
Let’s hear it for the four-hour working day - DiabloD3
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/oliver-burkeman-four-hour-working-day
======
ThomPete
I recently left Square to start a product consultancy&portfolio with a
colleauge of mine. One of our primary principles (we have a few) is "Time to
think" so we structure our working week with 3 days of work, 1 day of
potential meetings and one day of company time working on building a product
portfolio.

Our clients seem to like it as we give them time to get back to us. We are not
cheap but we (think) we provide a lot of value.

Furthermore we avoid the hours spent discussion and only do days/months.

This model is not for all businesses but it works surpringly well both for us
and the kind of clients we work with.

------
touchofevil
I'm completely over the 8 hour plus 1 hour lunch workday that results in
spending 9 hours at or around your place of employment. When you factor in
your commute of, say, 30 min each way, you've just spent 10 hours of your day.

Add 8 hours sleep plus 1 hour for dinner plus 1 hour getting up and ready in
the morning, that leaves you with 4 hours for your life during the weekdays.
Then you watch an hour of TV with your significant other, now you've got 3
hours left. It gets pretty hard to pursue a side project, art, or a hobby
living like that. Can you cut an hour or two off sleep? Maybe, but I didn't
factor in things like working out or calling your friends/family so it's
probably a wash.

What's more is that the lifestyle I've described above doesn't leave people
with much time to consume products/services. If people had shorter workdays
they would actually have time to spend money, which you'd think capitalism
would want most of all. Cutting down the workday would save people so many
pointless meetings as well since managers might actually feel some sort of
constraint on the time they have their employees in their offices.

I think most people in tech or high-skilled white collar jobs see how their
fellow employees do various things to reduce the 40 hour workweek to something
reasonable. People work from home one day a week often, or they work four days
a week supposedly doing 10 hour days instead of 8. There's a lot of charade
involved in the 40 hour week for many employees. However, many other employees
aren't able to find these loopholes and it results in a real
grind...especially when the job isn't just 40 hours a week and turns into 50
or 60, which quickly becomes unbearable.

We've really got to stop this madness. If you work at SpaceX or Blue Origin,
then yeah, what you're doing is pretty important and you might actually save
the human race, so you can feel good about those 40 hours. But if you're
working at an ad agency making gum commercials, let's get real, it could and
should be done in 4 hours a day. And besides, SpaceX and Blue Origin can
double their staff if needed to offset the shorter hours. Since their
employees would be better rested and happier they probably won't even need 2x
their staff, maybe just 1.5x.

~~~
cakedoggie
Easy. Skip the one hour for lunch, one hour for dinner, and one hour to get
ready in the morning. I got for a run and shower and dress, and only need 30
minutes to do all that and leave the house.

These are things you can fix yourself. If you really want more time, millions
of people do it.

Also, I cycle in and out so that commute is actually exercise and much more
pleasant.

> If people had shorter workdays they would actually have time to spend money

Ok, not sure why that is automatically a great thing.

~~~
teirce
> Skip the ... one hour for dinner

Not really sure how you are accomplishing this unless you are getting takeout.
Between prep, cooking, consuming, cleaning, that is easily 30 minutes to an
hour. If you cook enough for several meals that mitigates the cost somewhat,
but there are other sacrifices made there.

~~~
alsetmusic
Further, people have families and dinner is a time to spend with one another.

~~~
cakedoggie
Then count it towards time spent with your family, not dinner.

------
mseebach
Whenever there's a pop-business piece on here, commenters are very eager to
point out the obvious blind angles, typically survivorship bias. Let's hold
pop-psych to the same standard: Once you look at people who actually have skin
in the game (ie. actually runs a company and thus has the authority to put
such as change into effect), they aren't doing this. Why? _Something_ doesn't
add up, and these books are as a rule very light on analysing what.

If things are so simple as they are laid out, where is the startup that cut
their daily working hours to four and still succeeded? It should be possible
to find at least one (and it would be easy for them to attract top talent).
What are they seeing that these writers aren't? Also, journalists do
intellectual, creative work and are often employed as freelancers and paid by
the word, not time -- so they'd make perfect guinea pigs. If the argument is
as good as it's being presented here, there should be plenty of journalists
willing to give it a try. If you can indeed actually get as much done, and
possibly even of a higher quality, they'd obviously make it permanent. Yet it
doesn't seem to be happening? (Or if it is, why wouldn't this reviewer have
added a simple anecdote from his personal experience, or that of friends?)

~~~
mcless
You seem to be making an assumption that just because you have not seen
companies where the management encourages cutting down on daily working hours,
then such companies must not exist. From my experience, I would claim that
your assumption is false.

During my career, I have worked for a few small as well as big companies where
the management indeed encouraged limiting the working hours to about 4 to 6
per day. All of them had 40 hour week on the contract or legal agreement but
the company culture went beyond the written contract to support something like
a 25 hour week.

In my career, I did not see any kind of correlation between financial success
of the company, productivity and the number of working hours. Financial
success had a strong correlation with good decisions made by higher
management. Productivity had a strong correlation with high skill-level of
engineers and managers hired.

Another way to describe what I mean is: When I worked for one of these
companies that encouraged four-hour working day, there were competitors who
worked the regular eight-hour working days and were beating us in the
competition, and there were also competitors who worked the regular eight-hour
working days and were losing to us in the competition.

