I would love to see experiments similar to this salary experiment in the vein of 4day/week Nhrs/day. I'd guess that schedules may be shifted so that some people cover different four day periods, and one interesting side effect might be fewer interruptions in the office on Mondays and Fridays. As an early-in-the office kind of person, I find that the first slice of uninterrupted hours in the morning are often the very most productive.

In general, I tend to be most productive doing actual programming when I'm in the office and it's fairly empty. That is, whether I'm in before most others or in after most others.

However, I have multiple roles and tasks, only one of which is development.

I definitely get a lot of insight during the regular day from fellow coworkers, and tend to do more "operational" (not developing) work better when I'm alongside peers than when I'm there alone late. It's also the kind of work where multiple people looking at one thing really helps, since one person might miss something important and another might notice something important.

So I think it depends on the kind of work you're doing and how you like to work. And that is partially why letting employees work when they want, and even choose where they work, can lead to them being more productive in general, at least as long as you can trust them to choose a schedule that makes them productive instead of one that lets them be lazy.

What's a reasonable workweek then? And why?

I know that I have about 5ish hours of good programming work in me a day. I know that I like to take a 45ish minute lunch. I know that I have some admin type stuff to do on occasion.

So, sign me up for a 6 hour day and you'll get my full attention all day. I won't "need" to spend time on HN or twitter or whatever to kill time because I'll be fresh enough to work all day.

Also, because i believe there is a hell of a lot more to life than work, we'll work 4 days a week.

A guy can dream, can't he?

I wish we were more actively working towards such a world. Instead, we keep getting caught up in political discussions about how people who don't work are lazy.

Depends on who is working, what they're working with etc.

After about 7 hours of coding, I feel my code starts slipping off. Also, I code better at night. I know people who can't code for more than 6 hours a day or their work gets shitty.

I usually code 6 to 7 hours a day, and I take my friday afternoon (or part of it) and night off. This sometimes means working just the morning and the first half of the afternoon, and sometimes means working until 4am on the Thursday and then not working at all on Friday.

I think when you have great people on your team, that love their work (Not their jobs. Their work), it gets eaasier. This people will do their best, and that can't be measured in hours. That's why a fixed schedule actually sucks and many, many people don't like it.

Do you not have an hour of "administrative" or "meeting" work to get you to at least 8 hours? I find that my non-coding overhead is easily an hour a day.

It originated from: 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 8 hours recreation.

But if you add a preparation, commute, lunch-time, etc... you easily end up with only 4-5 hours of "recreation".

Now imagine you have a wife, kids, friends, side projects, maybe want to watch SICP lectures, learn some Haskell...

4-5 hours is simply not enough.

It actually originated from shift work. It used to be two 12-hour shifts, and then Carnegie and others realized three 8-hour shifts were more productive.

Right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

So after 100-110 years, maybe it's time to come up with even more efficient work day? (But keeping the right direction).

4 hours of actual programming per day, but there's overhead and like lunch