Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

I wonder if the productivity is maintained as we can only think for so many hours a day. If you look at famous writers such as Hemingway they only worked for a few hours a day. So the question is how does this translate to work that has a less cognitive load ? Has anybody done experiments with programing and hours worked ?

At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-existent (specific people that then ended up not staying very long in the company) and the advantages by far outweigh the "loss of control". In the end myself as a business owner and managers have far less stress by trusting people and empowering them to do great work.

With this framework, people will take breaks whenever they feel like. They go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same.

But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working.

Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine.

We also just released our company handbook which goes in a lot of detail on how we run a 20+ people remote business:

* https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates)

* https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF)

EDIT: Added some more details

How does the science on this compare to the science which got us the 40 hour work week? There seems to be a lot of anecdotes in the article.

I'm not sure I could gauge my productivity well from one day to the next. There's too many variables. There's other people, luck, different issues, strengths, weaknesses, shrimp gumbo, BBQ shrimp, shrimp soup...

I do know I give it my all during the week and I crash into the weekend. It's invigorating and exhausting at the same time. Getting over a rough week seems to take as long as getting over a bad hangover. Two days for sure, and sometimes I need a third.

I share your experience. But, I've recently read a book, The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater, a psychologist, wherein he argues that your brain does not crunch anything in the background, and only does what it focuses on.

However, the situation you outlined still occurs because you can get stuck in a certain paradigm (e.g. "this name that I can't remember definitely starts with 's'"), which you effectively reset, in addition to simply returning re-energised. Still a good argument for breaks and less strenuous working hours.

There wasn't really science that got us the 40 hour week. That was just the compromise organized labour arrived at in the early 20th century after blow back from unconstrained work weeks (there average man working in 1900 was estimated at 60 hours weekly).