> Would you also say it is non-sensical to claim more work gets done in 40 hours compared to 48? Or perhaps 56 hours?
Absolutely. Because all you have to do is not produce negative work beyond 40 hours. You can literally do nothing.
As I said, there is a balance to be struck and diminishing returns are a real thing. But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
> But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
You are assuming equal productivity (per working hour) in both scenarios. However, it just might be that the worker who just came off a 3-day weekend, and knows they only have to work for 4 days before their next break, will be more productive per hour than someone who just came off a 2-day weekend, and who knows they will need to work for five days before their next break.
Basically, you are assuming that people are robots and get a certain amount of work done per hour regardless of circumstances.
As metabagel said you seem to be basing this on every hour in a persons working week being equal which is obviously not how things really work out.
Do you not find yourself more mentally and physically fatigued at ~35 hours compared to ~25 into the work week?
When do you do your best work? At the start of the work week? Middle? End? Do you feel you do better work after you've had more down time to let your brain "decompress" or whatever you want to call it?
As far as I can tell we stumbled into the ~40 hour work week a long time ago due to physical exhaustion and that exhaustion led to more mistakes and productivity impact due to assembly lines being held up to correct those mistakes, etc.
This makes sense to me and seems like a pretty understandable and reasonable upper limit when it comes to physical jobs such as assembly lines and such.
Why do we just assume that ~40 hours transfers over to knowledge worker jobs? We all know how mentally fatiguing it is after several hours of debugging a tricky issue or trying to design a modern scalable architecture.
Whereas a mistake on an assembly line from a fatigued worker at 40+ hours into the week may put the assembly line out of action for a few hours it that is usually it for the negative impact.
Mistakes in a platform design or a silly bug can easily lead to constant productivity impact and huge costs down the road if that mistake makes it into production. We see it all the time with technical debt.
In your opinion how many hours per working week strikes your balance? How did you get to this number and do you think it is specific to you or more of a general figure that should be the standard?
Absolutely. Because all you have to do is not produce negative work beyond 40 hours. You can literally do nothing.
As I said, there is a balance to be struck and diminishing returns are a real thing. But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.