I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.
The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work.
I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it.
If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.
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.
You can in many cases run multiple shifts if you need the same hours of output.
>its definitely not five hours
Why are you so sure?
Because I've seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions. Students studying for selective examinations (medicine, law, maths) routinely work more than 10 hours a day. I've also seen closely very successful academics who worked a lot.
And frankly, 5 hours a day isn't that much. It's perfectly fine is some people wants work life balance, but you will do more by working more, and if you're ambitious, it's hard to avoid putting the hours at some critical moments in your life.
Students are typically young, and make up for their lack of experience with the energy to work longer. Not necessarily more productively--I've certainly seen people with very counter-productive intense study habits that didn't seem to help them much.
Long, sustained hours are more of a problem; in the US we routinely overwork doctors to the point of risking deadly error--in part because the standards of long hours during residencies were developed by William Stewart Halsted, a cocaine addict who worked 100+ hours per week.
> Students studying for selective examinations (medicine, law, maths) routinely work more than 10 hours a day.
Yes, for a little bit. But one thing I've consistently noticed is they're operating on borrowed time. Once the exam passes and the semester is over, they go into full burn-out mode. Now they're not even doing their laundry, let alone studying medicine.
Human productivity is incredibly fickle. We can be pushed really, really far, but we have to pay an immense debt.
Studying for an exam is a short term, intense, focus with a defined end date. Once the exam is over it's over you get your reward, you rest, and then you're on to something new. It's not comparable to the decades long treadmill that is a career.
Not sure why medicine has such a cult of personality around it, people in that field are glorified flowchart operators.
Doctors can pull a 10 hour shift for the same reason a call center worker can do the same thing. They aren’t doing deep knowledge work. The people actually doing the knowledge work are at research universities setting up controlled trials, running simulations, and putting out papers.
My theory is that, with some exceptions, no one really does more than 4 hrs. of focused (the productive bit) work. The rest is clerical, administrative or unfocused.
I do however hope my surgeon stays focused for longer should their services be needed.
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.
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...
> 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 feel like the real thing here is that people are much more productive when given some flexibility to choose how to work and, often, when not to work. Personally I’m a big fan of a freelance-style model of work for this reason. You get paid for the task, so you can center your schedule around what works best for you.
> 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