Some people get everything done first thing in the morning and are useless in the afternoons.

Some people can't get started until noon whatever their local time is.

Some people can commit to 10 or 12 hour days, and if so, it's not fair to ask them to work 5 days a week at that rate.

Some people work best in private offices, some at separated workstations, some at big collaborative tables, and some at home. Some do best standing, some walking, and some lying down -- all different from the ones who do best in a nice supportive chair or on a stool with no backrest. Some need an ergonomic keyboard, some need macros, some need a giant screen or 2 screens, or six. Some need screenreader software and some need speech-to-text.

The relevant questions:

* are they productive in some arrangement? I have seen a very very few people who seem to be always rearranging things and changing equipment and hours in a constant pursuit of distraction. The vast majority of people figure things out and settle into a steady state of productivity...

* is the nature of the work conducive to the desired arrangement? If the position requires customer or vendor contact or operations response, the coverage needs to be maintained (and handoffs need to occur smoothly).

* is the company culture amenable to alteration or accomodation? At one workplace, most of the people I worked with didn't come in until 11am and liked to schedule meetings at 6pm. I liked to leave around 5:30, having been there since 8 or so.

It comes down to the overhead in time and complexity (usually money as well) being too high to justify accommodating everyone. We just sorta jam everyone into the same thing and figure we'll get enough out of them. As the culture shifts more toward worker's work/life balance being important (if it ever does here in the US) I think this will change, but I don't think we'll see ever enough flexibility to accommodate everyone. We'll settle on another standard and stick to it till enough people complain.

[0]https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-...

I consider myself a pretty open-minded individual and a strong adherent to the idea that (properly conducted!) science furthers human progress, health, and happiness. But there's no way anyone can convince me that, given the exceptionally wide variability in the way human brains process information, that there is "one true way" to teach somebody something. Or even "one true way" for a specific individual that applies to all subjects.

For instance, there is an entire generation who seem to learn faster and/or better by watching well-produced videos on a topic. For them, reading a textbook or other forms of documentation takes too long or just plain doesn't work. This is basically what all of those modern online course sites and coding bootcamps are doing.

I'm the complete opposite. I'd rather sift through book-sized volumes of written documentation and tutorials (or in a pinch, a textbook) to quickly gain an overall big-picture view of a topic and then dive into specific details as necessary. For me, watching videos takes too long, and I get bored and sleepy watching them. Give me something to read, reflect on, and play with.

Another example: my son, unlike most of his peers, can't sit still in a classroom. Nor can he watch educational videos for any particular length of time. He is not (yet?) a self-directed learner because if you put him in front of an electronic device of any kind, he will tinker with all of the settings on the device instead of using it for its intended purpose. However, he absolutely excels at one-on-one tutoring because I have managed to teach him some fairly advanced (for his age) math, computer, and electronics concepts just by sitting down and talking about these things with him as if it was just casual conversation. The problem, of course, is that the way schools are structured, this cannot possibly scale even to just the kids that need it the most.

https://career.ucsf.edu/sites/g/files/tkssra2771/f/Article%2...

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA628405045&sid=googleS...

https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/LearningStylesMyth

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-...

Surely the idea that people learn in the same way is as bizarre as the idea that people learn in one of 4 ways.

Graduate level Math/Physics.

There are people who cannot understand unless they see the algebra.

There also people that will not understand until they see the geometrical interpretation of the problem.

One of the very minor customs that has developed (spontaneously) in my organisation (and I assume elsewhere) during the pandemic is (internally) people are quite likely to ask if it's OK to call you. This isn't a rule and obviously doesn't apply with anything urgent but it's starting to feel almost approaching rude now to call someone about a routine matter without checking whether they've got a minute for a call. Personally, I like that.

A lot of emphasis is understandably given to statutory/regulatory intervention to protect workers but there are small cultural things we can do to make work a bit less awful (like not scheduling your team meeting at a time when you know multiple people are taking their kids to school or right at the end of the day where you know people have trains to catch or whatever). These don't need to be documented corporate policies (because then it becomes something else) but just customs that quietly evolve over time.

I did some very physical seasonal work for about a decade where most of us would work about 3 months of the year, very intensely. After years of experimentation, the boss of the finest company in this industry figured out that a 3 day on, 1 day off cycle worked best for productivity and morale. This cycle gave everyone a chance to rest and recover from the athletic level of physical labour.

It was really interesting to step out of a 7 day week and into this 4 day cycle every year.

The push for a four day work week is inclusive and allows most people to shift to a four day work week. The push to people working in accordance with their optimal work patterns unfairly targets the service sector and restricts how their choice in how they work based on demands for their services.

There will be overwhelming pressure on schools to have days that match the shorter length of day in the five-day workweek so that parents who opt for five days can spend time with their kids. There will be overwhelming pressure to have four slightly longer school days so that parents who opt for the four-day work week can spend time with the kids on the three days off. It's very difficult for schools to opt for both solutions as it would require doubling the number of class types being offered which makes it harder for smaller schools to have sufficient students in every class to be financially viable. Even if we solve financial viability schools would need the ability to tell teachers which schedule they had to take rather than letting the teachers freely choose.

I can't stress how much this choice of working approach would be bad for the school system.

Here are occupations that generally don't have a M-F 9-5 work cycle right now:

police, firefighters, the vast majority of people who work in healthcare including nurses and doctors, restaurants, hospitality, janitorial, retail sales, plumbers, HVAC techs, construction workers, taxi/lyft/uber/whatever drivers, truck drivers, and customer service.

