> you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important.
...or because we're social creatures and tend to stick to well-established norms, for all sort of reasons (mostly good, not always). 40-hour weeks are arguably a relatively recent norm at that.
Whatever socially established norm we come up with as the number of hours one is typically expected to work in a full-time job, it's not likely to be the maximally-productive number for every worker, and those like Carmack almost certainly can and do achieve more working much longer hours. But there does seem to be good evidence that for larger samples of workers, reducing from a 40-hour week to 32 or similar doesn't have much of a measurable impact on output (which implies productivity per hour worked has actually gone up considerably).
And, arguably more importantly, workers that have taken part in such programs generally report improvements in their health, sense of self-worth, "happiness" etc. On that basis I'm definitely in favour of revisiting the expectation that a full-time job is ~40 hours a week, and understanding what can be done to help corporations and employees transition to fewer hours.
I actually think the harder problem is: should we extend the current concept of a weekend to be 3 days, or should we accept that the "3rd" rest day each week is different for everyone. I'm generally in the latter camp (*), for various reasons, but I could persuaded that a 3-day weekend, where a significant % of all workers across all industries (including, e.g. schools) all take the same 3 days off each week, has greater benefits.
* strictly speaking I'm in the camp of moving to a 4.5 day week, whereby every worker is expected to negotiate a half-day they won't be available each week with their employer.
...or because we're social creatures and tend to stick to well-established norms, for all sort of reasons (mostly good, not always). 40-hour weeks are arguably a relatively recent norm at that.
Whatever socially established norm we come up with as the number of hours one is typically expected to work in a full-time job, it's not likely to be the maximally-productive number for every worker, and those like Carmack almost certainly can and do achieve more working much longer hours. But there does seem to be good evidence that for larger samples of workers, reducing from a 40-hour week to 32 or similar doesn't have much of a measurable impact on output (which implies productivity per hour worked has actually gone up considerably). And, arguably more importantly, workers that have taken part in such programs generally report improvements in their health, sense of self-worth, "happiness" etc. On that basis I'm definitely in favour of revisiting the expectation that a full-time job is ~40 hours a week, and understanding what can be done to help corporations and employees transition to fewer hours.
I actually think the harder problem is: should we extend the current concept of a weekend to be 3 days, or should we accept that the "3rd" rest day each week is different for everyone. I'm generally in the latter camp (*), for various reasons, but I could persuaded that a 3-day weekend, where a significant % of all workers across all industries (including, e.g. schools) all take the same 3 days off each week, has greater benefits.
* strictly speaking I'm in the camp of moving to a 4.5 day week, whereby every worker is expected to negotiate a half-day they won't be available each week with their employer.