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.

When you're recommending specific radical reform, it helps your argument to analyse specific implementation of said reform, rather than merely extrapolating from a cool research article and sprinkling a few historical anecdotes.

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.

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.

The writers industry is a pretty shitty paid one unless you are famous so you really won't find many stories there.

But if you take larger companies who already have a good business you often see that they are wasting quite a lot of their time being inefficient and working long hours doesn't change that.

These big corps would love to eliminate their wastefulness, and if you could tell them how, you would be a very rich man. Simply observing wastefulness and then making the leap to "oh, let's just eliminate the waste and take the time off" is exactly the kind of "not adding up" I was referring to.

First off all being more productive does not mean making more money or being more successful it just means higher output. Depending on who you are that can mean a lot of different things.

For one if you spend all your time writing to make money you don't have time to necessarily get new work. I.e. there are diminishing returns on working more. Anyone who have done all nighters know this for a fact. If your mind is only occupied with one thing you don't get it in perspective and thus gets slowed down. So thats just one way to show why working more doesn't give you more.

Second of all I would love if you didn't put words in my mouth. I simply observed that large companies DO have a lot of waste i.e. that people work a lot but do not necessarily get work done which is an indication that it's not just heresay. But you can go into a lot of organizations and see that how some teams spend a lot of time and get very little done while others get a lot done in no time. Sometimes it's because some projects are more difficult than others but plenty of time it's not. Has nothing to do with prescribing what companies should do simply that there is some merit that time spent != productivity or perhaps a better word is useful output.

Thirdly TreeHouse did it this way. Doberman is doing it, and Google is to an extent doing it plus my company do it.

Just because there isn't a lot of companies who do it doesn't mean they couldn't be just as you don't judge the feasibility of remote work based on the number of companies doing it.

It's more complicated than that.

You could argue for support to just 'simply' double the staff to cover the 8-hour day, but that has no handover time, and you also double the fixed per-employee training costs (both starting and ongoing training) and fixed HR/management costs.