I get that not all jobs are M-F 9-5 workloads. But I also know a number of people report substantial hardships of not having that schedule in those jobs. I don’t think we want to make school no longer correspond to the default work week by having two default work weeks unless we want all people on the wrong default to add those problems to their jobs.

Schools can run a 5-day pattern even if some of their employees are on a 4-day pattern (as long as they are not the same four-day pattern). In fact, it's not unknown for various workplaces to run a 5-day every week pattern with employees on a mix of 9-8-80 two-week and 4-10-40 1-week cycles with different cycle days off.

Faculty (especially in pre-K through primary grades; scheduling can be more creative without disruption at the secondary level) probably need to be on every open day, generally, but other than that,..

Is it? In most secondary environments I’ve seen “homeroom”, if it exists at all (which tends to only be early secondary, like middle school, and not consistently even there), is simply a regular class to which added time for administrivia like daily announcements is added.

In a small group, start by asking what the company needs, and hire or move people to fit. It might not be possible to get a good fit for everyone.

Honesty and flexibility is the best policy: one dev who misses every morning meeting has a problem, but if half the team misses it fairly regularly, or everyone is yawning, move the meeting. Ask people about their working styles up front, and be clear during the hiring process if you have core hours, or inflexible shifts, or need everyone to be in person on the first Wednesday of the month, or whatever.

If you're maximizing "opportunities to collaborate" you're probably taking their attention from their work unnecessarily.

I find this breaks down at larger companies. The problem is that people often do not understand when collaboration is required. This is usually not their fault. Someone up failed to communicate up or down the chain (either on the receiving or sending end).

I've watched groups reproduce each other's works, bungle rollouts, etc. based on this lack of communication. The cost of these miscommunications was sometimes greater than everyone's salary put together. A truly excellent culture of communication and collaboration reduces the frequency and severity of these events but there's no silver bullet.

I'd rather work full 8 hours a day but have 4-day workweek. Ideally I'd prefer Wednesdays to be non-working days - this way I wouldn't have to spend more than 2 days in a row working in the office. For me this would feel even better than just 3-day weekends with 4-day contiguous workweeks. 5-vs-2 feels like you live in the office and go to visit home. 4-vs-3 feels the same although notably better. 2-1-2-2 (office-home-office-home) would actually feel you live at home and go to the office to get the job done. I even feel almost sure this would boost my actual office-time productivity.

We had the idea to stagger the days, alternating between Fridays and Mondays off. That works out so that weekends alternate between 2 days and 4 days. And a 4-day weekend is enough that you can really do something - an actual trip or something. Having that every other week is really nice.

When I'm out and about I'll work as long as I need to, 12 hours is a typical day, but any hours I do over 35 per week get paid time-and-a-half. If I'm out on an event and say staying in a hotel in rural Norfolk, I'd far rather work from 10 or 11 to 2300 than do 1500-2300, it's not like I'm going to make use of the extra 4 hours in the morning.

A 6 hour day sounds awful, I barely get into top gear until about 5 hours into the day on a typical desk day.

When they force me into "developer timeout" and effectively isolate me, I just sit there struggling for the first half of the day anyway.

In fact I only share details about my sub-optimal perceived well-being because people tend to come up with useful suggestions of relevant supplements and practices. E.g. from my own experience I can say homemade kombucha can boost after-work evening well-being significantly (feels like some batches boost serotonin or something like that).

If Saturday is the one day you are getting good sleep, then there is some improvement to be done. Perhaps reading a book before bed, and trying to go to bed early, can create a new sleep routing for your sleep hygiene? Worth a try! Hope you feel less tired!

Perhaps that's the conventional wisdom yet advices on the Internet are exactly what I hunt for by writing this kind of comments here :-) For a reasonably rationally minded person this is a great input of things to explore. Many such advices already changed my life for good.

1) Ask your sleeping partner, if you have one, if you snore.

2) Record yourself sleeping. I used an app called SnoreLab which does audio analysis to give you a numerical rating and pulls clips of likely snoring moments so you don't have to scrub through the entire night's recording. The app also gives a pretty exhaustive list of recommendations for fixing snoring.

Many people have snoring / apnea and don't know it / are in denial. Poor sleep quality / being tired is a symptom. Fixing this can add quality years to your life, so worth looking into.

Not saying you have sleep apnea or that sleeping on your side/belly isn't enough to deal with it, simply some information.

(It's certainly possible that the reason an above-average number of fire-fighters have sleep apnea is that 1) they're more likely to have people hear them snoring, and 2) the people screened out of the military for sleep apnea often respond by becoming firefighters.)

I'm glad you have a way to prevent snoring. But I wonder if sleeping on your belly isn't also bad for your sleep. Everything I've read recommends side sleeping for back-snorers. I've seen some sources say belly sleeping is bad for you as well.

In any case, good luck on your health journey

Excerpts below taken from the website https://996.icu/#/en_US

What is "996"? 996 working, ICU waiting.

A "996" work schedule refers to an unofficial work schedule (9a.m. ~ 9p.m., 6 days a week) that has been gaining in popularity. Serving a company that encourages the "996" work schedule usually means working for at least 60 hours a week.

In early September 2016, it was said that 58.com (58同城, a classified advertisements company) introduced the "996" work schedule, without paying employees overtime who worked on weekends. The company later claimed that the schedule was only practiced managing extra workflow during peak season - September and October, and that the schedule was not compulsory.

In early 2019, Youzan (有赞, a Hangzhou-based E-commerce company) announced the company would adopt "996" work schedule in the annual convention. Bai Ya, the CEO of Youzan, responded: "This will definitely be a right decision when we look back in a few years."

