Hacker News Reader

Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

What are the arguments against it?

There are certain jobs that cannot be done in 15 hours a week. Especially jobs where availability is of primary importance and/or bad communication is catastrophic.

I'm thinking of certain types of R&D, medicine, and certain kinds of leadership roles.

I would imagine as time goes on and with increasing advances in automation and AI, even those jobs would require less hours, though probably not doable in 3 hour workdays. More likely, those jobs would require "checking in" 10 or 15 minutes every hour around the clock.

Personally, I worry about overal state productivity and its geopolitical ramifications. Productivity per capita would seem a big determinant in the power a nation has, though this is purely speculation on my part. :)

Productivity waxes and wanes. I've experienced hour-long periods in which I accomplished as much as a typical day or week. I suspect a shorter work week would increase the frequency of these occurrences. The perceived relationship between productivity and time needs to die. The true relation is between productivity and "energy." An internal store of productive capacity. The focus on time leads to the continual (and largely wasteful) depletion of energy and eventually to burnout. This state is far more common than you might think. It's rare that an individual experiences the alternative and realizes something is wrong. Most people, rather than complaining or quitting, simply work hard enough not to be fired.

That might be true with your line of work, but certainly doesn't hold for a plumber, teacher or an accountant. You just don't get the week worth of teaching students in an one hour burst. Most of the jobs out there have well defined expected workloads.

I disagree about teaching. Public school teachers are overworked, tired and do a crummy job. I'd rather have 7 hours of Khan Academy videos and 1 hour of solid instruction. You're right about anything involving manual labor. But even then the notion of an energy tank absolutely applies.

There's an upper bound to how efficiently say elementary school kids can learn unsupervised, and if you discard the outliers it's not very impressive. School teachers are not just doing busywork sent down by bureaucrats; much of it is still teaching in the class, checking student's progress, grading the homework and so on.

As to the working in bursts I used to think of it as a manifestation of creativity and talent in heroic stunts. Years later I see it differently: if you do one hour of actual work in a week, you are procrastinating/slacking for the other 39 hours. Even, predictable pace of work is a hallmark of professionalism. At least now I try hard to keep my progress steady and predictable.

> Even, predictable pace of work is a hallmark of professionalism.

You are making an insestuous appeal to tradition while we discuss the merits of exactly that tradition.

Guess you can view it that way, although I meant that "it's a net positive". Sure makes estimation easier, and gives you higher overall productivity. Consider that if your normal, sustained rate hour only 1/20th as productive as the epic bursts one, you still end up being twice as productive throughout the 40 hour work week.

No point doing marathon as a series of sprints.

Is there any evidence that longer hours improve productivity (compared to multiple people working shorter hours)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com