I'd argue that the majority of office settings don't have moments of slack, but rather moments of productivity. This same productivity can be achieved in wayy less time than the standard 40 hours/week.

I can only agree, depending on what you include in "productivity".

I'd say it's incredibly common for a modern office worker to be engaged in email, meetings and chat for some 4-6 hours per day.

Not only does this leave little time to do actual tasks, that little time is also highly fragmented across the day.

It's a point I've made repeatedly on similar threads: the problem with modern office work is too much collaboration. Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it.

Give me a project to work on by myself and it will be done in 2 days. Give me the same project with a team of people to help and it will take months, it might never get done.

Just recently I had to migrate a website to some new servers with a new OS. Server build, fully automating the post-build and deployment, code changes, and testing… done in 2 days. Working with other teams around networking, change management, etc…. 9 months of waiting and hell.

> Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it.

One could argue that we virtually never do actual work. Machines or remote workers do. All we are doing is defining, communicating and controlling others' work.

That's arguably also work.

True. Figuring out what to do is work.

My point is collaboration (aka "figuring out what to do when") is pretty much the essence of our work. It is machines or remote workers that are "actually doing it", as I believe GP means it.

> I'd argue that the majority of office settings don't have moments of slack, but rather moments of productivity.

Absolutely. The complete lack of slack in the modern office drives a lot of my stress. I am transmuting that into an long-term win, however: it is driving me to seek flexible working arrangements, working for myself, setting up passive income streams (however small they are) and generally working less. I refuse to give my best years of my life to my work, and will work 2x as hard (for myself, obviously) to partially decouple time from income.

> This same productivity can be achieved in wayy less time than the standard 40 hours/week.

The nebulousness with which productivity is defined based on the context suggests it is not nearly as objective as some would have you think.

My company does max 30 minute meetings. It's great and somehow everything still gets discussed. Occasionally we run a bit long but everyone knows you can only rely on people to be there for the first 30 minutes.

I'm in a Staff role with my fingers in multiple projects across several teams, and I still only have 2-3 hours of meetings a day.

Great practice. We're doing a similar thing and although these meetings sometimes run late, it's now culturally accepted that invitees just type "need to drop" and leave. When this is normalized, people learn to get to the point.

>only have 2-3 hours of meetings a day.

Only?? It's surprising you tolerate even that much.

Maybe you are not aware of what Staff Engineer roles tend to involve. There's lots of technical direction, scoping, working with other teams, etc.

> As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically.

I worked as a contractor for a while with a 32 hour/week schedule. I was essentially just as productive as I was full time.

Reality is for most creative jobs, there's a fraction of your work week where you're extremely productive. Everything else is just rounding out the admin work while your brain is mush.

Nothing illustrates this quite like the task that is marked as 'half a week' and some manager doesn't understand why you can't do two of those in the same week.

Like, if a marathon only takes 6 hours then why can't you do a second one on Sunday? And if I harass you enough can you do another one on Saturday afternoon as well?

> Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins.

Every time I've tried this or seen it tried the meeting gets rescheduled and everyone's time is wasted. I wish it worked this way.

Yesterday I had a 1 hour meeting where 3 of the 7 participants needed to attend another meeting after 30 minutes. We reorganized the agenda to hit the issues that they were especially concerned about while they were available, and then did the other things in the next 20 minutes, finishing a little early.

It's not impossible, it just requires a culture of consideration, communication, and prioritization.

I wonder if that's the key -- maybe it's acceptable to shorten one meeting on your behalf (or at least your participation in that meeting) if the reason you'll miss this meeting is that you'll be in a different meeting. As long as you're in some time-wasting activity, they're satisfied.

I say mostly tongue in cheek...

That's funny if it wasn't true.

"I have to get out of the meeting as I need to work on a task."

A task? Ok, so you can stay?

It fits right into "wow, jealous of your agenda"...when it has some blank spots. The spots you actually do work, but somehow are regarded as slack.

"He's out of line, but he's right."

It also heavily favors the loud and self important who will force their way to the front and dominate the conversation. In an hour long meeting there is much more opportunity to give everyone several minutes to speak and have group discussion and deliberation. Now if your meeting can actually get done in 20 minutes, it probably should have been a phone call.

Well, most meetings are phone calls. Over time, I've seen more and more things default to 30 minutes whether meetings, presentations, or whatever. That's not to say that an hour isn't the right length for certain things, but it's reasonable to default to 30 minutes unless people think more time is needed.