In mid-March 2019, it was reported that JD.com (京东, a major E-commerce company) started adopting "996" or "995" work schedules in some departments. The PR posted that (Our culture is) to devote ourselves wholeheartedly (to achieve the business objectives) via Maimai (脉脉, a Chinese real-name business social network platform).

Gaining more publicity only recently, this work schedule, however, has long been a known "secret" practiced in a lot of companies in China.

These things above fail to take in the culture aspect. Generally, "being present" is considered "work", so the idea is to be present in the office for all of these hours.

When "we" (Americans) showed up at 8a-9a, busted out an enormous of amount of code, email, meetings, etc then left at 4p-5p was quite a shock to our native compadres. One of the managers actually asked us to slow down as they weren't able to keep up and were causing problems.

A snooty person would claim "oh look how much better the American system is", but it's much more complex than that. First, the Chinese have a very interesting total life integration. You still get married at late biblical ages (15-19), your parents move in with you and take care of the kids, you generally don't own many things (including a house), and your job and coworkers are friends and very much part of your life; you'll eat three meals a day with them and talk long walks. Your job pace is much slower and therefore, hours much longer.

Americans tend to live these absurd double identities, where we have coworkers our spouses will never meet, and we rarely interact with said coworkers outside of work, which is quite a culture shock to the Chinese. There was just another thread on HN about "fundatory activities", and how badly they can go over, which simply wouldn't exist in China.

In the end, just a different system, based on completely different national ideals. It's hard to understand until you're there living and breathing it.

But as a father, this is horrible work schedule. Culturally, it is totally acceptable for fathers to just provide but not really interact with their kids. Also there is an aspect of heroism of fathers working long hours to provide. And then, unfortunately, for some there is no option but to work long hours because they need extra money.

But some men would rather stay away from their children and let moms or grandparents raise the them. And I do know some such men. They stay late at work to avoid their families, they even bring their gaming laptops to work, so they can game after 5 and avoid their families. Honestly, work is a walk in a park compared to being a good father.

But it is hard to tell who is avoiding their families, who is staying late because of cultural pressures, and who really need to work late hours to provide for their families.

I think the flip side of what you’re saying is, why would you not want to be friends with the people you spend 8+ hours a day with during the workweek?

I certainly want to be able to get along with my coworkers, but it's not quite the same thing as being friends. There are few former coworkers that I keep in touch with after I leave a job. I tend to have my friends outside work. And my family too.

I just am pointing out how cultural differences lead to different perspectives. I would imagine that Chinese corporate culture around layoffs is also very different from how it is in America.

It’s really difficult to comprehend all of the small details that go into living within a different culture, and isolated components end up seeming bizarre, while they are perfectly logical when you live within the system itself.

Surely there exists a scenario where the company tells an employee "we no longer want you to do anything for us, we will no longer pay you, and you will no longer have access to the building", in that scenario it does sound like they're losing a large part of the people in their life?

To add my bit: given the growth rate of the Chinese economy over the last several decades, it’s highly likely that American style layoffs are exceedingly uncommon in China, to the point where the fear that you may lose your job and thus your whole social life is much less of a fear, at least to the extent that it is perceived as beyond your own control.

I love nonstop work, the problem is that a lot of times I have to unblock problems, stop to talk to other people, there are dependencies or things are on fire so a lot of time is spent busy waiting. It is work but it is not rewarding and you don't actually get much done.

Yet, if people were only working 16 hour per week, the company would stop to a crawl. Because during my extremely productive, I might need a few non productive hours from you. Maybe it's answering a quick question, maybe is giving me a pointer to something, on inviting me to a document, enough that I can keep progressing without being blocked and getting those golden 16 hours interrupted and wasted.

The point is that, even tho these are not productive hours for you, they are creating a massive value for the company because you can be supporting other people productive hours. And maybe those are happening on a Saturday from 6 to 9 PM. In fact it might even be OK for the company to tire you a bit, to get that availability, even if that means you won't have 16 hours of quality work anymore.

This is not in defense on the 996, but it is to balance the whole point that people should only be working when they really are productive/focused/.... Availability, even non productive does matter as well.

Because why do we work? To have money so that we can live comfortably. Work is not meant to fill in 40 or more hours of our life, it's just a means to and end. If we can have enough money by working less, many people chose this way. In the meantime, in most countries of the world it's not an option: you might need to work much more just to survive. A sad reality and something that I hope changes one day, once the old generations (thinking in terms of nations and wars and not realizing all human beings are mutually interdependent) pass away.

If you apply it to manual labour, you will get sick people. If you apply it to intellectual work, people will just pretend to work.

I think he is just plain greedy.

I've always been for the reduction of work hours, but this is a really good concise point that I'll put in my pocket. Thanks.

For me this is the largest boon of the pandemic revolution: I can take as many exercise breaks as I want without anyone judging me, I can do some parts of my work while cycling,* and I can adjust my work position they way I like. None of these is possible without disturbing my colleagues in the office.

*) Especially meetings! Man, so many of these are such a terrible waste of time! But not mine: I burn calories and become more fit. If only we could have been reasonable and implemented such policies without the need for a pandemic to erupt.

For some reason I stopped that as the Covid wore on.

Imagine trying to be a bigger piece of shit.

Japan isn’t even 996 & they’re going to have to start forcing people to have kids at gunpoint or kinda implode as a nation. Near purely because of their abysmal work culture.

I recall when Cards Against Humanity paid for their overseas factory workers a day off by paying for a full factory day with a quota of zero or something like that. All they asked was that the workers spend time with family & send a picture if they do anything special.