~~~
valuearb
I can believe that people normally can't get as much done in the second 4
hours of their 8 hour day as they do in the first 4 hours.

I can't believe that people can get as much done in 4 hours as they can in 8
hours.

Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay. You can't change math,
companies aren't going to get paid the same amount for making less stuff or
providing less services.

Maybe the difference is only 30-40% less instead of 50%, but I think most
people are willing to put in the extra 4 hours for the additional benefits.

~~~
mcless
> Less output == less revenues == ultimately less pay

Where is the math that working for 4 hours produces less output than working
for 8 hours?

Also, like I said before I don't believe that less output == less revenue.
Like I said, I have seen no correlation at all between working more number of
hours, or producing more output and revenue. What I have seen though is a
strong correlation between working on the right problems and revenue.

You are free to believe what you want. Similarly, I am free to believe what I
want based on my experience. As a result, I work for companies that don't have
a culture where they believe that output is always directly proportional to
number of hours spent. A company that believes working for 8 hours leads to
more productivity and I may not be a good fit for each other.

~~~
valuearb
Really? If you worked for 4 hours in a single day, there wouldn't be a single
useful thing you could do for your company in the next 4 hours?

------
zackmorris
Another way to look at this is the level of detail of problem you try to solve
each day. Every day that I'm working, I try to implement 1 feature. I'll often
implement 2 or if I'm lucky 3, and sometimes I'll lose a little ground and
take 2 or 3 days to implement something. But averaged out - 1 feature per day
results in steady forward progress and keeps clients and bosses happy.

It turns out (for me at least) that the level of problem that fits into 1 day
most optimizes my productivity. I don't waste time on low-level minutia and I
don't let tasks slip into being too broad.

So if you consider a 4 hour workday and imagine this pipelined, then the other
half of your day goes into preprocessing the next task with your subconscious.
This is where the real gains are made, because as far as I can tell, the
subconscious has no real abstraction limit. I'll often sleep on a seemingly
insurmountable problem and wake up the next morning knowing the answer.

Put all of this together, and most days I don't do more than 4 hours of work.
Sure I'm at the office 6-9 hours, but I find than any more than a single 4
hour stretch of being in the zone each day is not sustainable and actually
lowers my productivity. Luckily my workplace realizes this and currently has 6
core hours where it's encourages to be in one's chair, but this has been as
low as 4 hours and isn't heavily enforced when overall productivity is up. I
highly recommend a policy like this to any leads/managers out there looking to
find nonlinear speedups, especially on projects mired in scope creep and
overages.

------
ghosthamlet
Four-hour working day have many more benefits in modern days, if all companys
become four-hour working day, it not just for work efficiency:

First it can give more equality to workers or say human self, let them spend
more life time for themself, for family, rather than more work time for
companys;

Second it can slow down the whole world entropy, something like in this book:
Entropy: A New World View[1]

[1][https://www.amazon.com/Entropy-World-View-Jeremy-
Rifkin/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Entropy-World-View-Jeremy-
Rifkin/dp/0670297178)

~~~
sokoloff
How long until enterprising folks decide to work two "four-hour" jobs to get
ahead?

I predict less than one then-full working day.

~~~
DonbunEf7
Oh noes! But wait, people already hold multiple jobs.

Wouldn't it be nice if holding two full-time jobs meant 40hrs/wk? Then, that
irritating feeling instilled by a typical work week, that our salary is
ultimately meaningless beyond a certain point and surely isn't worth the
slight but never-ceasing pain and suffering inflicted in a banal-yet-reliable
way by the entire corporate hegemony (not with malicious ends but merely out
of a desire to ensure the 2% year-over-year train never derails), not to
mention the expression that one's spouse wears to cope with the reality that,
by working your drone-bee life through its paces and building your career,
you've stopped being the sexy intelligent beautiful person that they fell in
love with and become an inhuman ghost whose presence at home is welcomed and
tolerated only in exchange for ensuring that your childrens' college fund will
be well-stocked when they turn 19 and decide to go live a five-year decadence
party on your hard-earned pennies, an expression which is no longer full of
love but only imitating it shallowly, could be sorrow-drowned not in
intoxicants and prostitutes but in the knowledge that you are bringing home
sufficient double-income bacon to ensure spousal endearment and the best Greek
houses for your kids.

