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 Tim says that there is a shift in the way we put in ‘hours’ at work. 40 hour work week is outdated in this innovation economy.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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