A ton of heartwarming but also incredibly sad to think about pictures came in, like a family celebrating their very young child’s birthday in a closet of an apartment. Tiny little home baked cupcake with a singular candle.

They wouldn’t have even gotten to celebrate that in the slightest without their day off, paid by foreigners indescribably richer than them that they’ve never met nor likely will meet.

Then those foreigners are forced into the same work culture that makes having a family impossible?

What's next?

Contunue leaching off countries that actually support sustainable survival of the human species?

> makes it even more racist

Chinese Employers To Grant 15-Minute Maternity Break

https://www.theonion.com/chinese-employers-to-grant-15-minut...

> Bob Diamond on brutal working hours for junior bankers: ‘I’d do it again in a nanosecond’ [1]

[1] https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/bob-diamond-on-brutal-work...

Then he said other things that pissed off the wrong people and has not been seen since then.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3177452/jack-ma-m...

At work, many of my "breaks" are involuntary distractions that yank me out of flow, and during the others I can't do anything productive for my home life, so I end up reading HN or something similar.

At home, I can go out and play with my kids, take care of something that's been bugging me around the house, start dinner, or walk the dog. Those breaks not only give me the subconscious processing time I need, they also check things off my to-do list that have been distracting my subconscious, allowing me more focus for my work. I end each day having done more at work and more at home, so when Saturday rolls around I don't feel like I'm playing catch-up.

it seemed inhumane - and crazy nobody told them it wasn't okay or anything... I like getting some sun, let the blood flow, things like that. it's not only okay, it's highly recommended - even necessary.

Oh hell no. I need a break, but the last thing I want to do is take a break with other people. I'd rather sit at my desk pretending to work that go play games with other people. That is literally hell on earth.

But now I can't go for a walk on my own because then I'll get questions about where I am going and why didn't I go and play their stupid game with them instead of going on a walk on my own.

same thing for not leaving home at 5pm sharp and waiting 15-30 mins before you allow yourself to leave

it has to start from the top

When I started my own business I made it absolutely clear to the people I hired that the workday is just when you start and when you finish, but everything in between (including breaks, walks, lunch, etc.) are all part of "work". It's not like when you go to lunch you just stop thinking about the hard problem you were working on, and even if you do stop thinking about it, that's an important part of the mental digestion process.

Hey employers reading this. Having a hard time finding software engineers? Offer me this and I will come running. I’ll be banging on your door with my resume. Think about it.

Offer low tech debt and good hours and get a queue form!

A company that actually takes tech debt seriously is worth it's weight in gold.

People just worked 8 hours and didn’t come in Friday’s.

Usually countries with laws about commuting being part of the daily wage are more about people who work across different locations rather than their fixed daily commute (i.e. you have a single fixed 'location' where you work, and then if you travel to another location then you are paid for that travel, for instance a salesperson that travels 4 hours each way to give a 2-hour presentation cannot be argued to have only worked 2 hours from a minimum-wage perspective, however if they are travelling to their usual office, even if that is 2 hours away, this would not need to be paid).

Paid daily commutes aren't a part of any countries laws I am aware of, as otherwise you would need to pay people differently depending on where they were living and rasies lots of practical considerations (What if I hire someone who is working next to the office and they move 2 hours away? Am I forced to pay them 50% extra or let them only work a 4 hour day? Presumably I can't fire/make them redundant just for moving home, as I'm assuming this is in a country with good workers-rights anwyay!), but I may be wrong and there may be a country which does do this!

Oh, I see, than You are not talking about commuting. This has different name - in my country we use something that can be translated literally as "delegation" - but it rather means business trip, I am not sure what is the international english term for this (I have been part of project creating web apps that did accounting for people that major part of work was traveling to clients).

Sure, You can put it this way - if workers living close have problem with that they can move or select another employer (if they prefer commuting to actually working)

>> They work fewer hours for the same pay.

I would argue that You are using definition of work time that is beneficial for employers. For me every minute of commute to work is due to employers order (You have to be where I tell You). And thus is not owned by the employee.

If I live 500 km away can I just take a train ride in, stay 30 min then get back on the train ride home and collect a full paycheck?

If so, please let me know how to apply.

It only is if You ignore constraints that exist in real live (as opposed to thought models of economic systems).

>>If I live 500 km away can I just take a train ride in, stay 30 min then get back on the train ride home and collect a full paycheck?

Yes, you can try, but first You have to find employer that is charitable enough to pay You for doing nothing (I have said nothing in my post about forcing employers to take on grifters, just asked to recognize that commute is hidden cost for employees and should be normalized).

And by the standards of HN users I make a poverty wage already. Cutting my salary to 64% would put me well under the median household income for the my state and the nation as a whole.

And I promise I won't be less productive, because I'd be surprised if I did that amount of actual work as it is.

That being said, yes. As long as the salary is enough to maintain my standard of living, I will accept a lower salary to work fewer hours.

4-day-workweek arguments from 1986 !!!

When they get older and go off on their own, though, I would agree with you - a short daily working routine sounds good for me personally.

You're not more productive than a web developer in 1995, your tools are.

I hear what you're saying about investors needing a return on their investment, but investors only exist because modern human society runs on money and the people doing the real work don't have enough of it. Human beings will naturally develop tools and technology with or without money or investors because doing so improves our lives. The problem with our modern world is we are no longer building tools to improve our life, but rather turn a profit. Any "improvements" we've had are merely a side effect of the unnatural need for money rather than a better life. I'd argue we'd see more innovation if people had more free time to innovate rather than waste their lives in corporate slavery.