With so many people working remotely, aren't all meetings basically phone calls now?

Practically the only think I like about Scrum is that there's a person who is slightly at arm's length to referee these sorts of things. But it's a sort of broken clock scenario.

I wonder what percentage of meetings occur because someone in leadership is disorganized and / or unable to properly communicate with staff while they're performing their jobs on a daily basis.

Gonna say that, excluding standup, this has to be at least 50%.

I've heard this class of meetings described as "organizing your thoughts with witnesses" and that's a brilliant explanation in my experience.

That’s a brilliant description. And might not always be a bad thing.

There are no technological tricks and very few sociological tricks that can cause an immature person to act like an adult.

And the older I get, the more I realize that thinking that such a thing exists is its own kind of immaturity.

When I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs of effort) and burndown charts (which is antiagile and idiotic given all the changes). The real issue is institutional insanity, assuming you can direct engineers like they were machines.

Until you fix the institution you can't change the hours.

Absolutely. Almost every org treats engineers as an expendable resource. They do this because they fear the alternative, which requires treating people with respect, because those people are valuable to your organization.

You and I have very different career experiences. I have worked for 5 Fortune-100 technology companies over the past 20 years and never once did I feel like I was an expendable resource. Outside one particular experience, every one of my managers (Directors, Sr Directors) treated everyone with respect and honesty. Furthermore, they were genuinely concerned about health and family issues (family health, PTO, etc). Even in my current role, my company goes out of its way to provide a solid work-life balance (additional PTO for COVID, extra volunteer time, etc).

I hope others on HN have had the opportunity to work in places such as these...

Things have changed in the past decade for engineers. In the 00s, I felt expendable at every job, even at places that suffered after an exodus engineers. In the 10s, I felt necessary, but fungible. And in the 20s, I feel important and that my skills are distinct.

I'm sure this varies a lot for people working in different sectors, but I think every sector has seen the perceived importance of technology engineering increase over time.

Wow! I hope to one day work where you did and to have similar experiences. That sounds great.

>They do this because they fear the alternative

they do it because they can. Engineers have the tendency to be overly individualistic and ignore collective bargaining which is the primary means by which people can gain better working conditions. As long as people are willing to put in those 60 hours to climb up the next career rank ahead of their peers it's gonna be that way.

If you are organized you can call their bluff. But if more than a couple of people defect and keep insisting they can make the unreasonable deadlines, then those people get attention because they are saying what management wants to hear.

One of my goals in life is to get better at identifying (read, admitting/accepting) when the team has defectors and finding someplace else to apply my skills. But the few times it has actually worked are a mighty incentive to try again, even when I should know better.

Agreed. The situation you describe is one where constraints do not exist, which is cultural. You assume input, say 40 hours (input is not productivity) and keep piling on work, responsibilities and unrealistic deadlines where workers feel forced to put in as much as 60 hours. Which is again input, not output.

Where I work, we work output-based. We work in sprints where the amount of work that can be done in a sprint is fixed, expressed as velocity. This capacity is a hard constraint and immutable (unless you hire additional people).

The business is free to spent that velocity as they please, but they have no say over velocity itself. They also have no say over input (hours) or estimates (they're not qualified to do so).

These hard constraints are a thing of beauty, it forces serious prioritization. Call me old and cynical, but in my 25 years in IT, I'd say at least 80% of what gets build is bullshit. Untested brain farts from higher-ups that have no tangible benefit to any customer or user. Hence I fail to be impressed by almost any "priority" or "deadline", exceptions aside.

You always have more power than you think, and if you really don’t it’s probably time to move on.

The only thing I support more than WFH is my competitors working 20% less.

If they're doing this to compete for talent, go ahead by all means. I suspect they need to do something like this also because they're a UK SaaS company (so lower wages to start) serving the low-end of the non-profit market (price sensitive buyers). And they don't have the enterprise features to compete with Salesforce and CRM for the high-end segment.

The goal is to keep expanding these trials until labor law ratchets the work week down for everyone to 4 days. It will take time, but it will happen.

If you as a freelancer want to work five days a week (or more), by all means, spend your life in such a manner. The rest of us work to live, not live to work.

Laws mostly do not apply across borders, and many of your competitors are in other countries. How do you think you can compete if your competitor's employees work 25% more?

You disadvantage foreign firms with cross border financial/policy mechanisms, in the same way you encourage better labor and environmental practices for work outsourced abroad. This is a well worn policy path.

