40 Hours

How the crap did we adopt the 40 hour work week as a working standard?

It is so arbitrary. Ask the average worker how much of those 40 hours are actually spent doing work, and you will get widely volatile answers. Where did it come from? Did someone sit down and think, hey – ‘if we get people working a butt-load of hours, maybe they will get something done for some of them?’ Is it an intentional attempt to break people’s spirits? (Although that hardly makes sense, because if you break someone’s spirit – they do crappy work) How does time correlate to productivity?

I am becoming much more aware of output / product. What do my clients/bosses walk away with? In my field (art/animation), there is something tangible to see. But the idea is the same regardless of field – how do you help the company succeed? If your company makes more money because of your contributions, you will have inherent value no matter how many hours you are there or how hard you work. Think about it: if you were your boss, would you rather have an employee who was always at the office but got very little done, or one that comes less frequently but accomplishes a tremendous amount?

Hmmm… How would it be different if everyone worked from home?

Many of us would go crazy from social isolation. I guess a bunch of us would be even less productive without someone directly standing over us and harassing us. Or maybe we would be more productive without the crazy boss breathing down our necks. Hard to say how it would play out.

But why 40? What if everyone worked 25 hours a week? I wonder. Would we be more efficient? Probably not. I think people tend to goof off the same percentage of their day no matter how many hours they work. What if people were only paid on the output of their work? Not necessarily commission, but paid on the results of what they accomplished. That would be weird. I think that many people would be too scared. We would live with a bit less security. We would have to face up to the actual reality of how much value we are putting out into the world. On the flip side, we would have a more direct control over how much we earn monetarily. If you were genuinely working all 40 hours of the week, you could make a very generous income. If not, you could avoid those hours killing time at work until the clock strikes 5 – in favor of spending time with your family or loved ones.

Only one thing seems certain to me: in most cases the 40 hours that we are paid for does not directly correlate to the output of the efforts.