I'm not sure that having two more hours a day will free up your weekend, I'm kind of leaning to 4 days a week because you can actually have useful time.

Personally, I wouldn't object to 3 days of non-stop working till the midnight to have 4 free days a week. Things won't pile up and instead of having just evenings, I will be able to leverage full days which will give me better freedom of movement away from where I live.

The 5 days a week schedule is my primary reason that I'm not in a full time job since a while. I was at home at 18:20 max, yet I never had time to do anything for myself.

Some people would find that having two extra hours a day is great; others wouldn't.

For this among other reasons, I'm against a "one size fits all" policy. Give people more than one option, where it's reasonable to do so.

  Monday: 4 hours
  Tuesday: 6 hours
  Wednesday: 10 hours
  Thursday: 6 hours
  Friday: 4 hours
  
  total: 30 hours

- Monday: The second half of your day is work. Your morning is open to sleep in, get chores done, run errands, eat brunch with friends. Second half of the day should be meetings to plan the work for the week, and catch up from the previous week.

- Tuesday: Very few meetings, planning and gathering items to work on for Wednesday.

- Wednesday: Heads-down work, no meetings allowed, period. Turn off all communcation; this is "productivity day". You've had 2 days to get your "mise en place", and now you have 10 hours uninterrupted to churn away.

- Thursday: Shorter day than wednesday, wrapping up what you didn't finish.

- Friday: The first half of the day is work. Meetings to recap the week, complete any last minute details, documentation. Second half of the day enables you to get more errands done or get an early start to your weekend.

The time you save allows you to rest your brain, ruminate, get more sleep, exercise, pursue a hobby. This rest time recharges your brain to enable it to do more work when you are working. The roller-coaster nature makes you think the week is pretty easy most of the time, but you know you've prepared for the hard part and can tackle it in one go. Because of the forced planning and dedicated work time, you'll be more productive than if you only got drips and drabs of interrupted work done for 5 days.

Wednesday is "no communication day" so you could break the 10 hours up and it won't affect anyone.

1) School (transportation to and from, parent home to see kid off to the bus and be there when it gets back, at least)

2) Child care (10-hour days, which are more like 11 when you factor in travel, would be... very expensive, if you could get anyone to do it)

3) Any scheduled after-school/after-normal-workday kids' activities whatsoever.

Not the ideal; work less, have more fulfilling lives - I am all in.

But all of these initiatives are focused on the wealthier office workers and sometimes factory/shift workers who are non-customer facing. But it totally ignores the service industry which is a huge part of our society (and arguably even more so if we end up working less!).

You will still want an Uber after 5pm, or a shop or restaurant to be open on a public holiday. 4 Day work weeks, shorter hours - all great ideas but all ideas that either negatively impact the poorest portion of our society. Even universal basic income, which ostensibly would have a positive impact there would still not allow those individuals to work less.

Which is why my challenge is always; first we need to automate out the poorest roles in society (and then give them UBI obviously) before we solve our own lengthy work weeks.

No one says this change doesn't apply to people in those industries or in shift work. You have to remember that the idea is more to reduce work from 40 hours per week to something like 32 hours per week (30 in OP's case).

In this case, you can still have restaurants open late, it would just mean the schedule would be shorter for all staff.

> But all of these initiatives are focused on the wealthier office workers and sometimes factory/shift workers who are non-customer facing. But it totally ignores the service industry which is a huge part of our society (and arguably even more so if we end up working less!).

The service industry could make up for the lack of coverage by hiring another person. Giving jobs to more people.

I do believe that the question of having a livable wage (supplemented or not by UBI) is a separate issue that should not impede giving people their time back.

That's patently not an option in the service industry. You help people cut hours but now a restraunt, say, needs a percentage more staff (each of whom comes with a salary overhead) at a higher hourly wage.

This is before you consider the scale of it. About 85% of UK jobs are in the service sector. There is a massive labour shortage in key service areas anyway. At the same time, highly leveraged office workers cut their hours and have more leisure time, so service industry demands go up.

It's just not an easy pitch to make in my book. If I wanted to cut my hours I absolutely could come up with some automation and investment to help me do that, and my employer might agree to invest in that because I have high value and strong individual leverage.

That is just untrue for the vast majority of the service industry.

I don't see the connection here, why would it affect the poorest?

I don't think people mean that all shops close earlier, just that they'd need to hire more people to cover a reduced shift.

> we need to automate out the poorest roles in society

I think we've done that many times in history but it has never led to a reduced workload, usually the company will take the increased profits and the ones that lost their job need to find something else

Prices will just go up.

How much free time you have could very well be a function of how valuable / hard to automate your work is.

You are sort of making my point; proposals like this assume that those who contribute "less" are less valuable - but of course that is only true on one scale.

As a though exercise; if someone is physically disabled to the extent they cannot work and need regular care should they a) live hand to mouth and unable to afford non-essentials? Or b) should they be comfortable and capable of indulging in luxuries.

Currently our society says they have zero value so (a). I argue that it should be (b)

I am assuming you mean "who don't work" when you say provide zero value. The poor encompass more than just people living in a cardboard box in some alley. There are poor people living paycheck to paycheck who are barely able to afford food AND a roof over their head. A poor person can be a single parent with two kids who works two minimum wage jobs just to be able to provide for their family.

It wears heavily on me daily.

