Treehouse used to do 4/10s and from what I remember listening to Ryan Carson's podcast with Jason Calacanis, it didn't work out for them. So I don't think this should apply to every workplace. For more mature companies, it makes sense. For startups, I don't think so.
Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
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Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#52[deleted]
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#53Talk of lower work hours doesn’t always come with clear expectations around pay. Ignoring the large fixed cost of providing healthcare, I bet companies would be more willing to drop hours from a schedule if compensation also dropped.
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#54If I'm going to believe anything, I'd need a longitudinal study of about 5 years. I find 5 years to be a good hallmark to see whether something had an actual strong impact in my own life (e.g. regarding reading self-help books such as Search Inside Yourself [1] or Steve Pavlina's blog post on how to rock at university [2] -- sorry for being slightly off-topic but these two things changed my life). [1] https://www.ama…
Where did Steve Pavlina go to school? Not sure if some of those triaging strategies would have worked at U Chicago...
It definitely worked wonders for me (VU University Amsterdam), definitely during my psychology bachelor.
I experienced the following conditions.
> In every student’s schedule, some classes are critical while others are almost trivial.
True, the most funny ones were social psychology and e-business, common sense almost helped you to pass the course.
> For some classes attendance was necessary, but for others it didn’t make much difference.
True for me as well, reading the book within 30 minutes would save 75 minutes of time since the class would take 105 minutes.
> I could simply get the notes from another student if needed, or I could learn the material from the textbook.
We had a notes Facebook group and there was a Dutch startup dedicated to summaries.
> If it wasn’t necessary for me to attend a particular class (based on my goals for that class)
Having a good goal is tantamount if your goal is to learn everything possible, then triaging becomes almost impossible. If your goal is to just get by with the lowest grade possible, then triaging is a must.
> If I felt an assignment was lame, pointless, or unnecessarily tedious, and if it wouldn’t have too negative an impact on my grade, I would actually decline to do it.
I did this with my thesis, for example (again psychology). I could check for normality and do all the right statistical things, but it would only get me 5% extra points. So I assumed normality and everything else needed for multiple linear regression, tested nothing and reported the results.
> Maybe I’d estimate it would take me 20 hours to do an A job but only 10 hours to do a B job.
Heh, I did this so many times. I had side jobs, a girlfriend, friends and other activities that I could spend my time on.
> I often thought in this Machiavellian fashion back then, and often to my surprise I found that my B-quality papers would come back with As anyway.
Oh yes, one time I even published a paper that I rushed through as a homework exercise, because my synthesis of using psychology, neuroscience and game studies for a game studies paper was apparently unparalleled for a master student (the field simply doesn't have many people, so you easily shine). Think about that, I rush a paper writing it in 20 hours and it gets published and nominated for best paper award. Before those 20 hours, I knew nothing of the topic.
Triaging was a lot harder for my computer science programs though, it simply has less bullshit, contained more moving parts and has therefore been intellectually tougher. In that sense, if you triage a lot, it is some indication that your university program isn't of high quality, unfortunately (there are quite a bit of exceptions).
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#55If I'm going to believe anything, I'd need a longitudinal study of about 5 years. I find 5 years to be a good hallmark to see whether something had an actual strong impact in my own life (e.g. regarding reading self-help books such as Search Inside Yourself [1] or Steve Pavlina's blog post on how to rock at university [2] -- sorry for being slightly off-topic but these two things changed my life). [1] https://www.ama…
Bit of a Catch-22 problem, don't you think?
How? You experiment on something for 5 years and then report. In my case of reading books: you read books and 5 years later you know what stuck and reread it in order to get the full wisdom out of it. It helped that I studied for 8 years and reflected on these kind of things every year.
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#56Talk of lower work hours doesn’t always come with clear expectations around pay. Ignoring the large fixed cost of providing healthcare, I bet companies would be more willing to drop hours from a schedule if compensation also dropped.
"Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay."
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#57I've been working four-day workweeks for the past 4 years or so, and love it. I can't say I have the same output (nor would I want to, since I took a 20% pay cut for it). I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I don't think I'll be able to work 5-day weeks again. I tried it a few times and I found myself very unhappy, 5 days were too long and the weekend too short. The 4/3 split is ideal, four days isn't enough to get…
That schedule is called a 4-10 - 4, 10 hour work days, and every Friday off.
9/80 is that you work 9 hours a day, and every other Friday is off.
They're both popular in defense and aerospace.
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today". People confuse the two all the time! Flexibility and reliability have to go hand in hand, if you cannot be reliable when left unsupervised, you need to expect I cannot leave you unsupervised. On the plus side, when people are given this explanation they often self manage into a good routine.
But this is the problem. The current mindset is - as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.
You should really know what you're doing all day. If you can't even summarize what you were doing all day, that sounds like a bad thing. The evidence is your story about what you actually did.
Here's a perfectly great update that didn't result in a quick win:
"I spent all day debugging that null pointer issue like we discussed. I thought maybe it was because the API was sending nulls across, but I looked at the logs and couldn't find any instance of that happening. I thought maybe it was a type coercion issue too, but I wrote a few tests to rule that out and it turned out not to be the case. Then I remembered reading about a memory corruption issue that sometimes happens in our runtime version, so I spent the rest of the day reading about the situations where that occurs and figuring out if it applies to us, but didn't get enough time to finish that up completely."
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
>When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.
I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.
Most companies only let you bank so many pto (Paid Time Off) hours and carry them over year to year. I think this came about because of accounting change where employee hours are considered a liability (Hours/Money owed for nothing in return), but I might be wrong on that.
As a result employees can't just bank their vacation hours and get a big payday when they leave. It tends to only take a couple years to get up to the max, and you end up with "use it or loose it" pto.
Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
#60"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done."
The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impossible to measure.
Some do. Customer support can be benchmarked (and prodctivity-pushed) But... customers support jobs don't lend to this 4d workweek thing. The jobs that do lend to it, don't lend to measurement.
This difficulty can lead to all sorts of wierdness. Tyler Cowen claimed that office worker productivity has not been (measurably) increased by office computerization. IE, going from secretaries, fax and typwriters to Google docs hasn't produced any economic gains.
Strange claim. Difficult to measure. David Graeber (anarchist that reckons most office work is pointless busy-work) quotes the same stat this white paper quotes, people spend about 2/8 hrs working and the rest procrastinating on social media.
Measurement is also not incidental here. Measurablity changes everything. Once an employees job productivity is measurable, it can be optimized and already has been.
It's a Shrodinger's product evangalist problem...
That said, I like the jist.Lets shorten the workweek. Science-wise... well...