
Going for the 5 hour workday - kristerv
http://code.krister.ee/going-for-the-5-hour-workday/
======
jblow
I had this same kind of personality / mental condition, and I am going to say,
if he is really of the same personality type, 5-hour days are not going to
help this author in the long term. What is helping his mood is not really the
shorter day, but the hope of having made a short-term structural change that
might fix things. The thing is, it won't. He already mentions at the end that
burnouts are back. Well, pretty soon the 5-hour days will be feeling too long
and he will be 'unable' to do them. Then what? 3-hour days?

The fundamental problem is that he doesn't actually want to be doing what he
is doing, despite the rhetoric of "great team and awesome project". Come on,
is that really how you feel about it deep in your heart, or is it empty SV
rhetoric?

Two things will help this author:

(1) Strike out on your own, following your own motivation only. Yes you have
to figure out how to make ends meet financially, but that is your lot in life.
Fortunately it is easier to do this with computers than in most other fields.

(2) Meditate, learn to observe your mind and why it does what it does, so that
you don't feel powerless or subservient to things like burnout. It's hard to
explain the transformation that takes place, but being able to stand next to
or outside these mental processes is very powerful.

~~~
dkural
He also doesn't really think well from the company's perspective, here's an
Employee FAQ to complement the Boss FAQ on what's not addressed:

1\. There is a fixed cost to having an in-house employee no matter how many
hours he/she works. Healthcare, Office Space, Parking, lunch, any
subscriptions to systems per-head etc. So inherently it's a bad deal to lower
% productivity because these cost stay same. Note that not only these costs
don' decline, company now has to hire _more_ people to replace lost time, and
incur these costs for those people as if they're full-time. So instead of
fixed cost going from 1x->.8, it actually goes to 1.25x to get same amount of
work done!! (assuming 80% productivity at 5h)

2\. Even if (1) wasn't an issue, splitting a project to a larger team is
inherently less efficient. The communication overhead of a 2 person team (1
comm. channel to manage) is 1/3 of a 3 person team (3 relationships/channels).
Communication complexity increases exponentially with team size.

3\. Time & context are very important to competitiveness in technology. Doing
the same project in the same #hours and same $ is irrelevant in the real world
if Team1 did it in one 4 weeks real-world time and Team2 did in 6 weeks of
real world time, even if total hours worked is same. Likewise, employees build
company and project context faster, can iterate faster, acquire relevant
domain knowledge faster, and thus become more productive in Team1.

4\. Should your stock vest over 5-6 years now instead of 4?

[ edited for paragraph breaks ]

~~~
DanBC
You're making the mistake of saying fewer hours would be less productive, and
there's considerable doubt about that.

~~~
jblow
I have run a company for 13 years and I don't have doubt about it at all.
Dropping to 5 hours is for sure going to be less productive unless all your
employees are terrible in the first place (in which case, just hire people who
want to work more).

I am not claiming that the standard 8-hour day is the maximum; but I think if
a shorter day is better, I would guess the situation would peak around 7 or
7.5 hours. But again this depends on what kind of people you are talking
about. I personally work 60+ hours a week, most weeks, and I prefer it that
way.

~~~
theshrike79
And you are actually productive for all of the 60 hours?

I work a normal north european 37.5 hour week and I'm productive about 75% of
the time. If I'm having an off day, I'll just go home and do something else
and come look at the problem from a new angle the next day.

Programming is a creative profession, just piling on the hours doesn't affect
productivity in a linear fashion.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Piling on hours will affect productivity super-linearly. It means more parts
of the project are fresh on your mind.

------
Azeralthefallen
I actually worked at a company who tried something similar to this (6 hours/5
days) for about ~2 months, and it worked for a little while. Unfortunately we
found a lot of problems with this:

\- People who started early (~7am), left really early, and people who like to
start much later (~10am). This led to only ~3 hour overlap time period when
the majority of the dev team was in. There was a small effort to normalize the
start times, but we could never find a common time that worked for everyone.

\- I felt this put an obscene amount of pressure on some people (including
myself) more so than others.

\- People hate meetings, people beg and cry that meetings are a waste, but the
bitter reality is ether you get everyone on the same page at once, or you need
to do it separately, which becomes even more pressure for certain people.
Combine this with the limited time when you can guarantee the majority of dev
will be in, makes it difficult.

\- The coop/intern students i felt got shafted hard by this, since time is so
much more valuable during that two months they often got very little
direction.

\- I also personally found that about 6 of us (team leads/seniors) ended up
with much more pressure, and stress due to trying to force 8 hours of work
into 6 hours of a day.

