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

theguardian.com

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

#31

Post by Brigadirk »

jpfed wrote: post #24
Brigadirk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 addi…

I call this the "attractor basin hypothesis" of problem solving- your mental state is in one attractor basin and you need to be in a different one; a break gives you another chance to enter the right one. If true, it may be possible to get the same benefit as taking a break and returning to the work by doing something that jolts you out of your current attractor basin. Maybe that just means asking the right question…

Interesting idea. I'm currently learning German, which is rather similar to my native Dutch. Yet I'm learning most of it through English, because that's simply the language people tend to use for instruction material.

Every now and then when I'm doing English to German translation, I find myself puzzled and then have to remind myself "think about the Dutch word" only to then immediately understand/recall the German cognate. I'm sure someone talking to me in Dutch could have the same effect, and more broadly speaking, another 'attractor basin' may be activated by random chance, like the tired cliche of someone in a movie figuring out the 'case' as a result of their spouse or child mentioning something unrelated yet apparently analogous.

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

#33

Post by gallamine »

ryandvm wrote: post #17
wodenokoto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.

This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.

> they don't want to inconvenience their team

This is is why it's important for team members to explicitly encourage each other to take breaks and vacations. I've often told a coworker, "stop working! Take a long weekend!".

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

#34

Post by 52-6F-62 »

snarf21 wrote: post #5
uxhacker wrote: post #2

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 ?

Plus your brain will crunch things in the background. How many time as a developer have you "solved" a problem you've been stuck on for hours or days while showering or traveling to work. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.

For me that one happens very often when I'm falling asleep, in my dreams, after waking in the middle of the night, or in the early hours before I get up.

Many of my more annoying problems have been solved that way.

I knew an old Vietnamese refugee who was an electrical engineer working on maintaining and repairing portable stage lighting ballasts. He used to tell me how he would dream about the circuits and debug them then after spending a week of just staring dumbly at the physical thing—not accomplishing anything while at work, then come in the next day and finish inside of an hour.

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

#35

Post by Theodores »

uxhacker wrote: post #2

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 ?

Programming is one of the few truly creative endeavours in the capitalist world. Every job has a creative aspect to it - if you cut hair or work in a nail bar then there is definitely scope for creative flair. In fact you can be creative even if you have the most mundane job in the world, however, in the bigger scheme of things nobody is going to listen to your song, read your book or buy your paintings but they will use your code.

In answer to your question, DHH of Ruby on Rails fame used to write a lot about 37 Signals and Basecamp. They decided that the normal capitalist way of working was a load of rubbish and that they could get more out of people by making them work a lot less hours.

The way our world works is a system, the capitalist system, and with it there are many things that go unquestioned. Employment is seen as good whereas in a parallel future that never happened there was this idea that we would all be working a mere handful of hours with the machines doing all the heavy lifting. We live in an era of bullshit jobs to maintain the system with something like 87% of people actually hating their job. In the conventional sense Hemingway did not have a job. As a programmer with many interesting problems to solve creatively there is no need to be part of the 87% and to be more like a Hemingway. The DHH's of this world do not hire the 87%.

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

#36

Post by lowkeyokay »

combatentropy wrote: post #25

This is not the first article about how people get the same amount of work done, even more, in four days instead of five. But another thing they have in common is that they never ask the question, what about three? Or what about two? One? Surely at zero, productivity will not match the old standard of 40 hours a week. But it seems like the next logical question to me. If employees are just as productive at 32 hours a…

Exactly! I think of this every time this subject comes up and I always come to think of the scene from Something About Mary [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/rnso4nfdM9w

I also think the productivity gain or lack of loss comes from excitement and a feeling of responsibility for having the extra day off. It's mentioned in the article

>“The biggest concern from an employer point of view is ensuring that the full-time introduction of the policy doesn’t lead to complacency, with the risk that people’s productivity will slip back,” Barker said.

“To guard against this happening we’ve spent a lot of time making sure every person in every team has their own plan as to how they’re going to maintain and even improve their productivity.”

I think this makes sense but, as time passes and 4 days becomes the norm the feeling of excitement and responsibility will fall and output will follow. If everyone has a 4 day work week we will probably be as lazy as we are now in our 5 days.

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

#37

Post by naasking »

Brigadirk wrote: post #8
snarf21 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus your brain will crunch things in the background. How many time as a developer have you "solved" a problem you've been stuck on for hours or days while showering or traveling to work. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.

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 addi…

Yes, the brain doesn't crunch anything in the background, but your brain is a powerful association engine. Sometimes an outside stimulus will activate an association that will then associate with a solution you've been looking for. This is what happens in the shower: you allow your mind to wander, aka free-associate, and suddenly new possibilities unfold.

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

#38

Post by TicklishTiger »

The same might hold true for cutting down from 4 days to 3 days.

Everytime we humans try something new, we are excited and energized. Since the average office worker is only productive 3 hours per day, there always is a lot of room for increasing output for some time.

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

#39

Post by naasking »

sailingparrot wrote: post #9
gexla wrote: post #6

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 wee…

What science got us the 40h work week? It seems to me we just went from making people work as much as humanly possible to less and less (to 40 today in the US) as workers got more power through unions. I don't think science was much involved here.

40h was first most widely implemented by Henry Ford, because of equal productivity with fewer mistakes than the 10-16 hour days that were then the norm. So there is some empirical evidence that it's better than more hours, and some empirical evidence that it's better than fewer hours in some cases, and plenty showing no change with fewer hours. The fairest characterisation is that there was considerable back and forth between legislation, unions and capitalists seeking better workers.
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