Though honestly this thread is making me think that we need to basically reinvent the Sabbath. I'm old enough (mid 30s) to remember when most everything was closed on Sundays and now it's just another day for errands and brunch. Even holidays that were considered sacrosanct like Christmas and Thanksgiving you can now go to the store or they have absurd opening hours the day after (black friday) so that retail workers can't even enjoy the Holiday because they have a 4am shift the next day. We're seriously out of whack here in the US.

Agree that most people should have say, Sunday off, but there are many import things that must have 24/7 or close to it coverage. Groceries (every day), medical personnel, firefighters, etc. Lot's of nurses work 3*12hr shifts per week for example.

How many of us would forgo a Starbucks on Friday in order to have that 4 day week?

No, I don't.

I want a way to get where I want to go after 5pm, sure, but reduced working hours means, necessarily, that for a greater portion of the population than is currently the case, that will not be an individual, human-driven conveyance per party seeking transportation, and that's fine.

> 4 Day work weeks, shorter hours - all great ideas but all ideas that either negatively impact the poorest portion of our society.

No, they don't. Your argument that they do is based on the assumption that they are not applied to that group, which is odd because they are exactly the group (unlike elite workers who are generally exempt) to whom wage and hour laws apply.

> or a shop or restaurant to be open on a public holiday.

Actually, I want far fewer shops and restaurants open on public holidays, of which I would like to see more than currently exist.

> Even universal basic income, which ostensibly would have a positive impact there would still not allow those individuals to work less.

Yes, it will. It would drive up the costs for the wealthier people that would like the things provided by them working as much as they currently do, which would lead to a mix of reductions I working hours and downward movement of wealth, both of which benefit the poorer workers.

> Which is why my challenge is always; first we need to automate out the poorest roles in society (and then give them UBI obviously) before we solve our own lengthy work weeks.

That's backwards. We change the general workweek standards (which aren't, after all, hard limits but when, for non-exempt workers, extra costs for the employer and extra pay for the worker in the form of mandatory overtime compensation kick in), and establish UBI funded by taxes on capital income, and then the resulting pressure on labor costs drives automation, with the increasing pre-tax aggregate returns to capital as labor is minimized in production increasing the UBI funding bucket.

I'd qualify it more as; I don't believe these ideas are easy to implement for that group vs. non-service roles.

Now, I am based in the UK so things may vary around the world but I disagree with your assertion about the wage & hours laws.

For example; here we have a maximum working week of 48 hours. This was supposed to help people in the service industry but actually it mostly helps office workers. We have leverage to kill off the crazy hours expected in creative roles. However, service workers have wage pressure to sign waivers to let them work more than the 48 hours (because minimum wage is not a living wage).

These things have to work in tandem to drive up lower-income wealth but they just don't - so I object to other initiatives which don't directly address the problem.

Anything that says "just hire more people" is an unsustainable plan which ignores the economics (most people work in service industry, and mostly in part time roles). The outcome of increasing demand on that industry OR forcing the full time workers to work less is that the part-time workers would need to work more.

> No, I don't.

Great! We all need this attitude.

But I assert the vast majority will still want their 10pm Starbucks, Friday restaurants and Sunday shopping trips (also, it's not a high-wage sacrifice - the majority are also service workers and they also want these things, it's a circular economy!).

Oddly we are probably largely in agreement; I just think we need to be more radical in how we fix this otherwise we will just have another cycle that depresses the lower-income workers opportunities.

US wage and hour laws are not generally individually waivable, as the entire point of wage and hour laws is to address power imbalance between workers and their employers. When talking about the length of the legal workweek in the US, the discussion is of laws as to when overtime compensation for non-exempt employees is required, the added cost creates pressure on employers to limit excess working hours of non-exempt employees.

If UK wage and hour laws are waivable the way you suggest, that suggests a fundamental problem with the structure of the law which renders any discussion of fine tuning their coverage irrelevant.

For example; the overtime laws just create incentive to work more than 40 hours a week. On average US workers work much more than other OECD countries.

They create incentive not to allow workers to work more than 40 hour weeks.

> On average US workers work much more than other OECD countries

That's because the US has low minimum wage / cost of living compared to other OECD countries and relatively week social support systems.

This has to happen first. Automation will put them out of work way faster than the UBI system will come online - and that is assuming the UBI system is not completely stonewalled to begin with.

As soon as we know the work is definitely automatable, we should start pushing for UBI. Once people who do not want to work leave the workforce, everything will get better.

I think people get so wrapped up in the concept of "free loaders" that they overlook how sandbagged our economy is by forcing those same people to engage with it.

We dont cull the weak anymore, which is fantastic, but they are still weak. We need to care for them and get them out of the way of people trying to accomplish things.

[0] https://www.haar-werk.net/friseur-in/

It could be just me, but I find the value of stopping around 3-4pm versus 5-6pm to be pretty limited. You still have this feeling that the main part of the day is almost over and you can't do any substantial personal tasks or serious relaxing before the dinner ritual.

Also, when you're the exception in your team to leave early, you're effectively "disappointing" your team every single day that you work. Where others might have 4PM meetings, you're never available. This invites a feeling of guilt, where you start to make exceptions, and incidentally stay longer. Others are learning that your 4-6pm unavailability is quite soft. Further, every single morning you're behind in email and chat, needing to go through what happened late in the previous day whilst others are already up to speed.

With a real day off (4 day workweek), you have a full day to do something really substantial. Time feels plentiful rather than scarce.

A full day off is a barrier that is much easier to defend. You're just not available at all on that day, and work and expectations easily adapt to that.

Overall, I think the problem with modern office work is that it's far too collaborative. We've normalized being in meetings for half of the day and having hundreds of emails and chat messages to wade through, whilst the actual work takes a back seat.

