It often feels like there are only 3 productive hours in typical American white collar work day.
What if we just cut out the rest?
Edit: Some great responses. So responses must have also been said about the 5 day and 40 hour work weeks.
To be honest, while I feel while this is true for many jobs, we should also keep the people whose jobs where this isn’t possible in mind.
Then you miss out the unmentioned part of the work - idle thinking. Not only the time spent typing something on the keyboard is work. All the time spent thinking how to solve a problem is also work.
This is true. I tend to do my best thinking away from work, and not part of my current work time.
“I got no work done at all today, it was all back to back meetings!”.
My wife, regularly.
All the time spent thinking how to solve a problem is also work.
try telling that to every manager i’ve ever had.
Walking to get a coffee is when I’ve solved some of the most complex problems in my head. Walking to get a coffee was also one of the few times I’d leave my desk. What even was lunch…
That’s not how my employer measures productivity. They use keystrokes per minute. Gotta get good at idle typing.
Or the fact that most jobs are not behind desks or keyboard…
Office drones forget that society requires different types of work done to function… They ways got that bias lol it is cross cultural too
It sounds great! The real trick would be finding any company willing to pay the same 40 hours of wages every week for 15 hours of work. There’s not much point to a 3 hour work day if you have work 3 different jobs
There’s not much point to a 3 hour work day if you have work 3 different jobs
Not that I’m advocating for it, but… Working 3 jobs @ 15 hours a week each would mean you’d be a lot more resilient against layoffs and would be able to quit any of those jobs at the drop of a hat if things got shitty (knowing you’d only be losing 1/3 of your income, rather than 100% of it). It would represent a solid shift of power into the hands of the workers.
i’ve been down that road before. three part time jobs means no benefits and no employer-sponsored health coverage. it’s also extremely difficult to schedule multiple part time jobs so they don’t conflict with each other while still giving you something resembling ‘weekend’ off.
True, but the whole point of having a shorter work week would be to have more free time wouldn’t three jobs kind of defeat the whole purpose? That would just mean I wake up dreading three jobs instead of one…
And all the wasted time getting from one job to the next. Even if the travel is all virtual you still have to get setup/organised, put one thing down and pick another up.
And what happens if job 2 doesn’t start for like 2 hours after job 1 and job 3 doesn’t start until 3 hours after job 2? That’s now a 14 hour day where your either working or getting ready to work with just enough “down time” to not really get too much accomplished… AND you’re going to get taxed on each paycheck. That sounds awful
Some meetings are BS while others are legitimately helpful - I think a 3 hr day would make those good meetings hard to squeeze in.
You’d get paid a lot less
Under Capitalism, sure.
Yeah under communism you wouldn’t get paid
Depends on the stage.
3 hours a day wouldn’t be that useful. You still have to “be” somewhere 5 days a week.
What is useful; I did this for a few years; 3 x 8hr days. Mon - Wed, normal work hours, and a 4 day weekend. No need for “public holidays” even paid time off becomes less relevant, when you can switch one week to Wed - Fri. Leaving Thur - Tue as a “normal” way to take time off, giving a 6 day weekend possible every second week.
Everyone cant have all the same days off, there is already divide between service and shift workers and everyone else, a longer weekend would make it worse. The time off has to be spread around ant Holidays do need to exirt to make a real exception.
Agreed, but crossing over on Wed would work out for changes.
It kinda sucks that there’s a prime number of days in a week.
For many office workers, it would be about the same.
As a non-white-collar worker, I always find conversations like this very alienating. The idea of being on the clock while not working is bizarre to me.
That’s why a lot of roles like this are salaried. My productivity can’t be measured by how fast I turn a crank.
Yeah at that point in the career, the comp is for being available during business hours and moving work in professional, reliable and competent manner. Nobody is checking unless somebody is complaining.
People could add tasks but there is no pay incentive so why bother. That’s just give out labour for free lol
Dont be a bootlicker. Get paid!
Why would you be on the clock? You work 3 hours and that pays enough money.
The only problem that I would have with the 3-hour work day is that sometimes they’re generally is more work to do. Average is probably only about 3 hours but occasionally you need more.
Although quite a lot of time could be saved by not having meetings about meetings about when you’re going to have a meeting to book the meeting. But let’s be reasonable that’s not happening.
Ok. Let’s say we have 4 hour workdays, 4 day work weeks. Not just for white collar.
A business would require to hire 2 more people to cover a 24h continuous prosuction line (3 8h shifts to 5 4h shifts).
there would be more employment and higher productivity. More happiness I suspect.