In the end we ended up giving up on the idea, due in combination to other
departments complaining, some HR payroll issues, and problems with coverage.

~~~
matrix
This highlights something about our industry that I find a little weird.
Collectively we want to be respected as professionals, yet feel it's ok come
into work whenever it pleases us despite its impact on the team.

In my view, a true professional shows up and gets the job done, no matter
what. Asking employees to show up at 9 am on a reasonably consistent basis so
that the team can work effectively seems like a pretty low bar to me (except
in the case of special personal circumstances, of course).

~~~
krausejj
It sounds old fashioned, but I have to agree. I look at my parents -- my mom
worked 16 hour shifts in a hospital with no natural light for almost 40 years.
She was doing work that touched people in life or death situations; a far cry
from many of the apps we're building.

She never complained. Yet we find problems sitting for 8 hours in an Aeron
chair drinking micro-brew coffee with the freedom to check out Facebook or
Amazon whenever we want.

Was my mom unhappy? Nope, she loved her job. Was she tired and burned-out at
times? Absolutely. I think a lot of this has to do with perspective.

------
jlebrech
It's already a 5 hour work day, it's just inside of an 8 hour attendance day.

~~~
dovdovdov
More like a let's touch that code for an hour or so day. ;)

~~~
pawadu
After that lets have a meeting!

~~~
hacksonx
Just finished a 2 month project without having a single meeting with business
and I must say, things are much better. Business never told me directly what
to do and I never told them directly how long something would take me. Best
approach ever.

~~~
avoutthere
This works wonderfully if everybody involved acts rationally and
professionally. Otherwise, it can quickly become a nightmare.

------
wastedhours
Also worth realising that in a lot of companies you're not being paid for your
output, you're being paid for a certain amount of access to your brain.

The value in your job isn't your output, it's the organisational outcomes that
occur as a result of you doing what ya do.

Some companies are fine and built around the outcomes of 5 hours a day of your
code. Some organisations though really want 8 hours a day of access to those
sweet, sweet neurons. Even if the constant interruptions, meetings and
feelings of unproductivity are side effects, perhaps they value the outcomes
of 2 hours a day of your code and the value sharing that comes from an inane
question at 17:59, more than absolute output.

Not saying the latter is more efficient or should be right, but just showing
there's different value companies derive from their employees over and above
project deliverables.

~~~
Asooka
Is that really true, or is it just a well-sounding rationalisation we tell
ourselves to avoid doing anything to make things better?

~~~
lostcolony
It -can- be. I know I am woefully undertasked, and in way, way too many
meetings. Oftentimes I'm thrown at things that are floundering despite having
no knowledge of them, their history, their current deliverables, etc. Not to
actually code, but to just be present. Even though I feel entirely useless in
such a role, it seems to provide some comfort to my superiors, and even to the
teams in question. There are enough areas I'm extremely knowledgeable in,
there are enough times I -am- able to save people/teams large amounts of work,
there are enough times I can basically just look at a set of stories that
they're predicting will take man-weeks, and say "I'll have a solution in place
for you to start playing with tomorrow", that my presence seems to benefit a
number of people even when I do nothing at all, just as a security blanket. If
that's worth my salary to them, while I still have time to learn things on my
own (and, er, browse HN), fair enough.

~~~
Jach
I hope you're an architect-level or at least getting there. I kind of feel sad
for some architects though, they rarely get to code anymore, their existence
is meetings, but presumably their ability to coordinate and prioritize the big
picture outweighs having them apply their coding chops. For coders that can't
give up coding it's a self-limiting move to resist that direction, lots of
companies seem to have pressure that to advance you have to do 'less'.

When you do your big prototype solutions is it usually something you toss over
the fence to the team that now takes on the rest of the dev/qe responsibility
or do you try to work closely with one or two people on that team as you build
it? I mostly ask because another sort of altruistic (or selfish if you're just
killing time until the next round of meetings) thing you can do with your role
is go around dropping mana on heads-down coding grunts by working with them
directly on something; they'll probably have a nice feeling of appreciation
like this person, who they aren't quite sure does what but must be very
valuable, is taking time to work with them, and hopefully you teach them a few
useful things from your deep knowledge to boot.

~~~
lostcolony
Kind of. Due to some internal politics, we have an 'architecture team' being
formed, by someone who I don't want to work for (but who wants to poach me).
Meanwhile I've been the de facto architect for a year and a half for software
development. My actual title is 'backend tech lead'.

