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Working fewer hours would make us more productive

theguardian.com

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Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#61

Post by zerebubuth »

marklgr wrote: post #50
zerebubuth wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, one of the questions would be: does 20h/wk + 20h/wk = 40h/wk skills+involvement, ie. is it linear? Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place? It would seem to me that 2 people working 20h/wk offers some significant advantages over one person working 40h/wk. Firstly, it allows for fail-over; when o…

> To use an incredibly bad analogy: It's like moving from a monolithic "big iron" server to a pair or farm of smaller ones. There are many advantages, but it means it's now a distributed system with all the problems that can bring. The thing is that, as you noted yourself, the analogy doesn't hold, for people are not AWS servers waiting for charge or failovers. If they chose to work 20h/wk, it's presumably to spend t…

I think the analogy holds for the case of employees not having the capacity to give extra hours due to other commitments. However, I totally agree that people aren't AWS servers, and the reason I felt the analogy was bad was that such a mechanistic view doesn't leave room for the multitude of positive, human ways of working around such problems. For example: if an employer asks a 20h/wk employee to work extra hours, then there can be a negotiation around whether the extra hours can be done at home, flexibly in the evenings, or for a higher hourly rate. In other words, people can compromise and negotiate a settlement which is beneficial for all.

I also don't think it's necessarily true that two part-time people would be less skilled or less focussed on work. It's the very point of the original article that working fewer hours can increase the quality and focus of the work done during that shorter period.

I've worked with many talented and exceptional "family guys" (and family women) who were skilled and totally focussed during working hours. I haven't noticed a correlation between people's priorities outside working hours and ability to do good work.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#62

Post by trebor »

zekevermillion wrote: post #60

That working fewer hours ==> increased productivity is also a mathematical tautology. Productivity being a function of output and hours, with output generally being somewhat sticky as hours change.

I think your definition of productivity is off a bit. You need to account for "effective" productivity. My hours might be 40+ but how many of those are truly focused and productive?

Hence, working less time with (theoretically) better focus and reduced stress/strain would be more productive.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#63

Post by Spooky23 »

dustingetz wrote: post #58

Mythical man month actually says the opposite, because even if longer hours have diminishing returns, the organizational overhead from adding people to the team is worse. Maybe the descrepency here is short view (a couple years to build a startup) vs long view (mature organization over an entire business cycle) edit ----- Secondary source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547965 Quoting the secondary source: "Fr…

Not really.

It's the unit size that matters. Mythical man month said the ideal basic organization for delivering work output is modeled after a surgical team. If you model after traditional military units, the infantry squad is the equivalent to that team.

Under the mythical man month org structure, the atomic unit of work capacity is that surgical team. You can't do more surgery by putting two more surgeons in the OR. But you can add new teams and get more output. I think the analogy works in the military context as well -- a general doesn't ask for more individual soldiers, he asks for more battalions/regiments/divisions.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#64

Post by golergka »

lmm wrote: post #22
golergka wrote: post #7

I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law? I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach. Imagine that when you sign up for a job, you select how many days per week do you want to work, from 3 to 6, with proportionate wage scale. That you can select what hours do you want to work. That it's easy to change this arrangement while you're…

The only way to change culture is through law. Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched. Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them. Compare OHSA, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ .

> Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched.

That's not true.

http://web.stanford.edu/~leinav/pubs/RESTAT2003.pdf

Page 835. Total average of seatbelt usage, before law: 31%, after law: 48%, in 1998: 65%.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#65

Post by douche »

executesorder66 wrote: post #47
throwaway7767 wrote: post #30

I changed my working arrangement to 80% recently, so now I work four 8-hour day weeks. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you can make it work. I have wednesday off, so the week is divided into two-day stretches. Not sure if I'm any more productive (maybe), but I'm a lot happier. I suspect some coworkers are going to follow my lead, now that the precedent has been set.

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

The better deal would be working four ten-hour days. Particularly if you have a long commute, this is wildly better than five eights.

Eight hours isn't really enough time to get anything done, particularly during business hours.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#66

Post by rogeryu »

wslh wrote: post #31
throwaway7767 wrote: post #30

I changed my working arrangement to 80% recently, so now I work four 8-hour day weeks. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you can make it work. I have wednesday off, so the week is divided into two-day stretches. Not sure if I'm any more productive (maybe), but I'm a lot happier. I suspect some coworkers are going to follow my lead, now that the precedent has been set.

I don't think your plan is for everyone since if you need to be synced with a team not working on Wednesdays is negative in the long run.

This is nonsense, although it may depend on the kind of job you have. For most of us, we don't need to be there five days a week. You can plan around that.

Of course if you have five people in a team and everybody has a different day off, you can never get together, and that may be a problem. This is the same if you and your colleagues work many days/hours out of the office or at home.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#67

Post by golergka »

AlexC04 wrote: post #56
golergka wrote: post #7

I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law? I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach. Imagine that when you sign up for a job, you select how many days per week do you want to work, from 3 to 6, with proportionate wage scale. That you can select what hours do you want to work. That it's easy to change this arrangement while you're…

> I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law? > I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach That's a bit of a "trickle down economics" argument. Depending on corporations and owners to offer an option is never going to be as effective as passing a requirement.

> as effective

As long as you only care about "effectiveness" of the conversion to smaller working hours — yes. But my point is that we should care about creating an environment where people are actually free to choose how much are they supposed to work.

In other words, you argue of how effective we can be in achieving our goal, while I suggest redefining the goal itself.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#68

Post by zepto »

golergka wrote: post #16
soft_dev_person wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment (point 2 especially) reflects the current widespread notion (among employers at least, it seems) that one hour of work is one hour of work, always. I think the main point of the article is exactly to counter that. > "Productivity – output per working hour – improves with shorter hours." And why should the employer get all the benefit from this? I think a lot of people would love to work fewer hours, be m…

> And why should the employer get all the benefit from this? Thankfully, we don't analytically decide who takes the benefits — labor market is working pretty well at figuring this out.

How do you know it's working pretty well?

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#69

Post by [deleted] »

executesorder66 wrote: post #47
throwaway7767 wrote: post #30

I changed my working arrangement to 80% recently, so now I work four 8-hour day weeks. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you can make it work. I have wednesday off, so the week is divided into two-day stretches. Not sure if I'm any more productive (maybe), but I'm a lot happier. I suspect some coworkers are going to follow my lead, now that the precedent has been set.

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

[deleted]

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#70

Post by rufb »

seren wrote: post #52
executesorder66 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

GP does not mention the impact on its salary. Usually if you work 80% of your previous time, you are also payed 80% of the previous salary.

You're assuming a fixed workload-based salary. If we're talking about a salary that has a big variable component (commissions, fees, bonuses), the cut may have been smaller.
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