I’d take it.
6 x 4 = 24
you are entirely correct., and the first person to spot my simple math mistake.
thanks for correcting 😊
A lot has been said about that when talking about universal basic income. The idea is that people could work half shifts and make the rest up under UBI
I’m not sure I could condense my work like that. If I have 3 hours of work I want at least 4 hours to do it in. And if you decide you can condense it, employers will simply double everyone’s workload, and we are not computers. Maybe 3 hours of work is all anyone can do in a day, and some of us can do it in 3:15 but most of us like to spread it over 8. Plus there are insights that only come in non-active time, again, we aren’t machines.
I think logistics job titles would be numerous and intense.
Like, not office work, but with my auto body business in the past. I can absolutely crush it in a day when all the pieces come together. While I may only be working an average of 3 hours a day, my time is spent moving pieces around. I might be able to knock out $2500 in a day, but this is a stupid number. It doesn’t account for my 75% overhead, or how it took all week to setup all that work that happened to align with one day of intense effort. Never trust anyone saying what they can make in a day, week, or month with their business. What they did on their best day has no bearing on their average.
I get the skeptical impression that these shortened hours figures neglect the setup and true nature of most jobs. Like some grad student went to an office for a week, took notes, and extrapolated meaning that lacks perspective, but I could be wrong.
When painting, I’m much more effective in a shorter amount of time but it wasn’t a choice.
Personally, long term, I think we are beginning to recognise that the barbarism behind allowing a complex social hierarchy to develop based on a fundamental human need for survival. There are other forms of complex hierarchical display that do not kill people and oppress billions. Some examples are awards based accolades in academia and performing arts, another is merit from physical performance in events and Olympics. This will ultimately happen in the distant future. A wealth based social hierarchy is unethical barbarism if you step outside of cultural norms and objectively assess the ethics. The hard part is always convincing the winners to step aside and play a new game with new rules.
Yeah corpo drone being able to execute their jOB in 3 hours likely has advanced degree and/or skills that took decade or decades to acquire along with “proper” socio economic background etc pointing being it happens but this ain’t prevalent. Most work closer to fulltime and some entry level just slaving prolly providing free OT due to pressure.
A regular person is not cruising 3 hour into such a job without some serious life choices and executing on them.
You raised a number of great points. I won’t address all of them.
Setup and organizing parts/resources would need attention. Deliveries, messages, and decisions would all need adjustments. I expect that while one may work 3 hours a day, they may not be the same 3 hours every day, or even continuous.
For many jobs, it won’t change much. My advisor comes to the university 3 days a week, and stays for 4 ish hours. But he’s a very good researcher with high research output. (I do math, this might not be possible for lab based researchers.)
Usually these jobs can’t be measured in hours you spend in your workplace. You’re kind of always working since you can’t really turn your brain off while working on an interesting problem, but what others see is that you’re sipping coffee with your laptop open.
I thoroughly believe that 4 hours is the limit for most people (on most days) on how long they can focus deeply on a problem. That was at least my experience as a mathematics grad student. In math this is more evident because most of high level math requires this deep level of understanding.
Of course one thinks about these problems while doing other things (obsession is a common consequence of prolonged deep thinking), which is why visits to the restroom, walks outside and so on are famous to prove very productive.
Either way, math is also social (most problem solving benefits from discussion) and it is in my opinion much more productive to set some time off for talking about / working on stuff with others than grinding through longer. This is still work and incidentally also good time and resource management.
Of course. My friends who are doing research on Physics or Biology tell me that I always seem to be free. The truth is, I’m always kind of working. It’s very hard to shut off your brain when you’re tackling with some intriguing problem. I’ve found myself think about work while out with the boys for drinks lol.
Sadly we are so obsessed with squeezing “productivity” en masse out of the workforce. We rarely justify technology or process enhancements that result in fewer hours worked. We generally optimize how much we get out of each hour worked. I have always had an issue with this.
Take AI for example, we are seeing some tasks automated or accelerated by AI powered tools. However, I have not heard any employers state how their employees will be able to get their work done in fewer hours. I only ever hear how people will get more done during their work hours.
The system in this way is very much broken. In an ideal world, you’d get paid for the outcome and not the hours worked, but that is not a working relationship many outside of entrepreneurs and consultants have.
I think big part of that is that the person is available to deliver service at anytime during the 8 hour work day and you have to be good at it. That’s why management allows this. They ain’t giving up 5 houra of that so they have to hire another "overpriced cost center* to fill the slot lol
Overworking certain people ends up costing more if their error rates cuts in operations.
