I spend 40 hours at work. Doesn't mean I am productive for all those hours. My productivity may be 20-30 hrs/week between meetings.
Is 40 hours a week too much?
31–40 of 230 posts
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#32I never realized that Robert Owens' quote codifying eight hours of work is from 1817. Good golly. Our entire industrial mental model of work comes from at least two hundred years ago.
That wasn't an industrial mental model, it was a utopian socialist proposal that took a century and a lot of blood to win.
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#33It depends on the type of work. 40 hours of deep work isn't sustainable for too long without breaks and leads to mental health issues.
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#34If you want to find the optimal number look at how many hours startup founders put in. Incentives are 100% aligned in how they benefit from their work. They have no incentive to work less or more than the optimal number of hours.
There's nothing magical about startup founders, nor anything to suggest they're any better about figuring out the right number of hours to work than the rest of the world.
Nor are their incentives necessarily aligned properly - if you assume a startup founder is trying to start a business that will make them wealthy, then they may be operating under the assumption that more hours now == fewer later. So a founder may happily push themselves to pull 80 hour weeks thinking that a few years of that pace will pay off so they can coast later.
Most startups fail, and I'd imagine most founders ultimately wind up working for other people. So they'll never get back that additional time + they'll have to keep putting in hours on someone else's behalf.
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#354DWW - Four Day Work Week is the future. So many benefits for workers and the company! It's a win-win for many types of companies. Even if it's not a win for all companies, society would benefit greatly by mandating 4 days of 8 hours with no loss of pay as the standard.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/the...
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#36If I buckle down I can do 10 hours a day 3 days a week for a few months, then I burn out four a while. If I do 4 to 6 hours a day of low to medium intensity work (focused debugging with interspersed Google searches and occasional HN breaks) 4 days a week, I’m able to keep it up forever. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do 9-5x5 ever again, especially having to go into an office.
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#37Many companies think their employees are being productive for 40 hours a week, while it's actually somewhere between 10 and 20, with the rest being a big void. If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.
> If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell. I disagree. But I think what we qualify as "work" is more rigid than it needs to be. Is spending 5 minutes looking at HN every few hours work? Most people would say no, but it absolutely helps developers to know what's going on or new or what other devs outside their company are saying. If I spend 20 minutes reading about a language/app that my c…
Ok but can you write an OKR for reading HN?
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#38Back in the golden age of working from home, when internet service wasn't sufficient for for the barrage of pointless meetings, I was working no more than two hours per day. My coworkers and employers, who all worked in the office at the time, used to joke that I must be an entire team of people.
I still only get time for no more than two hours of actual work each day, but now that so many think they should expand to consume all the capabilities of the modern network by having endless meetings for no good reason, I'm much more exhausted when it comes to getting anything done during these two hours and productivity suffers as a result.
It is devastating how much less productive I've become spending more time working. I want to get things done.
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#39If you want to find the optimal number look at how many hours startup founders put in. Incentives are 100% aligned in how they benefit from their work. They have no incentive to work less or more than the optimal number of hours.
> Incentives are 100% aligned in how they benefit from their work.
Exactly. The reason the rank and file don't put that kind of time is they aren't given nearly as generous terms.
This isn't really a discussion of what people can do, people can do much more than they are in general, but instead the problem is how much of the fruits of the effort is willing to be shared.
Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?
#40No post body was provided.