January 16th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Seth points to a great blog post about the changing nature of work, which reflects some of the thinking in this great Paul Graham essay and in The 4-Hour Work Week:
Created by two HR dynamos (I know, two words you rarely see in that close proximity), Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the program attacks head-on what most “alternative work arrangements” only tip-toe around: the fact that we’re literally laboring under a myth (namely, time put in + physical presence + elbow grease = RESULTS). Our assumptions about how work works, where we work, and when we work are relics of the industrial age. That’s not a new problem.
Graham articulates the same notion this way:
The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they’re neither working nor having fun.
That idea–that office hours are an admission that we can’t measure productivity–is a really powerful one, and it’s stuck with me over the past couple of years since initially reading the essay.
Cali and Jody have a blog about work and their approach which looks pretty compelling.
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May 25th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Via Digg or Delicious or somewhere, I discovered John Wesley’s speculation on not necessarily working eight hours a day:
After a couple hours of intense work, energy levels drop and workers downgrade to less demanding tasks like responding to email and tinkering with existing creations. Towards the end of the cycle, the mind is so cluttered and drained that workers resort to “work related activities” that appear productive but don’t contribute to the bottom line. The afternoon cycle is similar but the productivity peak isn’t as high. For different people the peaks and valleys will vary, but overall I’d estimate only 3-4 hours a day could be classified as highly productive.
This reminded me a Seth Godin post, as well as sections of one of my favourite Paul Graham essays.
I agree with John’s central thesis–that a consecutive, eight-hour workday is antiquated, and doesn’t map very well to knowlege workers’ activities. Frankly, I never work more than three or four hours at a stretch. Some days I work five hours total, and some days I work ten, but it’s almost never consecutively.
This schedule works for me because I have a short attention span, and I think it keeps my brain fresher. It also enables me (or at least enabled me, back in Canada) to go see matinees in the afternoon.
I could work for eight hours straight every day, but I think I’d be less productive. I remember when I worked as a technical writer, four o’clock would roll around and most days I’d feel pretty spent. Maybe I just have a low tolerance for work?
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