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The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

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113 points robtherobber | 1 comments | 16 May 25 09:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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PaulRobinson ◴[16 May 25 14:41 UTC] No.44006083[source]▶
I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work.

I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it.

If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.

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1. isk517 ◴[16 May 25 16:37 UTC] No.44007394[source]▶
Unfortunately all I can offer is another 2nd hand story I saw posted recently on some social media site or message board. It was a person complaining about how they were being passed up for promotion and not receiving praise from management like their more lazy coworkers despite working 12+ hours a day plus putting in time on the weekends. They were baffled by the fact that once they said 'screw it' and started only putting in the time expected of them that their work started being praised by management. The replies were pretty universal in the opinion that once the person stopped burning themselves out by working all the time they then started producing work that was better than merely acceptable.