You can only compress things so much though. You can't just tell people to show up and do only the productive n% of the hours. You can't force 2 days of perfect productivity out of people. That's not how any of this works. When you cut hours, you're cutting productive and unproductive hours at the same time, you don't get to cherry pick.
Or if you can cherry pick, go into management consulting - you'll be able to squeeze so much more out of everyone who still works full time by telling them to only do productive things at work.
While we're at it, we can tell people who gamble to only go to the casino on the days when they win.
My hypothesis is that most of our "unproductive time" in the 40h workweek is just filler time spent warming seats, a direct result of there actually not being all that much work that a human can consistently accomplish in a week.
So, by removing the expectation that you have your butt in a chair 8 hours a day 5 days a week, the new model is "get everything you were already painfully stretching across 5 days done in only the time it actually takes (2 days), and let's all go home and enjoy the free time we otherwise would have spent scrolling on our phones under florescent lights and quickly tabbing back to Excel when the boss walks by."
I truly do believe 95% of office-based business would get the same "amount" of work done in this system.
The main issue, at least for me, is that I simply cannot focus for 8 hours in a single day. If I was to work 2 hours a day for four days, I would likely get more done than if I "worked" 8 hours one day.
> That is, only paying you for those 2h a day instead of 8...
In the context of tech-based work, If pay is based on productivity, then those two hours should be paid the same as 8.
I think tech companies are realising that it's paying for performance that matters; not paying by time. In many cases paying by time doesn't make sense. If you have an idea in the shower, does that count as working? If you going for a walk prompts a better idea, does that count as working?
I do 1 hour chunks of work 8 times a day, between 8am and 11pm. Some work
Gets blocked by other work, or other people being busy, pr some infra needing to be fixed.
Humans are not robots. If most people do 2 "work days" of work in 5 a 5-day week, it doesn't logically follow that people would accomplish 2 "work days" of work in a 2-day week.
If we could find a VC with too much money and a gambling problem, I'd be happy to simultaneously start competing companies in the same sector; my employees can work 4 days/week and yours can work 2 days and we'll see how each business does ;)
Depends on why those unproductive hours are unproductive. My hypothesis is that human brain is just incapable of doing the sort of forced, focused work that modern work requires for more than a small number of hours. I.e. the hours worked are just not randomly productive or unproductive (like your casino analogue suggests), but you spend the productive hours and then you move into less productive mode, which could just as well be skipped completely.
A related question is does the working capacity "charge" over the course of one evening + sleeping or does it require more time? If the answer is "more time", as I suspect from the fact that most productive days of the week usually are after the weekend, a good strategy indeed would be to just do all the work we can do (which is maybe 10-20 hours) in two days and then recharge for five days.
"You're cutting productive and unproductive hours at the same time" is perhaps true, but it's about the ratio. Obviously at the extremes (cutting the last day of work vs going from a 7-day to a 6-day) there's going to be differences.
Acting like unproductive hours are some random result goes against loads of companies who have been doing actual trials of 5 => 4 day weeks. Having time off is actually helpful, and the sort of procrastination from dissatisfaction/exhaustion/whatever that leads to this can be helped by this kind of stuff!
"Why is it 4 and not 3 or 2 or whatever" I mean it probably depends on people but TGIF is a saying for a reason
I don't think unproductive hours are random, but I suspect that for mental work the productivity ratio decreases more dramatically in the last hour of each day than the last day of a week. Basically, from a pure productivity standpoint, it may be more efficient to go from 5x8 to 5x6 (or even 5x4) than to go from 5x8 to 4x8. Most people might prefer 4x8 because a full day off is more flexible, however.
Or if you can cherry pick, go into management consulting - you'll be able to squeeze so much more out of everyone who still works full time by telling them to only do productive things at work.
While we're at it, we can tell people who gamble to only go to the casino on the days when they win.