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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: 0.426s | 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. wormius ◴[16 May 25 21:27 UTC] No.44009940[source]▶
From a capitalist perspective all it means is "more money extracted from the same amount of labor".

I agree with you in general regarding personal productivity. However from the capitalist perspective, even if you aren't as "productive" in the later hours, it's still a production cost that they no longer have to hire another person for. Every person hired is not just an "hourly cost" but an extra capital incentive. It's why they love to fire people and make more people take on a heavier load. To us, on the bottom it feels like less productivity (and man do I feel you there!), but to them it's one less cost. And that's what "productivity" is in their eyes. As long as they can extract enough value without having to take on the extra expense, they will call it "productivity increase".

Another interesting book about some of this is a stochastic approach to economics (from a left-wing perspective) - The Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy: http://symbioid.com/pdf/Politics/laws%20of%20chaos%20probabi...