As to approach, it depends. Occasionally I've written and hosted a solution,
and given endpoints for people to test with, before then walking people
through the specifics and bringing devops on board to move it to production,
and then will still actively take a hand in making changes/fixes/etc. Other
times I've basically just POC'ed it, and then suggested to a team "Hey, this
looks like it will solve a problem you're facing, here's some POC code, maybe
play with and evaluate this approach, see if it'll fit your needs?" and they
have, and in the process have learned more about the particulars than I knew,
so that they're in a good place to do the real evaluation and decide what
direction to head in. And still other times, especially common with juniors,
when someone hits a roadblock, I'll sit with them, seek to understand the
problem, and either explain the nature of the problem, and some possible
solutions, and leave it up to them to pick one (since they have the most
domain knowledge), or work/talk with them to work to and understand an ideal
solution (if it doesn't require domain knowledge I don't have).

------
ryandrake
Lot of people in this thread saying they'd be willing to work N% hours less
for N% less pay. Am I the only one living in a high cost of living area, for
which the opposite is true? I'd be totally for working more but getting paid
more. At this point in my life, mid-life crisis age, I am starting to notice
time stalking me, realizing my inadequate retirement savings, and wondering
how many more at-bats I'm going to have before it's time to walk away from the
baseball game. Am I going to have to eat dog food when I retire? What's my
kid's college going to cost? Will I ever be able to afford a vacation? Who
really has comfortable answers to these questions?

Why on earth would you _choose_ to work and get paid less than you can, while
you are young and capable?? I look back and wish I had worked multiple jobs
when I was younger, not that I had _fewer_ hours.

~~~
shubhamjain
> I look back and wish I had worked multiple jobs when I was younger, not that
> I had fewer hours.

Paradoxically, I just read an Internet comment how your 20s should be a wild
ride of backpacking, meeting people, having sex, and living a carefree life.

I don't think your effort should go into maximising work hours; that's a
mistake I have made a few times in the past. You maximise the ROI on your
effort by climbing the right hill [1]; and it takes some failures before you
find the right one.

[1]: [http://cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbing-the-wrong-
hill/](http://cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbing-the-wrong-hill/)

------
shubhamjain
Given a choice, I think 8x4 would be more sensible in terms of benefits. The
best use of free time is enjoyable experiences outside work, which is more
doable when you have it without interruptions of a work schedule. Five hours a
day is awesome if you have a hobby or a side project; not so much if you want
to travel. The second reason is the time it takes to level up and actually
start working. Honestly, this could be lessened if I didn't check reddit & HN
first thing after I start working but I have grown a bit habitual to it.

At any given day, five hours of focused work is much better than eight hours
filled with distractions, but I haven't found the magical solution to make
that (super-focused work) happen.

Personally, I don't have much of an issue with working hours. The main issue
is I can't enjoy long stretches of vacation. Yes, it's possible to sacrifice
some of your salary to go wild, but you can't do it without getting a frown
from your superiors.

~~~
wiz21c
Right now I work 4 days out of 5. I'm paid 4 and my retirement plan will be
4/5th too. But at the same time, I work on personal projects. I also choose my
day off on tuesday. Because tuesday is not an extended weekend, so it's "my
own projects day" and it's the first day like that in the week so I'm not
tired like I'd be on, say thursday.

I have to work until 67 in my country. So when I'll be off, I'll be way to
tired to start new stuff. Moreover, after 50 years old, I'll get a good chance
of getting cancer or some other life-changing disease. So I think it's better
if I take my time right now...

Final note : this holds because my job is not a dream job, so my return-on-
time-investment is weak (I don't consider the ability to buy a big car or
around-the-world vacations, or top-notch-phone to be a good return on the time
I spend at work)

~~~
beejiu
> I have to work until 67 in my country.

I presume you mean you have to work until 67 if you rely on the state to fund
your retirement?

~~~
switch007
Depends how you interpret it. Could also be due to any of the following:

\- low wages meaning lower contributions

\- low investment returns

\- changes to the tax system

\- they started contributing signifiant amounts later in life due to other
pressures

~~~
wiz21c
I'm just following the "system" here. Nothing fancy. I'm not in a situation
where I can retire earlier. I could do it, but for that I'd have to make a ton
of money, which implies competing with people which may be better at selling
themselves than me. I'm afraid I wouldn't perform very well in such context.

------
puranjay
I've always worked from home (freelanced, then started a remote company).
Never actually been to a regular office.

Recently, I joined a coworking space.

I used to think that I'm "unproductive", but after seeing how others actually
work, I'm surprised that businesses get any work done at all.

I'll be amazed if most employees work at more than 60% productivity.

~~~
3princip
I've worked in offices, now working from home. A few hours a day is enough to
be considered exceptionally productive in terms of coding for me, this leaves
a lot of time for other productivity, family, work around the house. In an
office environment the rest of the time is spent looking busy. A surprising
number of people will not admit it and will very adamently deny that they are
not being productive, yet output shows differently.

