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Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#301

Post by fastball »

mywittyname wrote: post #217
fastball wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? If you sleep 8 hours a day and work for 8 hours Mon-Fri, that's: - work: 40hrs - personal: 72hrs - sleep: 56hrs Switching to a four day work week would thus result in a 20% reduction in work hours but only a 10% increase in personal time. I'm going to assume you weren't including non-work hours if they were on "work days", but that seems silly if you have a 9-5 job.

I don't know about everyone else, but my evenings are far from entirely "personal time." Chores take up most of my evenings, so really I get maybe 1-2hr of personal time on work nights. People with kids who do sports probably get next to zero personal time, beyond maybe vegging out on YT/FB for an hour before bed. Weekends are the only days where I generally "plan" to do things, and even then, Sundays are half reserv…

I think you might be surprised to see how all that "extra" personal time can get absorbed by chores as well, ala Parkinson's law[1]. Chores are personal time unfortunately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#302

Post by throwaway803453 »

ajacksified wrote: post #296
throwaway803453 wrote: post #27

FWH has exposed how many white-collar jobs were only full-time in the ass-in-seat sense and how many employees should have Professional Meeting Attender as their job title. I used to be the guy who would champion efficient meeting practices. Now it's the last thing I want given that I can now work-out, make breakfast, do manual labor, etc., while listening to meeting. 4 day work week in grasp you ask ? For many I'd b…

I'm not surprised you made a throwaway to hide behind, because not only are you a coward, but this is the worst take I've ever seen on a website full of terrible takes. I can't imagine working for someone with this point of view, and I'll happily say that, on the record, without a throwaway account. As an engineering manager- an actual one- I'm not paying for hours, I'm paying for output. I couldn't care less if my e…

This is why I choose to be a contractor and an engineer. If I work, I bill. I never understood how anyone in good conscience can work 15hrs while the others at the company work 40hrs and still collect full-time benefits. As an engineer I have never had that luxury though, somehow we are always busy and I have to make an effort to reduce my billable hours without needing to pad them. I am probably also culturally biased from working class roots that overpraises hours worked and that mindset is admittedly self-defeating.

Preparing/eating a meal during a meeting is admittedly perk but it doesn't affect my focus or participation.

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#303

Post by akiselev »

jacquesm wrote: post #290
akiselev wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the GP just hasn't discovered the magic of the "minimum billable increment" yet. Lawyers love this trick! Customer wants you to itemize the bill? No problem - it comes with a 15 minute minimum billable increment. The more demanding/PITA the client is, the longer the minimum. Send me a text a minute after I've finished working for the day to check on the status and it takes me a minute to read and reply? No pr…

> Called me for a two minute chat while I'm in the zone on their project? Gotta itemize it! 15 minutes billed and I restart the work (out of the zone) at the top of the next interval. That's double billing and afaik illegal, you can not (and rightly so) bill your customer twice for the same time.

A minimum billable increment is not double billing when properly outlined in a contract. If one item is an hour and two minutes and is interrupted by a three minute item, the bill comes out to 65 minutes of work and 25 minutes of contractually obligated rounding. Anything that had to be item had to be rounded up to the minimum and that's the price the client had to pay for itemization. I wasn't going to play guessing games about which calls counted as an item and which ones didn't.

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#304

Post by Rexxar »

irrational wrote: post #212

My company typically gives everyone half days on Fridays from Memorial Day to Labor Day (and most people only put in a token amount of work - if that - on those Fridays - no meetings are allowed to be scheduled on any Friday of the year). This year, in addition to that, they gave everyone every Friday off for the month of July. And... the company still functioned just fine. We run on sprints and we finished just as m…

No code change at all or nothing pushed to production environment ?

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#305

Post by lotsofpulp »

mlyle wrote: post #215
lotsofpulp wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is the minimum wage for salaried exempt workers needs to be a few hundred thousand dollars. Otherwise, businesses will continue to label employees managers with no actual management responsibilities with the sole goal of paying someone a lower hourly rate in exchange for a more certain periodic payment. Once you remove this loophole, hourly pay will naturally rise as businesses will opt to hire mo…

This is an interesting idea, but it seems really impractical to me. As you point out, people enjoy some benefits from certainty in compensation. Outlawing a compensation arrangement far in excess of minimum wage seems questionable. And how far does this extend? Can I not pay a contractor a fixed rate for a project? Or a fixed rate to handle _____ for me for a week? It would seem to encourage arm's-length contracting…

Is it far in excess of minimum wage? A manager can be asked to be on call 24/7. But per hour, that is not much.

I don’t see what it would have to do with contractors. Minimum wage laws apply to employer employer relationships. Independent contractors can charge whatever they want.

