I like your CVS point. I have always thought if I could work 4 ten hour days instead of 5 eight hour days I would be much happier. I don't mind long working days and it is not often that I only work an 8 hour day, but if I got an extra full day off in exchange for those extra hours that would be ideal.
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has a similar plan - he says we should all work just three 11 hour days per week (and change the retirement age to 75).
I think that, at least for jobs that require significant context-building spinup time at the beginning of a work period before you can start producing useful work, this is a great idea.
Normally anything billionaires advocate in changing society is horrible, but in this case I have to agree heartily. Working only 3 long days a week would work out great for me. That would give me 4 full days off, plus as a programmer there's a significant amount of "spinup time" as you put it; this just isn't the kind of work you can work on in short bursts.
However, I think the 6-hour day plan has some real merit too. I think it just depends on the job. For an engineering or programming job, I think the 11-hour day makes a lot of sense. But for some job like nursing (as in the article), or customer-service jobs where you're running around the whole shift, I think the 6-hour day (5 days a week) makes a lot of sense so workers don't get too worn out.
There was one great point in this article: setting society-wide hour counts is probably a bad plan.
11 hour days sound delightful for a lot of jobs - lots of productive time at work, with enough time off to relax and travel. They also sound hellish for some work (11 hours of manual labor is wretched) and impractical for some (11 hours waiting tables misses prime hours).
So I think that conditional is important, but it sounds like a great thing to offer where possible. I can certainly see taking it as an occasional or even permanent schedule.
That's very interesting. I wonder if you would start to run into staffing issues with this. Especially in industries like healthcare where it is already difficult to find adequate numbers of staff in certain roles like nursing.
I've known a few people working 4/10 schedules (four days, ten hours), but I think managers are often skeptical that an employee is still fully efficient 10 hours in. I know more people working 9/80 (nine hour days, alternating 4 and 5 day weeks), which is less exhausting and still allows for free days and convenient 3 day weekends.
That's probably a fair criticism, but how many people are still fully efficient 8 hours in? I think as an employer you have to accept that you are going to be getting some hours out of your employees that are not fully productive, and ask yourself if getting some productivity during those hours is better than getting none.
9/80 sounds like a good tradeoff. I had never heard of it before this thread. That's why I love HN. It's better than /r/todayilearned/