But then there are meetings. Factoring in meetings takes a lot of time.
Endless talk about improving process...

The flip-side of focusing on productivity and less so on actively
participating in meetings or scheduling them is getting stuck in a coding job,
being remote and not active in pursuing promotions the companies I work for
usually fall back to relying on me for good code and meeting/exceeding planned
output and that's it.

In my experience, if you have the goal of moving up a company hierarchy, you
have to put on a show that you are a busy which has little to do with output
(code) and lots to do with appearences (lot's of talking).

------
n1vz3r
I track all my billable time for last 7 years. My average is 4:30 billable
hours a day and I can confirm that every period of over-working ends with
equal or longer period of under-working. So the 4:30 is like a gold number. I
stopped to fight with this, and now after 4:30 hours I happily clock out and
go home. (Yes, I'm self-employeed). This way the only reasonable strategy to
earn more without having health issues is to bill more per hour. Exception to
this 4:30 rule is non-programming work that doesn't require high
concentration: visual design, reports, configuration, CSS tweaks etc - I can
do it pretty much non-stop for whole day.

~~~
tclancy
>every period of over-working ends with equal or longer period of under-
working

I've only recently come to accept this. I've recently hit a period of too many
clients showing up at one time and I now feel stupid when I work on the
weekend because I know that kind of "heroic" effort will be balanced out by me
goofing off on Monday.

~~~
mpfundstein
and thats precisely the cool thing. i made 4k last weekend working on a video
encoder. delivered and now goof of since then

------
lbill
My contract specifies a 7.5h workday... But I do only 6h/day, and so do most
of my colleagues. I am very lucky: I live in France, this country has a strong
culture of "stay late at work and the boss will like you", yet my firm does
not care about that. It cares about getting sh*t done.

This is a broader subject than "work hours": my firm thinks that staying more
hour to procrastinate is not not useful, and it believes that employees are
more efficient when they are happy! In order to have an efficient workforce
and less turnover, I think any business should try to answer: "for each
employee: what conditions does he/she need to be happy at work?".

~~~
briandear
You definitely have a dream job for France! I live here too but I am "lucky"
to work for US employers remotely but from what I have seen at traditional
French companies your situation is unusual. I hope that those ideas start to
spread across French business culture!

------
_yosefk
I've tried both 5 short workdays and 3 longer workdays. I like 3 longer
workdays better. A full day for work and a full day for something else mean,
to me, that I can focus more fully on work and then focus more fully on
something else. A "half work, half not work" day means, to me, that I can't
quite focus on either.

TFA presents the shorter week [the alternative to a shorter day] as 3
consecutive days; I prefer interleaving work and non-work days, so as to
neither be absent from work for 2 days in a row, nor work for 2 days in a row.

~~~
hahamrfunnyguy
I worked the 3x10 schedule for a while, I loved it! Unfortunately, my boss
insisted I come back to work full-time.

------
jrumbut
I really wish more companies would be willing to do this, as a childless adult
I have no need for more than 20 hours worth of pay, and my health definitely
benefits on a lighter schedule.

Currently I'm achieving this through contracting but I would much rather have
a more typical employment situation to reduce the administrative burden and
the need for sales.

~~~
wfunction
> I really wish more companies would be willing to do this, as a childless
> adult I have no need for more than 20 hours worth of pay, and my health
> definitely benefits on a lighter schedule.

Pardon my ignorance but in your view how is having a child supposed to push
this in the other direction? Do you see having a child as an
opportunity/reason to raise the 20 hours/week to 40 hours/week and stay away
from home longer? Because I thought the point of raising children was so you
could spend some of your time raising a family, and my impression was most
older people would rather be with their families than at work. Do you see
yourself wishing that you could work 40 hours when you have children or
something? Wouldn't it make more sense to work more now and save for that
future instead so you don't have to work as hard then?

~~~
disiplus
im with OP. if you are alone right now all the extra time you have will be
yours alone, and all the money you earn will have to be enough to support you.