A race to the bottom can avoided with laws and regulation.

Sad that you call your colleagues "competitors". I guess you also missed the main point of the initiative, which is to have the same productivity in one day less. So your extra day of work effectively does nothing to the bottom line.

In case it does, all power to you. I think it's fair game that when people work more, they earn more. Nothing wrong with that.

I'm starting to get more militant about zoom calls. Trying to avoid angering people explicitly, but still pushing back as best I can to protect to the team from incessant zoom calls to have conversations that would be faster on slack, and better documented in email. Zoom calls just invite conversation that has to repeated again because 80% of everyone on the call forgot some amount of detail.

> conversations that would be faster on slack

I'm still searching for the golden goose "conversation" that's actually faster on Slack. Sure, a quick back and forth or check in is actually faster.

I have yet to find a meaningful discussion that's actually faster on Slack. It seems like they always drag out as sparsely filled, 45 minute threads. Nearly everyone of these would have been better served by a 10 minute call.

Faster can mean less clock time (Zoom will almost always win) or less “involved” time - each person reads the thread and responds when they have time, which uses less of their time but more clock time.

It can work either way, depends on the type of discussion. Often the best is to hash as much out in chat as you can and then meet to finalize.

The problem is it still requires mental load to switch in and out of that conversation.

You also create inequality on the team since threads rewards the fastest to reply. This is a lot easier to manage on a Zoom call.

> still requires mental load to switch in and out of that conversation

In my experience, sitting through a boring meeting while trying to appear engaged is way more mentally draining.

> You also create inequality on the team

Actually, I see the opposite, that video conferencing favors the most extroverted.

All methods can create equality issues, which can be a reason for using a variety.

I’ve noticed that the way Teams “collapses” threads that often the last to reply is the only one read besides the opening post.

My company's retention policy deletes emails after 6 months, as well as Teams chat logs. So unless we create docs in Sharepoint (who has time to add another layer of documentation?), everything becomes ephemeral at some point. Like tears in rain...

> ... and better documented in email.

This, so much. Let's just jump on a quick Teams meeting almost always can be taken care of in an email. And then it's documented and can be referenced and sent to all parties who may need to know that were not included in the "quick" Teams meeting.

Quick phone calls are often more efficient than emails. For status updates, downloads of information, sure email works. But if you want a back and forth exchange of ideas, talking is often much faster.

Talking is indeed faster but if you're not recording the result in some document to share with others not on the call there's risk that valuable information will be lost.

I'd say talking is best at straightening out misunderstandings. In those cases there's not necessarily any extra information generated. It's kind of like attaching a debugger to your communication stream.

We create a teams chat that is separate from the meeting and document what we agree on in that chat, that way it is documented for everyone who forgets the details by tomorrow morning.

Good point

I hate—hate—when I'm trying to find something in Slack and right where I'm pretty sure it should be I see a marker indicating that a call took place there, often without any surrounding indication of WTF it was about. Fucking hate it.

Yes, there’s only so much work that you can get done in one day. A lot of time is also spent on things like social interaction. What a 4 day work week offers is more flexibility. ie it’ll allow for either more quiet days of work or allow people to compress their work week and have more time to relax

I had a boss who was very sensitive to the fact that most meetings have several agendas, that half of the team doesn't give a shit about a third of the agenda, and so if you let the wrong people start talking first, then the entire team sits there for an hour when they are only interested in 15 minutes out of that hour (often at the end). So you start with the things everyone cares about and work your way down the list.

The upside/downside to this is that you can't filibuster on something that matters to you but nobody else cares about, because they already left the room before you started. But of course neither can any of the other people who think their hill is as valuable as yours.

This makes sense and understand what you're saying. But the idea of having a full extra day where I don't have to open the laptop and can instead concentrate totally on myself is much more important than a decompression day at work.

Exactly, that's also why I made the change.

>When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time.

So why pay cut

If you can do your work week in 4 days without losing productivity, you don't have anywhere near enough responsibilities.

That makes no sense. I have exactly the same responsibilities as before my switch. I also have exactly the same responsibilities as my peers working 5 days. And yet I successfully squeeze those 5 days into 4, and it wasn't even that hard.

Magic? No, modern office work is incredibly ineffective. Most of the day is spent collaborating with almost no part of the day spent on actually doing things.

That's what I'm saying. If you put 5 days of work into 4, you didn't have enough work before the switch.

I'm quite surprised how much I can do in my spare time on my small startup than often enough in my day to day job.