I dunno. I think it might be nice.

------
kapauldo
There's always going to be a competitor who is willing to work 5 hours.

~~~
jxramos
I remember listening to Daniel Hannan throwing this number of the number of
Germans it takes to work as many hours as an American. Maybe they're just more
productive ;).

"In the short term, what's not to like? But there comes a point when you
realize that you've been funding this on credit, that you've been depending on
external assistance, and that your productivity has fallen further and further
behind until you've got to the stage that we've now reached where it takes 4
Germans to work the same hours as 3 Americans. And that in the long term that
is just not sustainable. Europe now that it's in a globalized economy
competing against China and India and indeed North America, finds that it is
shrinking precipitously. In the 1970s, in 1974, Europe accounted for 36%, or
Western Europe, for 36% of World GDP. Today it's 25%, 10 years from now it
will be 15%. That is an extraordinary decline, over a period when the US share
of world GDP has remained pretty steady, round about 26%. So there was always
going to be a reckoning and I'm afraid that reckoning has come now." Daniel
Hannan
[https://youtu.be/Ufyov9RO8I0?t=648](https://youtu.be/Ufyov9RO8I0?t=648)

~~~
cameldrv
The difference in work culture in Germany is large. Americans may spend more
time at work than Germans, but Germans work more hours. Even friendly
watercooler chats are kept to a minimum, and doing something like looking at
Facebook on company time would be considered an infraction in a majority of
German workplaces.

~~~
jrs235
This is the experience I had while visiting and working with German
colleagues. They don't mess around at work. They get done in 4 hours what
Americans do in 8.

------
CosmicShadow
I've always heard people say if you can get in 3 hours of good development
work a day, that's pretty much the max and you should feel good about the day.
So if I get that done, I feel accomplished. I do consulting work and can live
that lifestyle, you just plan for it in the contract.

I've found even when working on startup stuff I want to get done, if it's not
just monotonous busy work style coding and requires thinking and planning,
meanwhile the system is getting bigger and more complex, then yeah, you can
only get done a good 2-3 hours of hard thinking work, then you are just
braindead, and any more work just means fixing that shit work the next day,
meaning you lose productivity. Maybe some people can push past this, maybe
some people just think they can and don't recognize, but at least for some of
us, that's just it.

I ask my friends about this who work for a living and they agree and say you
get 2-3 hours of good work in, the rest is fucking around, meetings, facebook,
whatever.

I'm not going to comment on non-dev work because I don't do it, and most of it
probably doesn't apply to this, unless you are doing intense thinking. Most of
the people reading this are probably devs or have hard thinking jobs.

------
cgb223
Sounds like a great way to only pay employees half of what they currently make

~~~
nitrogen
Some people would be very happy to have 50% of the money for 50% of the time.
There's not currently an option for that, so there's no way for the market to
discover the right balance.

~~~
cgb223
It exists, it's called a part time job, and it makes it very hard to do things
like "pay rent"

~~~
Qantourisc
Rent is indeed the real killer, it takes waaaay to much of the budget. It's
the only thing that has not gotten more affordable. Maybe even worse over the
year.

~~~
isostatic
This is the irony. If people worked 4 hour days for the same salary, some
would do two jobs to earn more, and then buy/rent bigger. This leads to an
increase in rental costs a which means that working 2x 4 hour jobs is
essential to get what 1 4 hour job used to get.

The same phenomena has been seen over the last 30 years. When a parent
(usually the mother) stayed at home houses were affordable on a single income.
After both parents started working prices shot up, now it's essential for both
to work, just to pay the extra rent/mortgage. This pushes childbirth later in
life, if at all, and means that children are brought up as a factory process
rather than parenting.

In the UK this is explicitly encouraged by tax breaks for outsourcing
childcare, taxpayer funded childcare, and penalising single working parents
through the tax system (60% marginal tax on £50k household income with 1
earner, 33% on £50k household income with two earners, but no way to share tax
subsidies)

------
dolzenko
Also advocated by Bertrand Russell in his In Praise of Idleness
[http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

------
krylon
I recently reduced my working hours from 40/week (8/day) to 30/week (6/day),
and so far I am very happy with it. Work is much less stressful, and when I
get home I have time to get a few chores done _and_ unwind so I can get to
sleep in time.

My daily commute is two times 70 minutes, but it is by train, so I have time
to read, stare out the window and enjoy nature (lots of rabbits, roe deer and
birds to see, plus beautiful landscape) or listen to music or podcasts, which
is mostly enjoyable.