If i chose to do it like you sugested. Work 100% and save 50%, there is no way
in hell that i would save that 50%. Nobody would. When you only have 10$ in
bank to buy a lunch you buy it for max 10$ but if you have 100$ you have to
force yourself to spend only 10$. you probably would not. I know that i would
not do it 100% of time. So in the end you end up saving alot less then 50%.

when you get your child, the extra time that you have if you work less will be
spend between you, your child/family, your alone time ( if you value it, will
be not even close to 50% ) and because having a family is way more expensive,
all the money you saved when working 100% and supposed to save 50% would be
spend 3 times faster then when you where alone, and then you would have to go
back to work.

~~~
wfunction
> When you only have 10$ in bank to buy a lunch you buy it for max 10$ but if
> you have 100$ you have to force yourself to spend only 10$. you probably
> would not.

I would agree with you but this is not the situation we're talking about
there. The OP is totally comfortable living with 50% of the income; clearly
he's not counting pennies when he goes out to get lunch, and I assumed that's
not a situation he's looking to get himself into either (but if he is for some
reason, then OK, you're right).

It very much seemed like he'd be still living pretty darn comfortably and
getting everything he wants at 50% pay. Unless you like to spend money just
for the hell of it, I don't see why you'd spend more on your lunch just
because you're making more money, when you're already eating whatever you want
anyway.

> when you get your child, the extra time that you have if you work less will
> be spend between you, your child/family, your alone time ( if you value it,
> will be not even close to 50% ) and because having a family is way more
> expensive, all the money you saved when working 100% and supposed to save
> 50% would be spend 3 times faster then when you where alone, and then you
> would have to go back to work.

I was thinking more like, invest the money in something instead of directly
spending (say) 10 years' worth of 2x salary in like 3 years of daily life
expenses. Maybe even use it to start your own business and dictate your own
hours... so many possibilities I can't even think of when you have the money.

------
theparanoid
I wish more companies offered less than 40hrs/wk. But, hey, most places don't
like even giving vacation. I'd rather commit seppuku than go back to a 40hr
office.

~~~
dceddia
What do you do now?

------
readittwice
There is another point to consider: Getting 20% less money, doesn't
necessarily also mean 20% less money after taxes. When I was working part-time
(20h per week) while studying, working full-time during summer meant this:
~90% more work (from 20h to 38.5h) but only ~60% higher salary (after taxes).
So I just continued to work part-time in holidays and enjoyed summer. In my
country higher salary means higher taxes, working less hours therefore means
paying less taxes because of a lower salary. Taxes don't consider the number
of hours you work. Although you need to consider that you also pay less e.g.
into your pensions fund, some of your additional salary is "just" taxed away.
When working 20h the difference for me was substantial, right now not so much.
But that may be different for you.

------
dasmoth
Great to see people trying things like this!

But... Ctrl-F "commute"? Nope, don't see anything. Are you either remote or
living very close to the office? Having more than a few minutes of commute
does potentially change the trade-offs.

~~~
danieldisu
When you only have to work for 6 hours it's very easy to avoid the more
congested hours. Allowing you to get to work by routes that normally are
collapsed, or just using the same route and getting there 15+ minutes earlier
because there are no traffic.

I think is a win-win

~~~
Asooka
I used to work 6 hours and commuted each day by bike for a total of 2 hours of
commute. It was the best. You do your work AND get your daily exercise AND
have 8 hours left over.

~~~
rockostrich
You had a 1 hour commute each way by bike? Did you live 13+ miles away or did
you just take a leisurely pace?

~~~
Asooka
It was ~10km in a straight line uphill. Our roads aren't really built for
bikes and I don't want to become a smudge on the road, so my route was more
meandering to avoid every large straight road possible. My absolute fastest
was 32 minutes going work->home downhill, taking the usually unsafe roads,
because traffic was unusually low for that day. After I bought a velocimeter
and used it for a while, my average speed was about 14km/h.

------
dvcrn
I am very very interested in this myself. I proposed something similar to my
current company but got refused.

I experimented with different hours off on certain days and found that the
thing that would turn me into a productivity monster would be a 4-5h work day
with remote option. But now try to find something like this (especially in
Asia). Despite loving my current job, I think if I would get a counter offer
from a company with these benefits, I would probably quit right away.

I am personally not a office bee and dislike leaving when it's dark. I'm
drained of all my motivation and the darkness makes me just want to go home,
watch a YouTube video and sleep, just to repeat the same cycle again. I
managed to counter this fairly successfully by working outside of cafes that
have terraces and picking a new location every day. My motivation and
productivity level stays up longer and the drain is reduced, but now if I just
had more time...

------
kareemm
Reminds me of a buddy's 5 year plan. He owned 50% of a company that he
bootstrapped to 8 figures in revenue; his co-founder owned the other 50%.

Here's his 5 year plan:

Year 1: work 4 days a week

Year 2: work 3 days a week

Year 3: work 2 days a week

Year 4: work 1 day a week

Year 5: cash cheques, spend time with his family, and do adventure sports full
time

------
onion2k
_But since I 'm giving the company the best hours of the day I would ask 80%
of pay for the 60% of workload._

The author states that he's able to work with fewer distractions and better
concentration when it's a 5 hour day, so everyone's a winner - he gets more
time, he gets the same amount of work done, and the company saves money. I can
imagine it works very well in the author's circumstances. But how many workers
are in the same situation?