If you'd have a clean and clear work package, you could do the work in that package at your convenience in whatever way fits best in your life. But we don't have that. We start the morning fresh with an idea of goals for the day in mind, and at the end of the day we did almost none of it. Everything changed throughout the day. Too many dependencies, too many moving parts. That's the real problem.

That vs the proposed 6-hour 4-day week some people mentioned in this thread, it'd be very happy with either obviously, but I still think I'd go for 3 days if I had to choose.

I'm definitely in the shorter days camp. In my experience there's a 2 to 4 hour peak performance window and a long tail of diminishing brain power.

Agreed, but nobody is gonna offer me 4 hours a day for 3 days a week. Being extremely optimistic, the best I can expect is 10 hour days for 3 days a week (though I dont thats gonna happen anytime soon either, so Im happy with 4 days).

Shorter hours but more/same days do little to nothing for me. I mean it'd be nice, but that or less days is a very easy choice for me.

Although that may be the case for most people, I doubt there's no exceptions to this.

You can increase or sidestep it a little with performance-enhancing drugs or a healthier lifestyle, but with their downsides, changes in your environment and other aging-related issues you'll see over a long enough period that it doesn't change much.

If your office hours are officially 09-18, but you’re working lunchtime and until 19:00, I don’t expect that officially reducing hours is going to help, because I expect you to unofficially keep with the longer hours anyway. On that basis, I think you personally would be better off with fewer days than shorter days.

On the other hand, if you keep to the shorter hours, I think either shorter or fewer days would both be an improvement, though I don’t know which is the better quality of life.

- support remote working

- have better housing closer to where people work

- if people want to commute an hour each way, that's on them

WFH solves this and allows commutes of up to 12000 miles.

Granted I wfh 2/3 days a week; if I had this commute every day I'd probably feel differently.

(Excuse the smugness here, but I've wanglee a four day week WFH and my life is amazing)

Most super prolific creatives (painters/composers) do a routine of between 1.5 and 3 hour sessions, one or two sessions per day. Depending on the person, but very consistent once the person figures out their routine.

That means 1.5 - 6 hours total. But this doesn’t include meetings and correspondence and all that jazz.

I like to wake early, work a bunch, then take time in the afternoon to do non work stuff.

Then I can come back at the end of the day and do another few hours. This lets me experience the world when things are less crowded, make time for family etc, while still having plenty of time for work.

A four day week, six hours a day sounds like bliss to me!

I do get the feeling of wanting way more flexibility but I also think that maybe contracting is the way to get that?

You could also go crazy and get a second or third job.

I do my very best when I'm at work. But, it's dead time to me. I have a lot of ambitions, projects, I write music, I'm trying to learn to draw, I have kids, and I yet have to give 8 hours of my day to just keep the lights on. Life is too short for that!

It's employee evaluation time at work right now. I always wonder: what would happen if I sat my wife down and had her write a document defending her performance as my spouse? And then I ranked her and told her whether it was satisfactory. And I had her record what she was doing with her time every day. I wonder what her reaction would be. That's pretty much how I feel about employee evaluations.

If you build your house on your own, cultivate green land etc. the four day workweek is more important as these kinds of work require a lot of preparation time.

Opt in models?

Inflamatory post but this would actually mean managers would have to manage. You can't go to a seminar and cocktail party and come back with the insights to properly manage a team where people opt in to the model that works best for them.

Adding on top of that care and integration for the personal preferences of the team members… that would truly be a sight to behold.

I get kids, go to park, pool, etc. Bring sandwiches or pick up junk food. One kid is baby, so usually drop him at home with mom.

Sadly most parents especially dads work late. So I am not able to make plans with moms for after school playdates. And my wife is not very social and she doesn't like Texas afternoon heat.

But there are a few dads who leave work early and we try to arrange pladates after school.

Not sure if one whole day off would create as many opportunities for play as shorter work days.

It minimizes context switching. I could get my head fully into work then fully out of work.

My company does a version of summer Fridays, where it's very easy to take 3-day weekends every week and I very much appreciate the "extra" day and would strongly not like to go in the other direction.

If you're answering emails and having meetings where everyone has to sync up during the day - I'd opt for the first one. If you're developing or coding where the time of day is irrelevant - I'd go for the second.

I would dislike both of those.

Instead of sitting inside all day while its sunny and then having free time just as its getting dark and everything is closing, I can enjoy (most) of my day, hang out with the kids for a bit while working, and then get some solid quiet work time in the evening.

I ski, hike, bike, do admin etc during the week, then have my weekends completely free for family.

I think this is because I mostly use my leisure time for studying or coding. I reckon that a parent would prefer 6-hour workdays to spend more time with their kids.

This is of course dependent on each individual's needs and circumstances. My manager has three kids that need feeding at lunchtime for several weeks at the end of and beginning of the school year because his wife is an assistant principal so the kids get a longer summer break than she does. He seems a bit frazzled after lunch during those periods.

However it's also nice to work with more energy and never have any dreading late hours where you'd rather rest a bit some days.

I have a 4 day week but flexible enough so I can move hours over, but I only move 1-2h to my free day on average.

Some people work on ships and work six months in twelve hour rotation and then be on vacation for six months.

Having said that, I live in Spain where restaurants don't even open until 8:30pm or so. So it suits not only myself but my environment. When you describe restaurants closed at 7pm, that sounds a bit like the Nordic countries. They're really 'early birds' in my experience, which I find very odd because of the long sun hours there in Summer. When I visited a small town in Sweden, it was deserted in full daylight. I can't wrap my head aorund that.