~~~
herbst
I did 32 hours weeks most of the time. I never understood my peers who would
insist on 40 and be stressed out all the time

~~~
krylon
The reduction in working hours came along with a proportionate reduction in
income. My lifestyle is fairly modest, so I can handle it (no car, no
children, no mortage).

It has reduced my financial flexibility, for sure, but I think it was worth
it. Quality of life is hard to quantify. ;-)

------
geewee
I've recently started a small software consulting company with work from home
options. I've considered taking two weekdays where I just work 4 hours from
home, and then working 4 hours from home every day in the weekend. It seems
like a really pleasant way to hit the hours required in a regular work-week.
Just imagine how much time you'll have only working 'till lunch - there'd be
time for a bunch of other stuff after work instead of just coming home and
being tired.

------
5_minutes
Completely agree with the perspectives here, it is however when telling this
to my non-tech friends and collegues a tough pitch: like I'm spoiled or am
just living on a completely different planet.

~~~
indemnity
To be honest, given how well tech is compensated, you _are_ living on a
different planet.

My brother is smarter than me, and works harder, as a teacher. Arguably a more
important job since he is educating the next generation.

I’m building widgets to help some company do something a tiny bit more
efficiently. The excess value thrown off by increasing this efficiency is
captured by the company and entirely distributed to the various middlemen, it
is not a net benefit to society, it is not changing the world. Someone just
found a new way to clip the ticket.

Due to the fact that my skills are more in demand, I earn twice his household
(him + wife) income. When you add my wife, it’s triple.

My struggles are self-actualisation and finding meaning, materially we are
very comfortable. His struggles are keeping food on the table.

It’s fucked. The answer is not that everyone should become a tech worker or
banker.

~~~
5_minutes
Here in Europe, IT is better paid, and can range up to "much better paid". But
it's less of a huge gap compared to, I suppose the US and the real startup
scenes there?

You can make 500-800 more then the average other people behind a desk, which
are perhaps "managers". But the double of them is only for real teamleader
positions.

So I guess it also depends a bit on location... where are you roughly based?

Let's say the average worker is paid 1800-2000. And as decent IT you can add
500-800 on top of that, depending on if you get a car etc also.

But hey yes, it's fucked!

~~~
indemnity
I'm in New Zealand, not the US.

But in many ways, our culture is the same, and inequality is rampant.

Our current center-right government is also systematically dismantling social
welfare and public health systems, with the end-goal being something very
similar to the US, I guess.

------
sigi45
blah blah blah how can we work less and say it is a good thing? Lets write an
article about it and rewrirte stuff which is out there for years.

There is a difference if you work 4h a day or 8. 4h.

99% of Jobs do benefit of working 8h a day. A cleaning person can do way more
in 8h than in 4h.

the construction worker will also do more.

But not the software engineere! Because he/she is doing 'mind work'. This is
bullshit. Yeah we are privileged and yes we understand that there might not be
a need to work 8h but than just say it how it is and not invent some bullshit.

~~~
mdekkers
_But not the software engineere! Because he /she is doing 'mind work'. This is
bullshit._

Can you qualify your "this is bullshit" statement? Other than just ranting
about it?

There is a significant difference between manual workers and knowledge
workers, and pretending it is all the same thing is disingenuous. This isn't a
statement about knowledge workers being "better" or "superior", it is simply a
recognition of the the fact that these two labor types are not the same.

I actively try to limit my "work" time, because like it or not, my brain
doesn't stop working on my active problems and tasks. As somebody who has
suffered through 3 consecutive burn-outs, I can only say that I wholly agree
with the 4-hour workday.

~~~
sigi45
There is a difference between not knowing when there is to much stress and
saing, that 4h are enough.

I do get more stuff done when i work longer.

I might get distracted by stuff but this is also a part of my work. Helping my
collegues? Yes part of my job. I do not count my lunch time as work.

And no not the majority of my work as a software engineere is thinking,
thinking and thinking. What i really think is tiring is making decisions.

Most of people out there have bad jobs and get paid little. But look at us:
Earning good money and talkling about 4h workdays for the same pay. Its
fucking arrogant.

I can only recommend to read this:
[http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-
productivity...](http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-
pitfalls.html)

and no there is no 'but i did my work so i can go home' How about spending the
rest of the time to improve something in your company? or bring the garbage
out? Or whatever?

And if you are part of a team, you put less work in than others and let them
down :(