For a start, _very few_ people can afford a 20% cut to their pay. Anyone in
that situation is out.

For businesses that pay people enough that they could afford a 20% pay cut,
such as the big high profile IT companies, the business is usually awash with
cash; they need people to do _more_ work and are willing to pay overtime for
them to do it. Saving 20% of the wage bill is no incentive.

Lastly, as dasmoth points out, if you have a commute then you'd just be
increasing the relative amount of time you're travelling compared to working,
which I imagine would make it feel much worse. I have a 30 minute commute each
way and when I do a half day it feels like a huge waste of time.

As a solution when it's appropriate I think it's great, but I doubt it's
applicable to many people.

~~~
alkonaut
> But how many workers are in the same situation?

Most software developers, I'd guess

> very few people can afford a 20% cut to their pay. Anyone in that situation
> is out.

True, but among software devs it's proably a lot more common than in the rest
of the population

> Saving 20% of the wage bill is no incentive.

It's the same argument as why businesses want workers to do 50h weeks and not
40. It's hard to find two talented persons so they find one and hope he'll
work more. What they aren't seeing is that they'll have to find a replacement
for him within just a couple of years. The incentive for the business must
come from the fact that once this is widespread enough, talented people aren't
going to want to work for the old "we expect you to be here 40-50h"
businesses.

> if you have a commute then you'd just be increasing the relative amount of
> time you're travelling compared to working, which I imagine would make it
> feel much worse.

This is important. First, if you have a 1h commute it makes no sense to go to
an office every day and do 5h as you point out. For some it would make more
sense to work 2-6 days a week from home, thereby reducing the number of
commute hours per work hour. For others, it would make most sense to do 4x6
instead of 5x5 hours etc. Also (and this is very important) if you do commute
it's important to be able to work during the commute. A 1h train ride is easy
to convert to work (even if it's not productive work but at least being
available for chat questions, catching up with email etc) but a 1h car ride is
not.

~~~
onion2k
_True, but among software devs it 's proably a lot more common than in the
rest of the population_

Even among that small subset of the population I doubt it's common. Your
lifestyle expands to fit your income. That makes it increasing difficult to
accept a lower wage. Further to that, it'll become even less common as
developers get older and more commonly have mortgages and families.

~~~
alkonaut
Indeed - but if you asked me 10 years ago whether I'd rather have this setup
than the extra pay - I would no doubt have taken less work. Consequently today
I would perhaps have a smaller house, had I taken that chance.

There may be those that won't be able to take this offer because they already
have the mortgage however,

------
waivej
Back when I worked for someone else, I switched to part time after I had been
there several years. I would work Mon, Tues, Thurs and got paid 60% of my
previous salary. I was more productive than ever and came to the office having
thought through things and ready to type it out.

I also didn't notice the drop in salary because I had time to repair things
and didn't "buy" progress in hobbies. I also had time to design things for
work while sitting in a convertible by a lake rather than a drab office. It
was one of the best experiences of my life. Sometimes I wish I could do the
same thing working for myself but the situation is different.

The only tough part was not having time to socialize with coworkers. They
would take breaks and talk about things but I felt my time was so precious
that I wanted to get my work done.

~~~
pc86
This does seem nice, but if I'm being honest with myself if I was only working
3/5 of the time for 3/5 of the pay, the last thing I'd be doing in a
convertible by the lake was work. :)

M/T/H does seem better than M/T/W or M/W/F though.

------
EZ-E
One issue is that most companies would take a person asking for a lighter work
hours as lazy, or not motivated No matter the company, there will always have
"that" vibe when wanting less hours, unless they are specifically seeking a
part time

"What's wrong, don't you want to work 50 hours a week like the rest of us ?
What's the matter ? Not motivated ?"

~~~
cr1895
For a different perspective, consider the Netherlands where the right to work
part-time is enshrined in law. It's really common for people to switch to 36
or 32 hours having previously worked 40 hours full-time, and it's culturally
acceptable and isn't seen as lazy or unmotivated.

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2015/05/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2015/05/economist-explains-12)

~~~
roel_v
"and it's culturally acceptable and isn't seen as lazy or unmotivated"

