Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

Re:Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut ... by wgerard on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @11:53AM (#19200369)

I'm really struggling to think of creative and abstract jobs that meet all of the following criteria:

1) Take place in a typical corporate setting--which is the context here, nobody's asking studio musicians to do stand-ups.

2) Have 0 artifacts of progress being made. Even brand design goes through iterations.

3) Are so abstract that it's impossible to distill your thought process into a small summary each day

If it's really impossible to summarize what you did all day, I'm going to question if you were actually doing anything at all.

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Re:Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut ... by TeMPOraL on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @12:38PM (#19200905)

"Big design up front" rarely works, even in abstract terms. I've learned that your point 2) is crucial - you have to force yourself to build "artifacts of progress" for actual progress to happen! Maybe there are some geniuses who can build whole programs completely in their heads, but my mind starts to run in circles if I try that. Whether drawings, prototypes, or just stream-of-thought notes, just continuously getting things out of my head speeds working a lot for me - and all of these can be turned into a summary of what I did today.

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Re:Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut ... by ghaff on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @03:56PM (#19202693)

There are days when I'm trying to write (as in prose or a presentation) all day and the muses are not connecting, I do a lot of unrelated not-really "research," etc. And that's mostly OK. For a day. But obviously not for a week or weeks in a corporate setting. (And, if I really had a hard deadline, I'd crank out something serviceable. But I usually aim to do better than that.)

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