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#306

Post by lupire »

throwaway803453 wrote: post #302
ajacksified wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised you made a throwaway to hide behind, because not only are you a coward, but this is the worst take I've ever seen on a website full of terrible takes. I can't imagine working for someone with this point of view, and I'll happily say that, on the record, without a throwaway account. As an engineering manager- an actual one- I'm not paying for hours, I'm paying for output. I couldn't care less if my e…

This is why I choose to be a contractor and an engineer. If I work, I bill. I never understood how anyone in good conscience can work 15hrs while the others at the company work 40hrs and still collect full-time benefits. As an engineer I have never had that luxury though, somehow we are always busy and I have to make an effort to reduce my billable hours without needing to pad them. I am probably also culturally bias…

If you feel guilty, give some of your pay to your coworkers or charity, not your capitalist overlord.

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#307

Post by lupire »

nimbius wrote: post #38
throwaway803453 wrote: post #27

FWH has exposed how many white-collar jobs were only full-time in the ass-in-seat sense and how many employees should have Professional Meeting Attender as their job title. I used to be the guy who would champion efficient meeting practices. Now it's the last thing I want given that I can now work-out, make breakfast, do manual labor, etc., while listening to meeting. 4 day work week in grasp you ask ? For many I'd b…

an excellent point. speaking from a more blue-collar perspective, i would argue most "real" (non meeting attender) jobs have been 3-4 day for a long time now thanks to automation and a perverse incentive to avoid paying benefits. bartenders, repair staff, custodial, fast food and construction have never offered a solid 40 hour week. many of these roles are highly automated and simply do not need a full 40 woman or ma…

benefit-less jobs are up to 29hr/week, not 15.

and it's not because of automation. Fast food restaurant isn't run by one person with downtime.

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#309

Post by jollybean »

throwaway803453 wrote: post #27

FWH has exposed how many white-collar jobs were only full-time in the ass-in-seat sense and how many employees should have Professional Meeting Attender as their job title. I used to be the guy who would champion efficient meeting practices. Now it's the last thing I want given that I can now work-out, make breakfast, do manual labor, etc., while listening to meeting. 4 day work week in grasp you ask ? For many I'd b…

While meetings can be a waste, it's a misunderstanding of communications to suggest they are 'entirely a waste'.

One level above manager (basically Director and above), it's practically all you do, i.e. 80% meetings and emails because that's the mechanics of the job.

Imagine a fisherman fishing at the dock: he is paying attention to signals, and then being super active for short moments, that's the nature of fishing. Managing is a lot of fodder communicating and hyper action / participation in some instances.

Imagine how much time you have to spend interviewing, listening to multiple vendors, talking to the legal department about the 'why you can't use some SaaS and how to get around it', the commercial guys trying to get under budget, your IP lawyers worried about the wording of the license, the DevOps team who are totally understaffed to release your product, the HR team pressuring you to hire 'the other person' in order to meet some strategic staffing targets, or their launch of the new HR portal which is a mess, prepping your slides for the conf. talk next month and the marketing team wants you to tweak your language, the Research Agency completely missed their objectives and you have to get them to re-do part of the research and you're not going to pay them extra, and you have to get your managers to focus on that. It's a lot of meetings.

FYI it's perfectly reasonable to listen to meetings while doing labour if the situation allows for it!

Re: Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

#310

Post by JetAlone »

yupper32 wrote: post #113

Easy: No. We can barely get a small percentage of jobs converted to remote. What makes people even hope for 4-day work weeks to be common? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Stress makes it feel like less work and more time is necessary. I think the stress we feel is really a crisis about work feeling meaningless. If our work felt more meaningful, and engaging, we'd be happy to work far longer, and far more intensely. That stress gets exploited by the journalists, who, needing clicks, keep rewriting the same prose variants promising some "hope" of less raw obligated hours of meaningless work.

This hope looks to be pregnant with the promise that shorter work hours would leave more time to pursue work that feels meaningful to us while allowing us to support ourselves... But a question worth asking is how much of it would just get absorbed into the indolence that most of us have let ourselves slip too much time and energy into. I contend that the hope for shorter hours is indeed not pregnant, but simply sporting a beer gut.

EDIT: I went through the struggle of clinging to this hope. I'm still stressed by exhausting time management problems and there seems to be no systematic panacea approach that will make them go away. But fully letting go of this hope, and the tacit resentfulness that comes with its unfulfillment was one of the best things I've done in the last few months and I would whole heartedly recommend it. My psychological resources can be re-distributed to something better; I could dedicate that mental energy to finding or performing work I do consider meaningful.

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