

The 4 1/2 Day Workweek - unfoldedorigami
http://particletree.com/notebook/the-4-12-day-workweek/

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wheels
It sounds nice in theory, but I know that in practice I'd resent it. I hate
being told when it's "break time", doubly so if I know that people are going
to freak out two days later because some project isn't done yet.

At the last company I worked for, they had a nice system: about every two
weeks they'd find some excuse for the company to pick up the bar tab after
work. A big percentage of people would go, but you didn't have to. Some people
would be there right at the start, others would show up later and you could
leave whenever you wanted to.

Coffee areas with couches also payed big dividends -- again, the idea was that
you'd yack with your coworkers, but only when it fit in with your work
schedule.

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SwellJoe
I didn't get the impression from the article that Friday was "break time". I
got the feeling that it was "meeting time" and "argument time", which is a
different thing altogether...it's formalizing the constant interruptions that
most work environments have throughout the day into one half day at the end of
each week. So, you save up your discussions for Friday. It just happens that
having meetings and discussions with people you like OK is a pretty low stress
way to spend an afternoon, so it makes the last day of the week an easy-going
sort of thing.

But, I agree that a lot of corporate environments could not pull this off.
There is a point in every companies life where the culture becomes too
divided. Not everyone likes fantasy football, Mario Kart, Rock Band, Medieval
themed restaurants, or volleyball, and any formal attempt to get everyone
involved in any one of those things is destined to failure and poor morale.

A pretty large percentage of people, below a certain age, can agree on free
beer, so the "picking up the tab" policy is a somewhat safer choice, but
probably a less productive one. Do you really want people discussing business
strategery after four or five cocktails over the sounds of the football game
on one side and the jukebox kicking out Justin Timberlake on the other?

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ccampbell
You've summed it up pretty well, Joe, and I agree this would need an overhaul
to be scaled. The only correction I have is that enjoying Medieval themed
restaurants is a prerequisite to working with us.

As far as "break time" goes, we really don't care exactly how or when you
accomplish 4 days of work, but we do want 4 days of solid work to be
accomplished. Some of us are night owl's and others rise at first light.
Nobody's going to freak out at you unless you're really slacking.

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rcoder
I think the take-away from this article isn't that you should absolutely use
the 4-1/2 day workweek model at your firm; instead, I read it to say that they
had experimented with several different schedules, put some serious thought
into what worked and what didn't, and then implemented a solution which was
tailored to _their_ team, deployment schedule, and customer base.

If you want something which works as well in your business, don't just
mindlessly clone this, or the 37signals 4-day week, or the first-stage startup
80-hour deathmarch, or _any_ existing schedule -- work it out for your own
environment.

Personally, I've been doing a lot of tweaking of my own schedule at work over
the last year, and found that having at least one full day a week where work
from home is a big booster to my productivity. It's an entire day where I can
avoid random interruptions, and I _never_ have that meeting in the middle of
the morning that basically wastes the day through lunchtime.

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SwellJoe
I definitely think having a single designated "meetings day" would help just
about any company. Monday morning meetings have to be the most life-sucking
idea ever. While I can see value in meeting briefly with your direct team--the
one or two people who are working on the same part of the codebase--at the
first of the work week, a bunch of people working on a random panoply of
things in a room at 8:30 Monday morning is comparable to beating productivity
with a Louisville Slugger and leaving its bloody barely breathing body in a
ditch down by the highway. Starting the week off that way is just asking for
trouble.

Though the Wufoos are more fun than most people I've met, so they can probably
make Fridays into a vacation without having to actually be free from work. I
suspect not many employers have a comedy goldmine like Kevin, Ryan, and Chris
around to tap into. (And, if they do, they probably think of them as a problem
to be managed into submission rather than given a raise and put in charge of
something.)

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akeefer
We actually took the opposite approach a couple of years ago and designated a
specific "no meetings" day every Tuesday for the development team (and so many
people work remotely on Fridays that it's effectively a meeting-free day as
well). Our team is too big and too diverse to effectively wall off much more
time than that without running into major scheduling issues, but even having
one day a week completely walled off from any sort of meetings has turned out
to be really helpful.

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swombat
It would be interesting to know how they measured productivity in order to
come to the conclusion that 4 days just didn't cut it.

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unfoldedorigami
We're actually writing about this in a future article about some of our
productivity experiments.

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stcredzero
This is somewhat like what we have at my present workplace. Friday afternoons,
it is mandated that we socialize and break out beers. At corp headquarters,
they play foosball. In Houston, we break out Guitar Hero.

~~~
whatusername
I worked somewhere where the last 2 hours of Friday afternoon - were the
weekly table tennis tournnament. Good for winding down for the week, bad if
you were in the middle of solving an interesting problem..

