It may surprise you to know the forty hour work week is totally arbitrary and came to us as a result of reducing the work week. The eight hour work day was introduced in 1914 by Henry Ford in response to the usual ten to sixteen hour work days factories were running at the time. Ford simultaneously doubled wages, making this a truly shocking change in the workplace. Then, in 1926 Ford reduced the work week from six days to five. These changes were regarded as reflecting the true American value of family, and Ford was lauded for his insistence that workers needed more than one day off to spend with their loved ones. Ford didn’t just do this in a charitable act; his workers became more productive over the long-term with these shorter working hours. Production increased, the New Deal in 1937 set the forty-hour-work week as the upper limit, and for the last century we’ve followed this model.
However, work has changed significantly since 1926. The Industrial Revolution has given way to the Information Age for the majority of Americans has passed. We increasingly sit at computers and share knowledge as work. The tasks we do have changed, the way we work has changed, and the structure of our work hours and days should also change to reflect this new reality.
Recently, Finland’s Prime Minister has spoken in favor of reducing their work week from five to four days, or limiting the work day itself to six hours instead of eight. Microsoft Japan changed to a four day work week, and saw productivity improved by 40%. Yes, they work one day less and complete 40% more work. How could fewer hours result in more productive days?
There are a couple reasons for this. The first is that attention and decision making are reserves which deplete over the course of the day. We’ve talked about this in our discussion of habits, and why an automatic system is so important. The fewer decisions you have to make, the more mental energy you have. Over the course of a work day, often eight hours, our ability to solve problems and concentrate diminishes. The afternoon slump is a well-documented phenomenon, and it’s not entirely due to sleep habits or slacking off. We simply were not made to sit in a room and concentrate for eight hours at a time. This contributes to the famous statistic that only three hours of work is actually done on a given day, on average. We only have so much capacity for focused and productive work in each twenty-four hour period.
The second reason a shorter work day or week works has to do with a inclination called Parkinson’s law. First published in a 1955 article in The Economist by a British government clerk, the law gives name to the observation that work expands or contracts to fill the amount of time we give it.
The story goes along the lines that this clerk observed within his government office, regardless of the number of people assigned to a project, the project still took the same number of months to complete as it had when only one person was assigned to it. He recounts the ballooning of the office from a single staffer to a team of seven, with the original staffer still completing the majority of the work. Instead of more hours and more people accomplishing more work, they actually got less done in an exponential amount of time.
Not much has changed today; we occupy ourselves with busywork, or just avoid the important project until it becomes critical. Most of us take as much time as we are given with an assignment. In school, when you were assigned a paper three weeks out, did you work on it a bit at a time over the three weeks? Or would you put it aside until the week it was due, then rush to complete it? When you have a report due in two weeks, do you get started right away or wait until it must be done? Most people do the latter. We can use this tendency to our advantage.
The answer is to simply give ourselves less time to finish the project.
If you need to ship a product by Thursday, make your deadline Monday. Or if you know you take a sabbatical every seventh week, finish seven weeks’ of work in six weeks. Things take the amount of time we give them. Give yourself less time on a task, and you’ll get it done.
Scheduling time to be productive results in more creativity and production by crowding out procrastination and distractions. Research shows that a daily schedule allows individuals to be more, not less, creative. When you place restrictions on your time, you remove the downtime for poking around the internet. This “back up against the wall” sensation of panic can be very helpful in completing a task or project. That energy goes into your work, and brings out creative ideas.
Sabbaticals work because you complete the same amount – or more – of work, in less time, with time built in to recover. The principle behind the sabbatical is focusing entirely on work when it’s time to work, and being completely free from obligation when it’s time to rest. Work, recover, work, recover; like an athlete running intervals, fully invested at every moment. This is what enables four day work weeks, six hour work days, or seventh week sabbaticals to work. By eliminating some of the dead time wasted, workers are more focused and end up completing more work than before.
Work of the future will be composed of shorter but massively productive hours, with employees focused on their work for a period of time, then headed back out into the world to live life. This future is already happening. There is no better way to embrace this reality than by scheduling your own time to recover over a weekend or week.
