Four Hour Work Week for IT Workers
I finished reading Tim Ferriss’s exceptional book 4 Hour Work Week few weeks back. Tim says that there is a shift in the way we put in ‘hours’ at work. 40 hour work week is outdated in this innovation economy. The book is filled with lots of practical tips on ways to reduce one’s work hours without reducing productivity. This book made me think, Can IT workers work less than 40 hrs a week and be equally or more productive that what they are today?
First of all, why do we work 40 hours a week? Who came up with that number?
According to Tim Ferriss, it’s an arbitrary number we have collectively agreed to ‘work’ (I am sure he is half kidding when he says that). But seriously, this is how we have come up with 40 hour work week. Sunday has been a day off from work since biblical times because of Sabbath (In some countries its Saturday, anyway its day for spirituality). In late 1920s Henry Ford was having employee retention problem and hence decided to give Saturday off to his workers (What a perk!). It was Henry Ford who also decided on the 8 hour Work Week. There are 24 hours in a day and Ford could have 3 shifts of 8 hour to maximize his capital utilization (for more read article in Wikipedia and blog by Hispanic Pundit). There you have it: 8 hours ‘times’ 5 days ‘equals’ 40 hour work week.
In a semi-skilled assembly line work environment from where 40 hour work week has emerged, productivity is highly correlated to number of hours worked. If 1 worker produces 30 widgets in 1 hour, it’s fair to conclude that in 2 hours that same worker will produce approximately 60 widgets.
But the important question is: Does this reasoning hold true for an IT worker in the knowledge economy? We all know that the answer is NO. IT Worker’s time is not strongly correlated with time. Granted more time IT programmers spends more lines of code he/she writes. But the inspirations and ideas to program come in bursts; you can spend 3 hours OR 5 minutes to come up with the same solution. This is not typical only to IT workers but to all knowledge workers. Measuring success by the number of hours spent for any creative/innovative work is an antiquated technique that is leftover of industrial era.
It’s not a simple transition but organizations need to start measuring success by deliverables instead of time spent. If the incentives are structured around this philosophy, I will not be surprised if the IT worker will have a 4 hour work week. OK, that’s a stretch but I am very confident that IT worker may spend far less time than what they do today. Not only that, thanks to technology, location they will be working from will be far more exotic than the current cubicle!
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To go the extra mile, I think we should even stop working so that productivity wouldn’t be an issue anymore
I actually disagree with your theory: I see work as blessing.
By the way, good organizations don’t account working hours but results. I work at Microsoft and no matter if I work from home or the Carribeans as long as I meet my commitments: some people arrive at 7am and leave early, some arrive at 10:30am and leave early, most people work normal hours + 1 day / week from home. I believe most great organizations don’t give a damn about working hours: what matters most is to get the job done.
Last thing, about commuting: the average commuting time worldwide is 40 minutes. 40 minutes x 2= 1 hour 20 minutes per day. Multiply by 5 or 6 (Asia) and you get around 7 hours per worker lost every week. Hence my call: teleworking is a real issue and enhances workers productivity. Imagine that people worked more instead of waisting time in public transportation and traffic! That would urge a 15% increase in productivity at no cost.
I don’t think Raj was arguing against work as a principle. Rather against the ‘40 hour’ principle, vs. what it takes to be productive. So in my view there’s no disagreement here.
That said, I think Ferriss operates on a number of assumptions, which should be addressed:
- no administrative overhead: outsourcing activities requires management and trust, as, incidentally, does teleworking from home. How can you be sure that your personal assistant is doing his/her job correctly, not to mention what jobs he/she should be doing? I’m sure Ferriss addresses this in some way in the book, but everybody has a different system and lifestyle and there will certainly be a warming-up period before all works optimally, which comes at a cost.
- from what I read on Ferris’s website, outsourcing also depends on cheap labour . When everyone outsources to India, I expect costs to go up. It’s a simple issue of supply/demand.
- is IT always going to be fairyland material? I understand the whole creativity-burst theory very well, I experience it everyday. But I believe that as certain knowledge shifts from the tacit to the explicit, that there are also ways to measure output, i.e. in lines of code, etc. As IT becomes more mature, so should methods of measuring it, and I’m sure it’s already happening in many companies.
- are all IT-people/knowledge-workers equal? Ignoring for a second that Ferriss appears to have become successful before he found his system, does that mean that unsuccessful people can implement the same system as easily? Not only are, in my view, learning costs ignored, but not everyone operates equally. Some knowledge-work, e.g. research, will depend on widget-output, as does IT-work, e.g. filling code vs. design.
- what are the consequences on society? I love how guru’s promote the individualistic lifestyle, but what are the effects of billions of people working only 4 hours/week, really? First of all, there is still widget-work to be done and who will do it? Prominent forecasters like Paul Saffo are predicting that the era for robots is still decades away, perhaps 30-50 years. I already mentioned the effects of shifting outsourcing abroad in the long-term.
That and many more are questions that I have about Ferriss’s work.
[...] 40 hour work week questioned Some interesting information on the origins of 40 hour work weeks and insights on why or we not should we adher to it are at Four Hour Work Week for IT Workers « Tech IT Easy [...]
This seems like an interesting 2-min view of what the workplace for IT-worker might look like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmfXksLir1g
Great post, I must read this book. I saw an interesting post on it at http://www.bizplusblog.com. Kevin Price says the practical application of the concept seems to be difficult. He has a video with Ferris on there as well. Great stuff! Thanks.
[...] Some interesting information on the origins of 40 hour work weeks and insights on why or we not should we adher to it are at Four Hour Work Week for IT Workers « Tech IT Easy [...]
You make some interesting claims. If what you say is true then a book like Ferris’s should focus not only on decreasing workload, but also on finding your creative sweet spot.
Alternatively, I do think generally decreasing your e-mail diet is a great time saving tip.
I agree with you in a different way. Once I have negotiated with the management to work 4 days 8 to 5; Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. I have said to them that I want Wednesday free to relax and keep my creativity up. But later the HR have said to them that it was a problem to them to calculate my salery if I came only 4 days to work and that’s it.