Working fewer hours would make us more productive

"people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits" It depends on so many factors (self interest in the job, capacity, health, age, repetitiveness, nature of the job, stress involved, etc...) that it can be true or false in different cases.

“Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!” Negative value might be abusive but those people are for sure less productive in their second job compared to if they wouldn't have to do the first one. But the net production is for sure higher for 2 jobs than 1.

"does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym ... you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly?" Assuming every activity is consuming the same resource is a very speculative statement. Being exhausted solving a math problem doesn't necessary means you're exhausted to run.

"When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm" That's assuming every job is made of very diverses tasks. As a core of modern economy, division of labour actually lead to the opposite in many cases. And that's sort of true for many jobs in game industry where your day job can turn very repetitive and all the tasks, no matter how much, looks the very same.

"Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week is going to achieve more" You would need a study to back it up, I would be very curious of the result of these two people over a period of 40-50 years of career at 80 hours per week for one and 40 for the other.

I think these types of studies are all going to be fatally flawed with a bunch of very-hard-to-untangle factors: since "40 hours" (or more) is the "expected norm" then if you're working less you've either fought incredibly hard to do so (which I personally have), you have way more freedom to choose working hours than most people or you're "forced" to work less (or more) for some reason.

e.g. my first thought about the "increased hypertension in workers reporting Now, if you've chosen to work many more hours then it seems intuitively obvious that you'll be more productive. There's also the hard-to-study factor of what you're working on. For example, many free-software developers are doing their free-software-developing in their "non-work" hours -- so they might be "working" (in the sense of producing code) 80+ hours a week, but will likely only get "counted" as whatever their day job was. (If there are studies that account for "what you do with your other time" against productivity, I'd be very keen to read them).

In a similar vein -- and as John said in the original post -- if you're "stuck" on something (e.g. can't do any more "design the hard algorithm" thinking) and switch to something "boring" that still needs to be done (e.g. make the Makefile suck less) that's still "more productive". But, as others have pointed out, many developers don't have that freedom -- they have to keep pounding their face against whatever bug they got assigned. And if you're stuck, but have to keep working on it, I'd bet a lot that your productivity goes to shit.

So, all that said, I personally believe (note: not scientific! ;) that we'd be far better off to have shorter expected/forced "working weeks". And I don't mean that everyone should be forced to work less! This may (or may not!) have a "productivity" impact for employers but if you looked at individuals' "productivity" (including work and "non-work" parts) I think it would go way up -- precisely because this would give the vast majority of people way more choice about what they get to work on. This -- I completely unscientifically presume -- would also have a large positive effect on people's reported happiness.

That is, they'd be spending less time smashing their face on that bug at work and get more time to do whatever else they like to do -- free-software, painting, writing, building things, etc.

In any case, I know that for me personally being forced to work 40+ hours a week on the same thing is completely toxic to my creativity and productivity at programming and I've worked very hard to get paid less (to work less). I can also tell you that nearly every co-worker or friend I've told of my myriad different arrangements to achieve this have wanted to do the same (but feel they "can't"). The only exception seems to be when people realize the bit about "paid less" ;) and can't do (or don't want) that. Interestingly, I still have spent a bunch of my increased leisure time writing software -- but for myself, or free-software instead of "for work". Of course, I've also spent a bunch of it doing things for pure enjoyment.

Now, of course, that's all just anecdotal. But, for me, less "must work on X for $" time means a lot more happiness and a lot more "productivity" (if you look at everything I do with my time).

"A living" is a rather broad concept. Two factors are grossly overlooked: the general standard of living is rising, and much of that rise results from making it nigh unto illegal to live below that standard. Even the "poor" expect easy indoor heat & AC, toilets flushed with city-supplied drinking water, one car per adult, a cell phone per teen & up, etc. I grew up on hand-split wood heat & no AC, well water, one car for the household, wired phones with 4-digit numbers, etc. - and we were firmly one-income "middle class". Nowadays wood stoves are regulated into near oblivion (near prohibitory particulate limits), heat & AC standards required for "certificate of occupancy" along with high plumbing standards, cars include a plethora of then-unattainable options and must meet very high gas mileage standards, cell phones are a standard welfare item, etc. - all due to well-meaning but subtly devastating requirements to live even in "functional poverty". Normalization of home mortgages, insurance-paid access to extremely high health care standards, and easy access to crushing loans for education, all seem perfectly justified now yet persuasively "force" people to work more and more "to make a living" which many of us saw as luxurious not all that long ago.

You can live well on a whole lot less - as most people did not all that long ago. Ditch the >1000 sq ft homes, instant shirt-sleeve indoor temperatures, waste-encouraging volumes of drinking water, high-MPG with-all-the-features cars, supercomputer-in-your-pocket phones, etc. Get a catastrophic health insurance plan. Pay your way thru college. Downgrade the phone. And elect leaders who seek to make simple living legal, and otherwise decrease burdensome tax rates.

Your "living" standard is your choice. Really. Contain your costs, and you can live on a whole lot less. As always I'll be derided for these observations, but it's what I grew up on.

Excellent response JC!

I like what I do. Save eating, exercising, resting and socializing. I always can't wait to get back to work.

Find purpose and stop counting.

"Destroying an Earth-threatening asteroid..." But what asteroid ? That's all the point, it's ridiculous to care as much about a non-existing asteroid in the near feature than the plenty of dramatic problems that are causing damages for centuries.

"Someone has to do the work", "confiscating the fruits of the productive to give to the idle punishes the former and rewards the latter". That's absolutely not what liberating work is about, and what you describe is a pretty narrow view of economics that we're taught since childhood. Investigating a bit economy shows it get way more complicated than that, just defining "productive value" is a very deep subject. I don't believe you and I are able to assess if an economic system is sustainable or not (reality shown even the best economists can't), whereas scientist are pretty accurate about the low probability of an asteroid destroying earth in 2016.