The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

Unfortunately all I can offer is another 2nd hand story I saw posted recently on some social media site or message board. It was a person complaining about how they were being passed up for promotion and not receiving praise from management like their more lazy coworkers despite working 12+ hours a day plus putting in time on the weekends. They were baffled by the fact that once they said 'screw it' and started only putting in the time expected of them that their work started being praised by management. The replies were pretty universal in the opinion that once the person stopped burning themselves out by working all the time they then started producing work that was better than merely acceptable.

> I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

You may be less productive after 5 hours of work, but even if your output 50% less in the next 5 hours, you'll still produce more by working more.

Employers don't care about productivity, they care about your total output. And it's not only employers, if you want to improve or pass a selective test or anything, you have to put the hours.

There may be some threshold where more work becomes detrimental, but it's definitely not 5 hours.

From a capitalist perspective all it means is "more money extracted from the same amount of labor".

I agree with you in general regarding personal productivity. However from the capitalist perspective, even if you aren't as "productive" in the later hours, it's still a production cost that they no longer have to hire another person for. Every person hired is not just an "hourly cost" but an extra capital incentive. It's why they love to fire people and make more people take on a heavier load. To us, on the bottom it feels like less productivity (and man do I feel you there!), but to them it's one less cost. And that's what "productivity" is in their eyes. As long as they can extract enough value without having to take on the extra expense, they will call it "productivity increase".

Another interesting book about some of this is a stochastic approach to economics (from a left-wing perspective) - The Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy: http://symbioid.com/pdf/Politics/laws%20of%20chaos%20probabi...

It really depends on the work. I used to run a large product-engineering org and I saw that slack-engagement correlated very closely with how well PMs were doing. That wasn't true for engineers.

Those 4-5 productive hours start for me after 6-8 hours riddled with Zoom calls, if not completely covered in them.

> I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

Off topic: I think that’s generally true in an 8 hr work day, but I find in a 10 hr work day I can actually be productive for up to 7 hrs. It’s a non linearity due to chunking.

When I worked 8 hrs, I spent mornings reading news, did a bit of work (1-2 hours), then it was lunch time, then surfed a bit to ease my way back to work, and worked a couple hours (another 1-2 hours) and then it was time to go home —- leaving at 4:45 because if I left any later I had to fight traffic. So you’re right - about 4 hours.

Nowadays, I work a 10 hr work day, and I can actually squeeze about 7 productive hrs in. I do a bit of work in the morning (2 hrs), then lunch and then some news reading, and then back to work (3 hrs) until 3pm when I go for a walk. When I get back at 4pm, I still have 2 more hours so I manage to get more work in because 2 hours is enough time to start something substantial. In an 8 hr work day, I’m already getting ready to go home so am not inclined to start anything new.

The chunking works so much better in a 10 hr work day. Humans are poor context switchers, and it’s hard to start back up. But a longer work day lets me account for the startup time, and gives me more productive chunks of time. Traffic is also better after 6pm. 10 hr work days are also more leisurely because there are two long breaks (lunch and afternoon)

Of course I’m not advocating for this - folks have kids and other hobbies, and you shouldn’t have to give your employer more hours than contracted. But I’m just saying if one has to extract more productive hours in a work day, this seems to work.

Or do as the Germans do. I worked out of Germany once and saw that everyone worked 3 hrs, then 30 minute lunch, and then 4 hours. Coffee breaks sprinkled in between, but everybody was almost robotic in their focus.

> I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

That depends very much on your work

My work really flourished during WFH. I was actually headhunted back to a place I'd worked before with the (verbal) promise they were now and always would be 'remote first'. During the last 2 years my productivity has exploded. I get up, make myself a coffee, and start working at 6am. Then after a shower and a walk in the forest, I work a full day of intense and focussed work. I've been happy, fit, fulfilled. I've often visited the office and love the social interaction. I've often worked weekends and evening because it's been fun, and I've felt loyalty to the company. Then 8 weeks ago the CEO suddenly announced RTO.

But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

We're living in a mad world.

This may be true for a lot of people, but it's not universal and is readily avoidable. A few tips that have worked for me:

* Don't install any company apps or log in to any company accounts on your phone.

* Set your working hours in your calendar and stick to them.

* Set your Slack status to automatically show you as away and snoozed outside your working hours.

* When you're done with work, shut down your laptop and walk away.

I've never received any complaints from sticking to this pattern. When I'm in my working hours I'm consistently reachable and I do my job, when I'm not you can't get hold of me if you try. This is how it was in the office, I don't see why the expectation should be different in WFH.

I do think that a key thing that makes this work well for me is that I'm consistently online during (and only during) my specified hours, rather than mixing and matching my schedule on a day to day basis. I'm not always reachable, but I'm predictably unreachable.

I don't think it's a paradox at all. I saved X hours a day by not commuting, and spent maybe .25X to .5X extra hours working (which actually felt pleasant, because I was sleeping in later, getting "home from work" sooner, and taking zero-friction breaks when needed by walking to my kitchen instead of driving to lunch, etc.)

The WFH shift also exposed the ones who have self discipline and the ones who are not. Nobody is asking you to go beyond the contracted hours. Inability to stop working is a fault of the person and not the mode of working. Agree that the managers fear kicked in so they start to pretend to do work for "visibility". However, that's a sign of a rotten culture and these people were most likely NOT productive in the first place and now they are being exposed therefore they have a need to over-compensate for it.

There are plenty of us who became extremely productive and can finally enjoy life rather than constantly play the spectacle in the office or sit in traffic for hours. And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.

I look at it as trading one evil for another (lesser one). I would say that I definitely work more hours now that I'm fully remote but at the same time I wouldn't want to back to the office even if it meant working less hours.

If anything remote work gave me flexibility. There might be some days I'm cranking code for close to 8 hours straight and others where I work maybe 3-4 hours because I have other things on my plate.

A lot of people I know who work from home feel the need to prove they are just as productive (or more) at home, so they can keep doing it and keep their job while being out of sight. They also take fewer breaks, because it feels like they aren’t working, or getting away with something. Those in the office take liberal breaks and just chat a lot, while still feeling like they are working, because they are at work.

In my case, I learned that grinding 12-16-hour days on a single skill (coding) isn’t beneficial to anyone. The quality drops, mistakes creep in, and the risk of burnout skyrockets. Clients typically only care about delivery. Did the thing get done, and does it work?

Meanwhile, some managers and even teammates seem to care more about the hours you clock than whether you crossed the finish line. I’ve never fully understood that mindset. Why glorify effort over results, especially in knowledge work?

The business got more benefit. Harder to argue it is for the employees.

maybe maybe not

> For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.

Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):

- Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)

- Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing).

- Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory).

I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.

I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break.

Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).

In practice many companies will de-facto make people sign the opt-out.

> without compensation.

Aren't the lower European salaries to be considered not compensating the worker?

Say you have a great boss without saying you have a great boss. :)

2-3 a week? I’m jealous. I’m just a programmer (or “IC senior software engineer” in corpo-speak) and I have 2-3 per day. Most days I only have about 3-4 hours after lunch to get any work done.

They understand that their findings don't apply to everyone in the world and it's implicitly understood that there will be exceptions. It can be discordant when you're the protagonist of your own reality and you see a headline that doesn't match your own experience but in the big picture it's very normal.

4h daily maximum meetings is still unreal. That's what I clock on my absolute worst days, most days it's just standup and an hour of backlog refinement