
The 6-hour workday - wumi
http://blog.ezlearnz.com/post/40316576/the-6-hour-workday
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michael_dorfman
I was with the author up until I saw the "..for a 25% lower salary" part.

At my startup, I'm paying people a regular (8-hour) salary for working a
6-hour day. The company gets value out of mental focus, not in having an ass
in a chair-- so, if people are more focused and motivated with an extra two
hours available for other activities (family, friends, what have you) then it
is a net gain for the company.

~~~
dcurtis
Do you have any data to back this up? I know 37signals yells about their
workday all the time, but I haven't seen any real analysis of productivity
between 8 and 6 hour days.

The problem I've seen is that most of the 2 hours of wasted time happen
randomly throughout the day; it's not concentrated at the end. So when you
simply cut the day off 2 hours earlier, how much real work are you cutting
out?

Also, if it's a startup, don't you expect people to work until things are
finished? Why create a specific time range per day?

~~~
michael_dorfman
No data, just anecdotes and my own sense of experience.

Note that I'm not arguing that there is 2 hours wasted in an average day--
rather, I'm arguing that a) mental clarity trumps hours on the job, and b)
more time for personal pursuits will lead to more mental clarity at work.

As for the latter question, I expect people to get things done-- but in terms
of deciding which things we expect to get done by which date, we need to take
some "expected hours per day" into account.

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sethg
For some jobs (e.g., assembly-line work, or being a receptionist), every hour
that the employee is on the clock adds value to the company. For all other
jobs, I don't think _any_ rule of "you are expected to work X hours per day",
whether X is 8 or 6, is really useful.

At the end of the day, er, performance-review period, either you've created
value for your employer that justifies the salary they paid you, or you
haven't. If you did, why should the employer care whether you did the job in
6, 8, or 10 hours per day? If you didn't, then some kind of remedial action
needs to be taken, and the action is _not necessarily_ "do what you were doing
before, but for more hours". And if the employer can't gauge the value of an
employee's contribution without referring to how many hours per week the
employee showed up, then the employer has bigger problems.

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dimitry
How about a workspace without set hours. You have a task to complete by a
certain deadline. Do it or risk being fired.

This will add overhead by always keeping everyone on track with specific
tasks, but it's definitely worth it (think Scrum/Agile).

Doesn't Best Buy do this?

~~~
ph0rque
While I think what you're proposing is the ideal, the question becomes, what
are the tasks that can be reasonably done in e.g. a week? Would the average
"good" employee finish them in 20 hours? 30? 40? That's why I think there
should be a guideline in the number of hours.

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swombat
What is this, some theoretical guessing at some sort of work system that may
or may not work and that has no bearing with a real workplace?

~~~
ph0rque
> What is this, some theoretical guessing at some sort of work system that may
> or may not work...

Yes, that is exactly what this is, until I am able to put it into practice and
see if it works. I say this as the author of the blog post.

>... and that has no bearing with a real workplace?

Well, in my experience (at least at the place where I work), everyone could be
just as productive in 6 hours as 8 (or 9, or 10), if they knew they could go
home afterwards.

~~~
swombat
Ok.

Well, I'm not trying to put you down, but your thoughts on this subject are
pretty worthless until you can put them in practice. "How to structure a
workplace" is one of those extremely complex topics that require many years of
practical experience to get right, and that present countless options that
look alright at first glance but turn out to be disastrous.

This is very similar to the problem of scaling applications to millions of
users. Would you take advice about that from someone who hasn't actually gone
and scaled at least one, but ideally several applications to that kind of
scale? No, because even though their theoretical solution might sound alright,
it has no substantiation to confirm that it actually has a snowflake's chance
in hell to work out in real life.

The problem with your article is that it is just day-dreaming, but you present
it as if it was some sort of tested solution. In fact, it _is_ just day-
dreaming, applied to a subject that many extremely bright people have been
studying and working in for about a hundred years. That subject is called
"Management", for your information. Certainly there is room for improvement,
but until you actually have experience of the subject and have proven that
your ideas actually work, they are effectively worthless.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I think this is a bit harsh. There has been a lot of research on these issues,
and the proposal of a 6-hour workday is pretty common among socialist parties
in the Scandinavian countries, at least. It's not an unknown (or particularly
novel) proposition.

I'm not the original poster, but I commented above my assent-- at my last
start-up, we went with the traditional 8-hour day, but at my new one (where I
am just beginning to hire people) I'll be using a 6-hour day (at the same
salaries I used to pay people for 8.) Based on my practical experience in
hiring and managing dozens of people at my last company, I'm making this
decision-- I'll let you know how it turns out, once the data is in.

~~~
swombat
I'm not really criticising the idea itself here, more its presentation and
backing. I'm a big fan of ROWE (Result Oriented Work Environment). In my
start-up we don't have any such thing as working hours, and we don't intend
to, ever, if we can help it. Ultimately, when we hire someone, we're not
hiring them to sit on a chair for a certain time, I'm hiring them so they can
do amazing stuff. If they can do the amazing stuff in half an hour before
breakfast and spend the rest of the day playing computer games, all the
better. Our start-up is still very small, but this is working for us at the
moment.

This kind of system, in our case, is not the result of idle day-dreaming,
however, but of about 15 years' worth of combined experiences working for
other companies and seeing what works and what doesn't, and reading masses of
literature on the subject. That makes it very different from simply saying
"Oh, I think I'd work just as well with fewer working hours, and hey, it might
even give some benefits" - which is just idle chatter and not worthy of an
article, imho.

~~~
ph0rque
So, I should have kept my thoughts to myself for another 15 years, until I do
intensive research on the idea and see what works and what doesn't? Nobody
forced you to read the article.

~~~
swombat
Btw, if you want a better system, go read up on ROWE:

[http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a...](http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&hs=eVj&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Result+Oriented+Work+Environment&spell=1)

~~~
alabut
Totally agree with the ROWE sentiment - I'm reading the book now and the
stories from employees at Best Buy's corporate headquarters is just as
inspiring as the ideas themselves. If you're in a small enough team to set
work culture, then get rid of tracking hours, measure only results and
milestones instead.

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nazgulnarsil
humans value the power to control what other people do. few businesses will
give up the power to tell you that you have to be at your desk from xAM to
xPM.

