I personally consider this to be a fascinating subject. I chose the number 4 because of the 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferriss, a book that talks about increasing productivity overall and the number of things that it makes possible. He has said over and over of course that he does not mean we should be working only 4 hours per week but for the sake of argument, do you think working 4 hours per day could work well in certain environments? Of course, if you’re working at McDonald’s, it might make little sense because the company will likely not want to have 6 full sets of employees to fill their 24 hour-day.
For Creative/Admin Work?
How many hours in a day are most able to work at or near their top levels of productivity. I personally know that my peak is early in the morning and while it’s not a straight down line from there, the productivity does decrease during the day. Would all of us be able and motivated to be much more productive and possibly get as much done (or close to it) by working just half of the hours? It’s certainly an interesting proposition and I love the fact that some places are giving this a try.
The city of Gothenburg in Sweden will be trying for an extra year to have a control group working 30 hours per week instead of the standard 40 in order to see the effects on productivity, happiness, morale, etc. You can read more about the experiment here.
The “Other” Extreme
Of course, there are many other jobs that live by the other extreme. Think of investment banking, where workers are basically expected to “live” at the office. Working day& night, weeks and weekends, etc. Sometimes there really is that much to do but in many other times, it’s much more about “perception” which is quite sad.