Also for my my best work is done after hours when things quiet down and I can actually concentrate... My worst hours are the mornings when I struggle to wake up.

A retail clerk can likely do a 10 hour shift with little to no loss of productivity in the later hours - and some jobs basically just need a human there to monitor the process - those likely would do well on 4/10 shifts.

But other kinds of work can't get much beyond six hours a day anyway, in which case spreading it out may make sense.

But there's also a weird "fairness" aspect - even if everyone would be better off with varying schedules, people would think it "unfair" - and it's visible. If Sally gets paid half what you do, you never know. But if she leaves after 4 hours each day, you start to feel annoyed.

If we’re shortening the work week by 4 hours, I’d rather take that as a single afternoon off. 4x8, then Friday is a half day (vs shortening 5 days by a fraction of an hour).

If we were to go to a 32 hour week, I’d probably want to just do 4x8 and have a 3 day weekend. That allows so many options for short trips, major home projects, camping, going downtown, etc. With the current 2-day weekend, I always feel torn between doing things that are fun vs doing chores. It’s never quite enough time.

Would the work days suck? yes. But in my opinion working 8 hours a day already makes the rest of the day useless. I think in the end a schedule where you work to get it out of the way and then enjoy the time off would feel like I am taking more time off than I am working. I know every industry couldn't do this, but for some it's possible. If you get do it by pay month you could work 4 on the front and 4 on the back and get 21-ish days off for 8 days of work.

Would be curious to see if any HN companies have gone ahead and implemented this, and if so, why!

And I am also curious to know people's strategy when feeling burnt out and not getting ample time to rejuvenate/rechArge between bursts of being vErry productive!

I wouldn't. The problem with that schedule is that you never get a break. Every day is a work day. You're always thinking about work. You always have to spend time getting ready for work, spend time commuting, spend time (or money) getting lunch. You can't just chuck some stuff in a bad and disappear to a different country for a 3 day long weekend break.

The beauty of a 4 day week is that you don't have to think about work for 3 days a week. That gives you far more freedom than shorter work days.

If you have 6 hour days you might find yourself still working more. For me its no contest.

I know people (in IT) that work 6x6hours. And both they and employers are satisfied with this arrangement.

> Standard work hours here

The fact you assume we know where 'here' is implies you're in North America, but that's not a foolproof heuristic. Where are you where that's standard?

> stay 10+ hours

If standard hours 'there' were 9, why were you spending > 10?

For context -- I am in Australia, it's a week away from winter, I would prefer a 4-day work-week be legislated as default rather than a 6-hour workday.

If you mean in terms of productivity, I agree with you. Having a clear boundary between workday and free-time is a clear productivity multiplier for me. This is much better than one more extra day-off.

I can also maintain peace of mind throughtout the week if I do not do any work at all agter designated boundary.

This is true, when you want to do what you do. But when you work mostly for a paycheck, I will disagree with you. Then an extra day-off is so much better than a shorter work day.

8h/day sitting in front of a computer is a lie and a bad way to measure productivity.

My company's return to office policy is a hybrid deal. I am very productive when I'm in the office and I use the remote days to refresh myself. On those days I generally only "work" by replying to messages and listening in on remote meetings. I've never been more productive. I get more done in my in-office days now than I did during a full week either during the pandemic or before it.

Early day lets me get stuff done uninterrupted. It also means I get stuff done by 3 PM, instead of 6, so there's more time to toss it to someone to look at.

I'm all in for either shorter working days or fewer working days, provided that stuff is still done. I think I can do what I do in 4 hours at most. At least 4 hours are lost.

So, next time you negotiate a raise with you manager, ask for less hours instead of more $$$.

At my company which is a very typical big sv company, no one is watching how long you work but the work needs to get done.

If companies allow people to take the weekend off, it's not such a stretch to extend it to 3 days.

That said, I run a startup and even taking the weekend off feels generous to me because I see all the things not getting done.

Shrinking the window of days I can meet with them is very effective though.

6 hours feels more productive and 6x6 feels less hard than the normal 37 over 5 days...

Have activities after work, near work place, especially with work colleagues? 5-6 days with low hour daily.

More time to do chores and rest at weekend? 4 days work weeks

There is the main problem already. Stick to your working hours. Don’t do free overtime.

Even 3 hour days should be enough - to interact with your peers. Other than that, performance is a measure of work planned vs work done. Time to sit on your ass should not even be a thing.

Some popular restaurants, and others were kitchens not open to the public but the key was the rapid delivery of one-off orders not long after the employee accepted the overtime.

But this was decades before DoorDash or Uber Eats, there weren't even any cellphones, you had to look at the paper menu and order over a land line, it was so primitive it took 20 seconds.

And that generally seems like the amount of Time we can be productive.

I got into tech in the 90s specifically to avoid the 9-5 dead-end job and ended up working mostly exactly that. But hey, we have billionaires now.

If we want a 30 hour workweek, we need to deliver it to everyone in the world with real tech. No more phantom tech distraction BS.

Solar. Permaculture. Robotic hydroponics. Real recycling. Personal digital assistants (and I don't mean tablet computers). Independent income streams beyond mining crypto and donating plasma. This stuff is so incredibly obvious but the entire weight of the global economy keeps us running the rat race instead of solving the real problems. Now work is just another form of escapism to distract us from stepping into our power and taking agency over our lives.

The ultimate expression of tech is the 0 hour workweek and self-actualization for the entire human race.

France is a nice place to live. Everyone working 35 hrs and being on holiday so often is a good reason its economy is slowly dying.