Go tell the boss:

let me work less and I’ll produce more

The five-day work week is an artificial and outmoded idea. A shorter working week can boost efficiency and an employee’s happiness

Oliver Burkeman

@oliverburkeman

Usually, I’m sceptical whenever some ultra-successful Silicon Valley firm gets held up as an example of how we’ll all be working in future. Sure, it’s possible that Google’s success is down to free yoga classes, napping pods and unlimited gourmet food consumed in “conversation areas designed to look like vintage subway cars”. But it’s surely equally likely that these are indulgences a rich company can afford, whether or not they help the bottom line – and they won’t be coming to call centres or council offices any time soon.

The latest trend might have more going for it, though: more tech businesses are experimenting with four-day weeks. As Ryan Carson, co-founder of the education startup Treehouse, put it: “You get all day Friday off, instead of pretending like you’re working when you’re not.”

The most important reason to work fewer days, of course, is that it’s good for families, friendship, hobbies and the human spirit. But the most interestingimplication of the current experiments, backed by some academic research, is that it appears to be good for productivity and work quality, too. Partly that’s because desk-based “knowledge work” relies on plenty of brain rest as well as exertion. Pushing people past their natural limits doesn’t just make them inefficient, it actively damages work on the following days. In other cases, employees aren’t working fewer hours at all, but simply rearranging them, from five days of eight hours to four days of 10. Yet even this provides a useful sense of constraint: knowing you’ve got to squeeze everything into fewer days seems to improve efficiency overall.

A similar philosophy of less-is-more informs Josh Davis’s recent book, Two Awesome Hours, which begins by rejecting the premise that it’s worth trying to squeeze value from every moment of every day. To get more out of machines or computers, it’s almost always best to run them for longer. But they can’t get tired; humans can. Instead, to the extent that your job allows it, Davis proposes fighting hard to ringfence one two-hour period of distraction-free work each day, at a time of peak energy – during which you’ll probably get more meaningful stuff done than in two whole days at half-power.

The big unspoken truth here is that we think about the work week in terms that might have outlived their usefulness. In the 1920s, the two-day weekend represented a major victory for workers’ rights, but that doesn’t mean five days of work is the right number. Even the seven-day week itself is a human creation: unlike the year, month, or day, it has no close connection to nature. (Revolutionary France had a 10-day week, and the Soviet Union tried a five-day “continuous work week”, with staggered days off, so production lines never needed to pause.) Besides, measuring work in hours, a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, makes little sense for knowledge work, save that it’s easy to quantify. If you can possibly get away with it, work less: you’ll find you get more work done.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com

Go tell the boss: let me work less and I’ll produce more | Life and style | The Guardian

We are still living in the Nineteenth Century:
The Origin of the 8 Hour Work Day and Why We Should Rethink It | Leonhard Widrich

And we are still working as we were in the Nineteenth Century, in that the office resembles the factory:
Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life - The Atlantic

The Swedes are beginning to think differently:
Sweden is shifting to a 6-hour work day - ScienceAlert
Sweden introduces six-hour work day | Europe | News | The Independent
The truth about Sweden's short working hours - BBC News

All this can be heard when Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times on Radio 4:

The Joy of 9 to 5

18/11/2015

The Joy of 9 to 5

Lucy Kellaway looks at the UK's long hours office culture and asks what happened to the 9 to 5?

In 1930 John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by 2030, we'd all be working a 15 hour week. And yet, almost half of us in the UK put in over a 40 hour week and most of those who work over 48 hours say they're unhappy.

In part one of a new series on modern work culture, Lucy Kellaway, management columnist for the Financial Times, discovers the origins of the eight hour working day.

She finds out what people are actually up to when they're in the office at all hours and argues much of the typical working day is taken up with time-wasting. For Lucy, our self image has become so intertwined with our job that we bolster it by putting the hours in - even if in doing so we're less happy and productive.

Speaking to business leaders, management researchers, and office workers, Lucy asks whether it's time to re-define our notion of 'hard work', and explores the idea that working less could actually be better for everyone.

Written and presented by Lucy Kellaway

BBC Radio 4 - The Joy of 9 to 5, 18/11/2015
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Futures Forum

Monday, 23 November 2015

In Praise of Idleness: working less could actually be better for everyone.

Go tell the boss:

let me work less and I’ll produce more

18/11/2015

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