Uh, you should probably add to that "... by other people who work part time".
There most certainly _is_ a career bias against part time workers. Sure, in
some sectors it might be worse than others, and not all of it is that explicit
- but come promotion time, working part time gives you a severe handicap.

~~~
cr1895
Well, no, I wouldn't add that because plenty who work full-time don't see
part-timers as lazy or unmotivated (or may intend to do so themselves at some
point if they have a kid, for example).

And sure...it may indeed be the case for some that promotions are slower to
come by not working full-time. Hardly strange- if you work fewer hours, your
experience will accrue more slowly. But this is separate from cultural
acceptability or value judgments by your coworkers/employer: one can be
productive and motivated for 36 hours a week, just as one can be lazy and
unmotivated for 40.

------
arien
I went through some kind of burnout as well last year (more related to
personal stuff than work itself) and decided to take a long vacation. I didn't
want to go back to the usual schedule and risk having the same issue again in
a year or two, so I decided to work part time when I came back.

So, now I work Monday to Wednesday and have Thursday to Sunday free. This
means I only have three days per week to make an impact on the company (as
opposed to the ones who work full time), so I find myself really focused. My
productivity vs before has skyrocketed.

What do I do on my extra days? Sometimes I go out, sometimes I just do nothing
and relax, sometimes I do small side contracts or personal projects. I hope
one of these takes off one day and allow me to recover the money I gave up
when switching to part time. At least now I've got the energy to work on them.

------
whatnotests
/me looks at clock, laughs, gets back to work.

~~~
thinkMOAR
at least you are allowed (i assume) to check HN every now and then during
office/work hours? There is always worse :)

~~~
whatnotests
Yeah mostly on HN while:

* Tests are running.

* long-running scripts are running.

* Code is compiling.

* Database is importing.

* Files are copying.

* etc

Thank goodness for this site and a few others.

~~~
ssijak
What do you compile, linux source?

~~~
whatnotests
* "Compiling" static assets (CSS/JS) on a JRuby-on-Rails project from 2012.

* docker build -t whatever -f some/Dockerfile .

* aws cloudformation update-stack ...

------
heiti
Have you also done anything about trying to find out why you have trouble
focusing? I read some older article from your blog also and got the feeling
you have been taking yourself as a static thing and that the things around you
need to change for you to feel better. Or did i get that wrong?

~~~
kristerv
Interesting view. I would myself say I've tried a lot of things and I wish I
could be contempt with what I have, but it just never works out this way.
However I'm totally open for suggestions, since I'm really willing to try
anything (but "suck it up").

Also I have tried figuring out what's wrong/different about me and I have no
answer. I've actually have had situations where I'm grateful for having a job
at all, but the positivity only lasts a few weeks.

------
mto
I'm a remote freelancer and currently also doing 25h/week but usually
distributed over 7 days. Originally started because the birth of my daughter
but I've quickly noticed how my productivity increased. I think it's even more
than my productivity in 40h in the office (also because I could never really
relax there). I used to have the "I hate everything and being locked up in
that office all day long is awful" moments every 3 months. Now my motivation
stays roughly the same over the year.

------
Zelmor
2 weeks is not enough of a dataset. Habits have to be unlearned and off-work
time reorganized.

Come back in a year.

Also, it would be better to ask the manager's observations regarding
productivity. Biases and all, you see.

~~~
kristerv
will do :)

------
Asooka
Well, programming isn't really traditional work. You know,

    
    
      W=F×s
    

We don't apply a lot of F and definitely don't move a long s, so at the end of
the day there isn't a lot of W we've done. I think it's useful to think of the
Puritanian work ethic briefly mentioned in this article, together with the
recent article about running modern society on human power alone. Back in the
day, we really did run a lot of things on human power. Yes, for the really
long s, we used large animals capable of sustaining a great deal of F
throughout the day, but other than that, a lot of stuff was done by hand. If
you don't apply your share of the F, you literally don't have food to eat. The
goods you had were a direct product of hand labour, every bread was made with
a nontrivial amount of calories expended by human muscle.

As we see, the more you work your muscles, the better they start working -
that's the basic premise of exercise and getting in shape. However, your brain
doesn't quite work like that. You can over-exert your mind much more easily
than you can your muscles and it just doesn't recover as well as them. For
your muscle, the cycle is work->muscle hurts->muscle recovers->work hurts you
less now. For your mind, the cycle is the other way around work->you get
burned out->you recover->you now burn out more easily. This fundamental
difference in the nature of work in the knowledge economy is what we should
focus on, to overcome the work ethic, traditions and employer-employee
regulations, that were formed in the time when 1 bread = lots and lots of
calories expended by muscle.

------
krambs
I remember the Heroku founders espoused 6 hour work days for developers. They
felt that this was the daily limit for creative workers - and that there was
not only diminishing returns after 6 hours, but potentially negative ones (due
to bad decisions made when overworked).

------
ianai
The reason hourly employees are to be paid time and a half in the US is to
incentivize companies to hire more people. Decreasing the full time/OT line
increases the demand for labor. I just wish I knew how to make that thought
agreeable in the US.

