Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.
Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that countries demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities.
A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies.
On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.
I work remotely at companies until they fire me for doing the minimum. I still get paid for the two to three weeks, so I couldn't care less because the money goes towards my hobbies.
What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.
The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.
If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.
Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
It’s not a wide range: They don’t repudiate each other.
I’d trust climate science if climate scientists stood and picketed and denounced social sciences as “not science”, due to non respected scientific protocol. I mean it’s easy: If you can publish 28 chapters of Mein Kampf in social science papers after changing “___” for “white men”, and get it peer reviewed and published, then it’s not science.
But no. Climate scientists, social scientists, and doctors who claimed masks “didn’t protect against Covid19” (literal words of the international organization of all doctors united), they all stand together to impose “science” by …arresting opponents.
I may trust some studies. Especially when they’re directed as revenue for the scientist. “Scientist from [institute] distinguishes electron from another in order to sell a new metal” = No bias = Science. “Scientists want Europeans to consume less energy because it pollutes” = probably paid by China.
You lost me. As in, I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.
Are you saying you don’t trust climate science but you would trust them if they declared some other branch of science which has nothing to do with them as being unscientific? What does one thing have to do with the other?
Are you also saying medicine is not a science because doctors got it wrong about masks? Science isn’t about always being right, but about observation and experimentation to try to arrive at the truth and a deeper understanding. Can you name a single branch of science which has never got anything wrong ever?
Your last paragraph is particularly confusing. Is your entire post sarcastic? And if so, which group exactly are you criticising?
Working based on time i.e. 5 days a week is already problematic. We all see the pay by the hour workers like pool cleaners, vendor machine stocking people etc spending lots of time dragging out their work as they get paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense from their perspective and yes not everyone drags the work.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
Australia also has a 60 year productivity low and a government that is boosting taxes on capital gains on shares/business to basically a worldwide high. So take our experiments with a grain of salt!
So you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽
That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!
I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...
Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
Only if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.
Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.
Because if we did we’d have universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing, and every single one of those things makes it harder for abusive jobs to control their employees.
> universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing
My my, seems like we gots ourselves a socialist o’er here. We don’t take kindly to your kind ’round these parts. What’s yer idea? Improve folks lives? Treat others with respect and dignity and give e’ryone meaning? Are ya cuckoo in tha head? Git him, boys.
Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
Think of it like a sprint versus a marathon. If you run at full speed you can get farther than someone keeping a steady pace in the same amount of time, but you’re going to tire yourself out and become slower. You’ll lose in the long run despite looking very “productive” at the start.
Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse?
New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going.
Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.
In what metric do they get ahead? I think this is the key. What many visualise as getting ahead primarily seems to be fund raising or having a higher monetary value. Especially in startups where the largest mouth, the biggest blagger, or the quickest to mention a buzz word gets you more funding. Being closer to your end goal, with an adoptable product that improves society, is really the only metric that matters.
How does that differentiate from a boss or a company philosophy stating a 5 or 6 day week is better? With no reliable metric on better, other than ancedotal evidence. It's not as if it's repeatable experimentation.
> What success looks like differs by industry, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all measurement would have made the findings less applicable to the real world [...] Burnout emerged as a major theme in the findings.
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.
Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.
That would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.
Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.
The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that countries demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities.
A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
Do workers really care about productivity? As long as I get paid that's what matters.
I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies.
On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.
I work remotely at companies until they fire me for doing the minimum. I still get paid for the two to three weeks, so I couldn't care less because the money goes towards my hobbies.
Papers like this should be called opinion surveys.
Calling it a study is a disservice to science. As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.
The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.
If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.
You can find the study here if you wish to critique its methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
It’s not a wide range: They don’t repudiate each other.
I’d trust climate science if climate scientists stood and picketed and denounced social sciences as “not science”, due to non respected scientific protocol. I mean it’s easy: If you can publish 28 chapters of Mein Kampf in social science papers after changing “___” for “white men”, and get it peer reviewed and published, then it’s not science.
But no. Climate scientists, social scientists, and doctors who claimed masks “didn’t protect against Covid19” (literal words of the international organization of all doctors united), they all stand together to impose “science” by …arresting opponents.
I may trust some studies. Especially when they’re directed as revenue for the scientist. “Scientist from [institute] distinguishes electron from another in order to sell a new metal” = No bias = Science. “Scientists want Europeans to consume less energy because it pollutes” = probably paid by China.
You lost me. As in, I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.
Are you saying you don’t trust climate science but you would trust them if they declared some other branch of science which has nothing to do with them as being unscientific? What does one thing have to do with the other?
Are you also saying medicine is not a science because doctors got it wrong about masks? Science isn’t about always being right, but about observation and experimentation to try to arrive at the truth and a deeper understanding. Can you name a single branch of science which has never got anything wrong ever?
Your last paragraph is particularly confusing. Is your entire post sarcastic? And if so, which group exactly are you criticising?
Working based on time i.e. 5 days a week is already problematic. We all see the pay by the hour workers like pool cleaners, vendor machine stocking people etc spending lots of time dragging out their work as they get paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense from their perspective and yes not everyone drags the work.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
Australia also has a 60 year productivity low and a government that is boosting taxes on capital gains on shares/business to basically a worldwide high. So take our experiments with a grain of salt!
Tax changes that have been overdue for twenty-odd years to address house prices and attempt to level the playing field between labour and capital.
Pity they didn't also change the gas tax.
So you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽
That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!
As an Australian, I am not sure that most work done in this country adds to productivity
But how will a consulting company bill for the 20%?
You increase prices by 20%
Billable hour rates would need to increase by 25%.
I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...
It's Hawthorne effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
Only if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.
USA: So what I hear, is we need to work 6 days per week + AI? Correct?
Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.
Won’t we face an economic decline if we continue reducing the work week even further?
Basically every study shows a four day week works best. The issue is why we never go with what the study shows.
Because if we did we’d have universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing, and every single one of those things makes it harder for abusive jobs to control their employees.
Progress is a functioning of effort, time, and luck. It’s a marathon. Keep grinding. Success is proven possible.
> universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing
My my, seems like we gots ourselves a socialist o’er here. We don’t take kindly to your kind ’round these parts. What’s yer idea? Improve folks lives? Treat others with respect and dignity and give e’ryone meaning? Are ya cuckoo in tha head? Git him, boys.
Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
Think of it like a sprint versus a marathon. If you run at full speed you can get farther than someone keeping a steady pace in the same amount of time, but you’re going to tire yourself out and become slower. You’ll lose in the long run despite looking very “productive” at the start.
Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse?
New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going.
Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.
In what metric do they get ahead? I think this is the key. What many visualise as getting ahead primarily seems to be fund raising or having a higher monetary value. Especially in startups where the largest mouth, the biggest blagger, or the quickest to mention a buzz word gets you more funding. Being closer to your end goal, with an adoptable product that improves society, is really the only metric that matters.
"study"... The replication crises in science has shown that most studies are total bs. So we probably don't want to go with them.
How does that differentiate from a boss or a company philosophy stating a 5 or 6 day week is better? With no reliable metric on better, other than ancedotal evidence. It's not as if it's repeatable experimentation.
By inductive logic, a zero day week works best.
> What success looks like differs by industry, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all measurement would have made the findings less applicable to the real world [...] Burnout emerged as a major theme in the findings.
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.
>scienceaim
>!!
Junk science slop blog. Nice.
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