Andrew Chen

Now this is interesting. Goes against what we were doing in the first dot.com boom. I remember working many weekends in a row, leaving the office at the middle of the night. Companies used to boast that they had bunkbeds for employees to crash in.

This approach seems far more civilized.

Thanks for posting these Andrew--very thought-provoking for my current work style!

I agree with the efforts of many to convince the powers that be to stop naively assuming "X% more time spent working == X% more output", but I think it's a drop in the ocean compared to the bigger issue of "well, what should the working week be, anyway?".

As soon as someone brings up the Ford study (from 100 years ago), my immediate reaction is: right, so ... have you stopped to think how out of date that is by now? How much the world has changed? Has it occurred to you that if it was so arbitrary back then until it was tested, that it might be equally arbitrary right now?

I would like to see the ultra-conservative idea of an 8-hour day, 5-day week taken out back and shot in the head :). There are - blatantly - much more productive approaches to working, given all the tools of modern life.

Are peopel taking into account the issue of working across timezones - the fact that many people in USA and EU spend large amounts of their working week working directly with people 8 hours out of phase with them, and make it work?

This points both to ways to be a lot more flexible (if people can make THAT work, they can tolerate a lot more flexibility in the day to day phasing of staff times), and to needs that are largely unmet (how many companies actively support and adapt themselves around the odd needs of the staff that they have placed in those positions? Even in IBM I found people were often on this kind of schedule with no support beyond "tolerance of their tiredness" by management (although I hope IBM's moved on since I was there)).