~~~
mac01021
> I just wish I knew how to make that thought agreeable in the US.

Maybe relieving employers of the need to provide all full time employees with
fringe benefits (ie. medical insurance)?

I don't know if this means we need a publicly funded, single-payer, healthcare
system, or if there is a more attractive solution. But the way a person's
healthcare is tied to their employer in this country is rather bizarre, and
I'm sure it is widely regarded by businesses as an incentive to avoid brining
on more full-time people.

~~~
LordKano
_Maybe relieving employers of the need to provide all full time employees with
fringe benefits (ie. medical insurance)?_

Even before it was legally mandated, market forces made it virtually
impossible to not offer it for full-time skilled labor.

Why would I work for you when I can go to your competitor, work for them and
get medical insurance? Even if I was in a position where I needed a job, as
soon as I can leave, I'm going to go elsewhere.

~~~
mac01021
Why don't the same market forces drive my employer to buy gas for my car or
give me gift cards to amazon or walmart?

~~~
LordKano
Ask for that in your next salary negotiation.

------
bufordsharkley
> Free time has filled up. I still get more stuff done, but personal
> development still requires proper scheduling and planning. The allure of
> "I'll have time for everything" has gone.

Yes: it's not the working for 8 hours, but rather the limited time left after
the 8 hours is over. There is so much more in my life than what others will
pay me to do, and I'd have so much more energy for work if I was given more of
my time back to pursue it...

------
korzun
You can't measure engineering productivity over a span of a couple of weeks.
You can't compare the output from week X to week Y unless the test conditions
and subjects are completely in-sync. We all know that would be impossible.

Here, the author claims there is a change in productivity, all the way down to
a %.

There is nothing scientific behind this; you might as well let your cat pick
the numbers. They will be just as valid.

------
davidgerard
The word "commute" is missing from this essay.

~~~
ghaff
More broadly, there's overhead and limitations imposed by having to work on a
given day. Even if you're working a short day, you usually can't take off and
do a substantial recreational activity or really jump into some project.

People differ of course, but a 3-day weekend is worth a whole lot more to me
than somewhat shorter days.

------
krausejj
Why not be a freelancer?

Work when you want to; earn market rent for your time; and balance your need
for leisure time (which may differ from others') with your need for
compensation (and, maybe some other gratification if you love your job).

We are all free agents, even if it doesn't always feel that way in a
traditional job.

------
sshb
On Sweden's 6-hour workday:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-
up-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-turnover-
down-sweden-experiments-with-six-hour-working-day)

------
wcummings
If a company starting doing this, it would be a real boon for recruiting. It's
pretty hard to compete w/.

------
erikb
I find that 20 and 25 hours is too little. You need to spend a considerable
time in office just to be part of what's going on.

However 30-35h where perfect. You get stuff done, you are not too far out of
the loop, especially if others do the same, you are still able to rest enough.

------
galfarragem
My dream workday:

From 6:15am to 9:00am, work alone at home.

Get ready and 15 minutes walk/cycle to an office.

From 9:30am to 12:45pm, team work.

6h/day (3h on Friday), 27h/week. Wednesday and Friday work from home only.

------
gkya
I know this is off-topic, but I hate the st ligature, so out of place... I
mean it's a screen I'm looking at, not press-printed paper, no need to save on
fonts.

------
ensiferum
As so often is the case the post highlights how work gets in the way of life.
Should have been born rich ;-)

------
irrational
How would I have time to both do my work and read Hacker News with only 5
hours in my workday?

------
bbcbasic
Just had my weekly Wednesday off (oceanic the zone) and spent 3 hours working
on my side hussle that is a web store. Tweaked the theme, analysed ad data and
set up some new ad tests. I felt super productive getting as much done as
might take 8 hours if the work was "jobified".

Spent rest of day trying out mattresses, getting a massage, cooking fish and
watching star trek. Hoping I'm successful so that every day can be like this!

------
kenbolton
I started doing four hour workdays about eight years ago. Every day is a
potential workday, and some rare workdays are two! I don't find it burdensome
to have a month-long streak of working every day at this pace. And if I "miss"
a day (or week), it isn't the end of the world.

I have a seasonal side-hustle that includes the occasional 12-hour workday and
even multi-day 24 hour stretches. Funny side-effect is an increase in code
quality and productivity during the season.

