity has improved over time, we
actually have seen the expected reduction of hours, but it varies by
occupation. A much smaller number of people work in manufacturing now, while
the ranks of retail and white collar workers have grown. People are moving
towards occupations where “productivity” is harder to gauge and not
necessarily the most important metric at all times. The increase in
productivity in some sectors and the migration of workers to new sectors are
broadly related, too, since the former requires technological advance, which
is the result of cognitive work and creates more need for white collar and
cognitive work.

------
ulisesrmzroche
We should be having official 4 hour workdays. State mandated.

We can only do about four hours of solid work. There’s really no tricks to
productivity. Just trying to mask fatigue, I suppose.

But me? I don’t do any real work until after lunch. Maybe a meeting, to manage
my managers, of course.

I learned this just in recent years tho. Before that, I was as neurotic as
anyone.

------
youareostriches
Working fewer hours is absolutely required as a practice of degrowth to reduce
CO2 emissions and limit ecosystem damage.

------
wazoox
Do you know why work is so much more productive? Because so much is automated
away, and relies on machines. Each and every worker works using lots of
machines. Of course, the more machines you can make work the more productivity
you have.

When a large part of your work can't be delegated to machines, for instance
nursing a baby, talking to people face to face, etc (mostly "human relations"
things) then your productivity can't augment as much. This is also why "human
work" earns less than "things work".

Do you know what machines use to work? Energy. In the end, energy availability
is the ultimate constraint. Good old thermodynamics. Why can't anything grow
forever (and surely not GDP)? because of available energy, and thermodynamics.

------
sravi2421
Sure, productivity is rising. But how much are healthcare and education costs
rising? And how does that compare to this rise in productivity?

Until those two pieces get solved, productivity gains don't matter since
everyone needs to produce/earn more to just get those basic needs fulfilled.

~~~
Razengan
What is productivity?

~~~
LeonB
For some things it’s easy to measure: eg how much wheat is produced per hour
of farm labor.

Some easy to measure things don’t rise and it’s easy to see why, e.g. how many
students does one teacher teach in a given day.

Productivity in the aggregate is “the gross national” product and is
calculated by the bureau of statistics. This is divided by the total number of
hours worked.

Must be a very big spreadsheet. :)

------
KineticLensman
I do a three day week with a corresponding pay cut. Incidentally, this puts me
in the same position, time-wise, as women returning from maternity leave, so
the shorter hours don't mark me out particularly. My co-workers are fine with
it, and if a surge is needed, I can work longer weeks and accrue Time Off In
Lieu. There is no way that I would go back to a routine five day week.

I'm doing this to prep for the more significant transition of fully retiring,
so that I don't hit the cliff edge of going from full-time to nothing.
Stopping work is still going to be a bit of a shock, but I genuinely feel
part-time working is helping me to prepare for inevitable retirement.

------
lbj
Interestingly we did a survey such as this on our massive danish government
and it turns out that since the 1950s there has been a 0% productivity
increase, the wages have however followed increases in the private sector.

------
soufron
As a good tip, in order to keep my workweek short, I try not to work on
Wednesday and Friday, and of course, on the week end.

This means I try to work 3 days a week only. I usually can do it pretty much
easily.

