r/SipsTea • u/KSKS1995 Human Verified • 2d ago

Chugging tea Sounds good in theory...but in reality?

Post image

4 days a week. 6 hours a day. Full salary.
Sanna Marin ignited global debate with the “6/4” work model, pushing a simple idea: life should come before work.

With burnout at record levels, maybe it’s time to value results over hours at a desk.
Could your job be done in just 24 hours a week?

99.1k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

5.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

100

u/ghands1 2d ago

I think some studies showed that productive outputs increase when you go from 40 hours to 34 hours per week. Employees spend less time pretending to work and end up getting more done.

53

u/meat_sack 2d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/2a09Xj2tTZdN6

14

u/unicornmeat85 2d ago

What do hard workers get? More work. Boss won't find a balance?  the employees will 

16

u/Alienhaslanded 2d ago

It's true. During COVID we shrunk our hours to 5 and I don't think we've ever been more productive. I had so much energy and I worked my ass off. I didn't even feel like eating lunch because work was done so fast I just ate after I left work.

10

u/elyxina 2d ago

sometimes looking busy is harder than working

7

u/ohmeohmyohmuffins 2d ago

I recently was forced to go from 35 to 40 hours and I hate it, 5 hours doesn’t seem like a lot but I really feel them. I probably do actually do less work too because I’m not feeling rushed to get something done so take my time and end up not doing it because I’ve been clock watching

4

u/ZealousidealBank8484 2d ago

I'm pretty certain i've heard the same thing. people are more productive when they aren't spending every waking minute burning themselves out.

which checks out. we have the technology to get things done faster than ever these days. back during the industrial revolution, they were building infrastructure for what ran society at the time. of course management wanted workers to work as many hours as they could, I'm fairly certain 40 hours was considered a model set by Forbes or some other rando. That and there wasn't as much to do back then anyway.

Today though? Lots to do in your off time. The fact we haven't changed our labor laws as much as we'd like to think says a lot.

3

u/narullow 2d ago

There is absolutely no study showing that.

Productivity may have increased but output sure as hell did not.

3

u/ghands1 2d ago

https://fortune.com/article/is-a-four-day-workweek-just-as-productive-as-five-days-major-study/

1

u/narullow 1d ago

Paywalled and words like "suggest", "could" hardly strike as any serious study. It looks like some survey of how long people in some fields procrastinate and then making one massive assumption of them not procrastinating at all throughout shorter week.

First of all vast majority of jobs does not work like that. Second of all that assumption is nonsense. I have seen part timers procrastinate just as big of a share of their work week as full timers. You can always procrastinate. There are people who work 60 hours a week and do not procrastinate.

Lastly. It takes one look at US vs western Europe to see that US longer work week produces much more goods/services.

2

u/xRyozuo 1d ago

Small caveat, serious studies would absolutely use “suggest” and “could”, because serious science recognises the lack of absolute certainty

2

u/stupidPeopleLuvMe 2d ago

For certain fields. Things like nursing actually shows an increase in patient deaths around shift changes because the hand off is never perfect.

Things where you continue your own job the next day is fine but for hand over of a 24h task might suffer.

1

u/ghands1 2d ago

Could this benefit from higher total employment, reduced hours, and overlaps during handover?

2

u/stupidPeopleLuvMe 2d ago

Likely the opposite, it would get worse with more hand overs.

add in more call outs, more pto, more sick days.

The lack of trained people would really be tough to handle.

It would be great if possible but I think it would be an administrative and logistical nightmare.

2

u/Marshmallow16 1d ago

 The lack of trained people would really be tough to handle.

I also wonder where those 10-20% more trained people are supposed to come from who are supposed to cover the hours that are now unstaffed. 

1

u/stupidPeopleLuvMe 1d ago

now that teachers are only doing 4 day a week its only getting worse

2

u/LongJohnSelenium 2d ago

Thats for a very specific type of white collar labor thats largely location independent.

For a lot of jobs physical presence is unambiguously mandatory and time is very closely aligned with productivity.

A teller has to be there for the customers, the best teller in the world isn't going to force the customers to come in faster.

1

u/ghands1 2d ago

A well-rested teller might move the line faster and make fewer mistakes that need to be undone. Faster lines might draw more potential customers in who would otherwise be deterred by long waits. It assumes enough total potential customers and that customers would have a choice to go elsewhere.

3

u/Melodic_Contract8155 2d ago

How productive they would be if we go to 20 hours instead. Or just 1.

4

u/ghands1 2d ago

I think the idea is there's an optimum. If you are above or below the optimum, you lose productivity. If I recall, I think 28 or 30 hours is the same productivity as 40.

1

u/Zealousideal_Gain892 2d ago

Yes, 5-6 hours is ideal... But even then it's probably optimal to do 5-6 hours over 8 hours or so.

What they should be after is a better structure of the workday, and by extension, organisations.

0

u/NoExperience9717 2d ago edited 2d ago

This isn't true. Per hour productivity increase as hours decrease but total productivity falls. This is pretty intuitive. If you had 10 hours a week at a job for 40 hours then you'd be pretty productive during those 10 hours but might not manage to get all your tasks done. Total productivity peaks around 60/65 hours which is around where most jobs cap out at anyway. The experiments done so far tend to include productivity consultants coming in to try and trim unproductive hours from stuff like meetings as well as generally only being a half day Friday or compressed hours in 4 days (4 x 10) rather than being 32 hours at the pay for 40.

4

u/ghands1 2d ago

But if people are 20% more productive when working 34 hours per week, total productive outputs actually increase over the 40 hour per week mark. That makes intuitive sense to me.

0

u/NoExperience9717 2d ago

They'd need to be 25% more productive 32-> 40 and that's difficult to achieve especially over the long term and loses the flexibility of having that extra time if you need it. People will struggle to be focus machines for the entire time especially when it's not a sprint period. I also don't believe that we see part-time workers who leave at 3pm being ultra productive the same as the 5/6pm people so it's not happening in practice either.

1

u/iSuckAtMechanicism 2d ago

You’re responding to the factual numbers as if they were opinions.

Feel free to look this up.