201–210 of 351 posts
Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and/or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and/or decreased debt. What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week? At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the…
Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and/or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and/or decreased debt. What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week? At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the…
Economists stopped repeating the ceteris paribus fallacy about half a century ago. At about the same time as systems modelling got mainstream.
I vote for retiring the no free lunch one next.
Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and/or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and/or decreased debt. What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week? At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the…
I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…
When I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time) That might be true, or it might not. It depends on how much efficiency goes up and how much buffer time people has, right? In many jobs people spene a non-trivial amount of time reading news, or in FB/Twitter/etc, so it def can be true that removing one hour of news+twitter yi…
I've seen no compelling evidence to suggest that working fewer hours will raise efficiency enough to result in the same amount of work being done in those fewer hours. It _can_ be true, but it seems unlikely enough (to my intuition) that I'll assume it would not be the case unless someone can put forth a convincing argument/evidence.
I really support 4x9, though, for a lot of reasons. It should become a work norm (and 36 hours set as the nominal workweek by government).
- I do think productivity will go up some, and the fall in output will be less than 10%. Split the difference, and call it 5%.
- Because there will be some fall in output, and because there are some professions where you need butts-in-seats for coverage... I think it will, by reducing the supply of labor, push up the equilibrium price and get more people into skilled work.
- It's a hedge against automation reducing demand for labor.
- I think we'll recognize a lot of ancillary benefits from reduction of commute times, etc.
- It's a massive difference in quality of life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked in a Wall St. firm in the 90's and wore suit and tie every day, even though my job was neither customer facing nor even in New York. I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt. Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (…
I don’t think it’s really about the clothes being uncomfortable, but just the idea of being forced to wear certain kinds of clothes
I work a four-day week (80% time, not imagining 4-10s) as a software engineer at a non-profit academic organization. For a paycut basically, I make 80% of what I think of as my "actual" salary. I have managed to do this at a succession of several jobs now. When I briefly tried to go back to 5 days, it was really hard. It seems insane to me now that anyone works 5 days a week. (And I do know plenty of people work even…
I’ve mentioned this before, but when moving my team (design agency that helps B2B SaaS)to a 4-day work week, productivity increased dramatically. Most businesses can move to a 4-day work week. If you’re an employer and you read this, just give it a try for a month and measure output. Your limiting beliefs will most likely become weak opinions.
We've been doing this (4day x 8hr) at Monograph (monograph.com) for much longer than I've been at the company. I like to think we're a bit of an outlier since we take Wednesdays off. While this seems strange, it means that I never work more than two days at a time, I have time in the middle of the week to recharge, and I don't totally lose context on problems I'm working on. We could argue that this means it's not a…