I don't even know that The Economist wrote about this, as implied by the wrong link, but the source seems to be this: https://slack.com/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-betwee...
Thank you for the link, this one makes more sense.
A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
21–30 of 133 posts
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#22[flagged]
Catchy title and some of us read the slack link that's posted in the comments. But I guess also look at how many people posted the exact same response. Maybe they are right, people don't read.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#23The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted a…
Fully agree. On my last job interview, I sat in front of the committee (about 7 to-be colleagues) and the director. I said:
> I will only work maximum 30 hours a week. The reason is that I am not productive after 6 hours. It simply does not make sense for you to pay me after 2PM, because I will not do anything productive from 2 to 4PM and you are wasting money.
Everyone smiled. Except the director.
I still got the position, but the director is still hoping I will at some time upgrade to 100%. I said I will consider again after 2 years, but I doubt my perception will have changed by that time.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#24How is productivity measured in their study though? As it's survey based I presume self reported?
I worry that expectations may have a confounding effect: those required to work long hours may feel less productive relative to the higher expectations of their work culture?
I could well believe they actually are less productive as well, on some objective scale, but not sure a survey could prove this.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is well understood in my peer group at least, and as a fractional CTO, I quite routinely find agreement with CEOs and the like on this as well. If you work hard, chances are you're not working smart enough. I think that mode where you need to work hard and not smart is quite similar to creating technical debt: Sometimes you need to do it, usually to meet some timeline you have no control over, and it's best done…
I wonder if being a fractional CTO self selects for knowing people who understand this? The kind of person who thinks you can go 110% all the time probably thinks you can’t work at more than one place because you owe your employer all your effort.
I think there's some truth to that. I also talk to people sceptical of the model (I'm in Germany, so scepticism is generally not in short supply), but by and large I'm most likely to meet and interact with people who believe the model works. Surely a bit of a bubble.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#26This is a very good article. The core is that "productivity" is extremely hard to measure for most white-collar jobs, or indeed anything that isn't piecework or an assembly line. Even if you can assign a number to annual or monthly productivity (salespeople have monthly targets), you can't assign it to individual minutes of the day.
So people end up producing the appearance of productivity instead. Often at the expense of actual, unmeasured productivity.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#27> Three out of every four desk workers report working in the 3 to 6pm timeframe, but of those, only one in four consider these hours highly productive.
It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better.
At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours.
Plus a day that’s roughly 9-3 instead of 9-5 would have the benefit of being aligned with school schedules (at least here in the US) and make things easier for working parents.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#28> Three out of every four desk workers report working in the 3 to 6pm timeframe, but of those, only one in four consider these hours highly productive. It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better. At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours. Plus a d…
To add to your example, UK school hours are (or were when I was going to them) 09:00-15:30.
I'm not 100% sure the hours here in Germany (sadly lacking the need to know), but I think many are 08:00-13:30.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#29Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company.
1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix properly? When you make changes outside of hours, you put your teammates into that position every time.
2. You upset your teams and your companies understanding of their capacity. Because you are not beholdent to work overtime by the contract, if you decide to take a break from overtime for whatever reason, projects will start slipping with no perceptible root-cause. This is a really bad spot to put your team into.
3. You're likely to become the "rockstar". This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but can be damaging to companies that do not now how to work with them - see https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj....
4. You will eventually start burning out, there's no question about it. Burn out doesn't affect just you, it affects the company. Once you start burning out, all sorts of interpersonal and quality problems will develop that will jeapordize a (hopefully) otherwise healthy team.
5. You will ocassionally ping your teammates outside of work hours, some of whom, due to various reasons, will feel a need to respond, or "hop on for a quick check". Yes, the teammates are in control of their actions, no, that does not excuse you from regularly pinging them outside of work hours. This is especially nefarious if there is a power imbalance, such as a more senior engineer (or a rockstar) pinging a more junior engineer.
If you're finding that you need to continuously work overtime to meet deadlines, speak with your manager, this is a problem for them to solve, not you.
Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
#30The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted a…
Working smart vs working hard. Also - optics.
Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER.
People are shallow, visual, and have no attention spans (especially now). You need to be aware of the optics and play them.
No, you are not gaming the system - you are getting to the even point of a stupid, unfair one.
Also - you need to just plain not take jobs in companies with hustle cultures if you can avoid it. If everyone on the team is 22, it's probably going to be hell, because they are still to learn the lesson the hard way.
Call it reverse agism or whatever, but it's a joy to work with professionals who have seen dysfunctional workplaces and who have lives.