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Comment by hdjdnnsbsbs | Hacker News Reader

He stopped paying people who wanted to be paid 5 days for 4 days of work? How is this different from 99.9% of companies?

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It's how most companies think they work, but really very few companies actually track output. They track time. They're not measuring how much work you do, but instead how much time you're available for. The idea of a 4 day week is that people stop procrastinating, wasting time, daydreaming, sitting in meetings doing nothing, etc, and that saves a day a week. The employer gets the same amount of work for the money, and the employee doesn't have to pretend to work any more. Everyone wins.

I switched to 3 days weeks almost 2 years ago. (Mostly, I remain in a company chatroom on other days for people to ask me questions, and if there's a massive disaster I'll help if I'm available).

What I've found is that I spend the 4 days I'm not "working" organizing my thoughts and plans as a background task and this means most of my 3 days is spent executing. Whereas at my previous job I would spend several days a week on thinking and organizing and another couple on being blocked or bored.

Do you get 60% salary for 3 days/week? I’m thinking of doing the same thing.

I'm in a unique position there where I currently don't take a salary because I'm an investor in the company. But no, if I were drawing a salary I don't see any reason it would be 60%

As an investor in the company, you would seemingly be in a position to push leadership to allow what you do for other employees.

Have you, and how did it go over, if so?

How does switching to a 4-day week stop procrastination, time wasting, daydreaming, pointless meetings, etc.?

If that's so easy, why not stop doing those things and keep the 5-day week?

Try thinking about it with the limit not being the hours per week on average you're at work, but the total number of hours per week on average that most people are capable of being fully productive.

In other words: If people at work 40 hours a week on average, but only have the mental stamina for 32 hours of work a week on average, why stay in the office 40 hours on average? Those 8 extra hours will not account for extra productivity. Switching to 5 day weeks, in this model, won't increase productivity, nor 6 day weeks.

I've said "on average" a lot, and that's very deliberate. Most people I've ever worked with across 20 years in tech are largely unable to keep up a fully-mentally-engaged 40 hour work week every week, and even fewer are able to sustain longer average weeks than that for very long at all.

If only some companies make the switch, you could bring an argument from 'efficiency wages': ie by offering a perk to your workers that they can't (currently) get elsewhere, you make them work harder and avoid wasting time, because the outside options are worse so they want to impress to keep their cushy job secure.

I don't know whether that's true, but it's a plausible argument for why people would do less of the unproductive things you mentioned.

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