What Do You Think of the Standard 40-hr Work Week? | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.400 | All right, what do we got instead?

00:00:08.320 | All right, next call is about your thoughts

00:00:11.600 | on the future of a 40-hour work week in the eight-hour work

00:00:16.080 | day.

00:00:16.580 | Hey, Cal.

00:00:21.080 | For knowledge work, what do you think of the standard eight-hour

00:00:24.400 | work day, 40-hour work week?

00:00:26.320 | And what's ideal?

00:00:27.960 | And do you think that this is likely to change at all

00:00:30.840 | in the next 10 years?

00:00:34.880 | It's a good question.

00:00:36.600 | So I've thought and written some about this.

00:00:39.800 | I had a New Yorker piece in January

00:00:43.760 | that was about slow productivity.

00:00:45.160 | And it actually opened talking about some

00:00:47.640 | of these ongoing discussions to shorten the official work week.

00:00:51.200 | And basically, my take is focusing

00:00:54.320 | on the number of hours we work or the number of days we work

00:00:58.880 | in this broader context of burnout and dissatisfaction

00:01:01.880 | and a general reconfiguration of the working world,

00:01:05.840 | especially in knowledge work, I think it's a red herring.

00:01:08.200 | I don't think that is the problem that people have.

00:01:12.000 | I don't think the problem that people really have with

00:01:14.240 | knowledge work right now is that they

00:01:17.680 | have to work Friday in addition to Monday through Thursday.

00:01:21.080 | I don't think it's that the day ends at 5 versus 4 versus 3.

00:01:25.200 | These are knobs you can tune on the margins.

00:01:28.600 | And though I am a believer in results-oriented style of work

00:01:34.080 | and I think having a lot of variety

00:01:35.640 | in how people configure their work days and work weeks

00:01:38.200 | is, in general, a nice thing to explore,

00:01:39.880 | it's not the solution on its own to the issues

00:01:43.720 | of dissatisfaction and burnout that so many are facing.

00:01:46.920 | And my argument in that piece, and also an argument

00:01:49.080 | I lay out in a video--

00:01:50.360 | and again, I'm really pitching these core idea videos today

00:01:53.160 | because this is why I recorded them for exactly this purpose

00:01:55.720 | so I can reference my ideas easily.

00:01:57.680 | But if you watch my core idea video on slow productivity,

00:02:00.760 | I make this point.

00:02:01.840 | The real issue is overload.

00:02:04.680 | The thing that is burning people out,

00:02:06.440 | the thing that's causing a lot of dissatisfaction,

00:02:08.320 | or at least one of the many factors in knowledge work,

00:02:10.600 | is having more on your plate than you can easily

00:02:14.080 | imagine accomplishing and having an incoming stream of ever

00:02:17.640 | more piling on top of that.

00:02:20.960 | So you enter the state where you have this overwhelming amount

00:02:24.960 | of obligations and three different things happen.

00:02:29.120 | One, there is a mental short-circuiting that happens.

00:02:33.280 | There's a part of the human brain

00:02:34.640 | that is charged with making long-term plans for our goals.

00:02:38.000 | That thing short-circuits when you give it

00:02:40.120 | 75 different obligations and 700 unread emails.

00:02:43.400 | It can't figure out a plan for all of those things.

00:02:46.520 | And then it feels like it's failing

00:02:47.720 | to make plans that are things for important.

00:02:49.560 | And you feel anxious and you feel overwhelmed.

00:02:51.560 | We have a short-circuiting effect that

00:02:53.160 | directly makes us feel bad.

00:02:56.240 | Then we have a pragmatic negative impact,

00:02:58.800 | which is overhead spirals.

00:03:00.520 | Everything on your plate that you

00:03:02.000 | agree to do, be it a small thing or a major project,

00:03:04.600 | brings with it a fixed amount of collaborative overhead

00:03:08.280 | that is required.

00:03:09.120 | OK, to get this done, I have to talk to some people

00:03:11.440 | and keep people posted and go find some information I

00:03:13.680 | need to accomplish it.

00:03:15.800 | Now, that's all fine if you give me one thing to do.

00:03:18.160 | Yeah, I got to find information and talk to some people

00:03:20.560 | and have some meetings where we can discuss

00:03:22.360 | how it's going to happen.

00:03:23.680 | The problem is when you have more on your plate

00:03:25.800 | than you can handle, when you're in a state of chronic overload,

00:03:28.480 | each of those things brings with it

00:03:30.480 | its fixed amount of overhead.

00:03:33.560 | And if you have a huge amount of things on your plate,

00:03:35.880 | that overhead alone takes up most of your schedule.

00:03:40.000 | Everyone experienced this who had

00:03:42.600 | a certain type of knowledge work job

00:03:45.240 | during a pandemic experienced this when they found

00:03:47.400 | their calendars get completely full with Zoom meetings

00:03:49.920 | back to back to back to back, and their inbox

00:03:52.040 | is completely overflowing.

00:03:54.640 | That is overhead spirals, an overhead spiral.

00:03:57.680 | You have too much stuff on your plate,

00:03:59.440 | so the overhead takes all your time.

00:04:00.960 | And why it's a spiral is because now if all your time is

00:04:03.320 | spent servicing the overhead, you're

00:04:05.360 | making very little progress on the things that remain.

00:04:08.280 | So more things pile up.

00:04:09.560 | And then you get more overhead that you

00:04:11.240 | have to service, more meetings, more emails.

00:04:13.200 | You get farther and farther behind.

00:04:15.560 | This is maddening.

00:04:18.840 | It's misery making.

00:04:20.960 | It's almost satirical sometimes how it feels,

00:04:24.960 | how much you're just in these meetings and doing email.

00:04:27.240 | So it completely crushes the soul.

00:04:30.360 | And it ends up requiring you to try

00:04:33.760 | to fit work into early in the morning or in the evening

00:04:36.440 | or on the weekends because it has to get done sometime.

00:04:38.760 | So now you're losing the time that you

00:04:40.400 | would ordinarily spend to do other things

00:04:41.880 | that are important to you.

00:04:42.480 | And that is going to accelerate burnout as well.

00:04:44.560 | So that is happening as well.

00:04:45.840 | And then you just have the alienation from output

00:04:47.800 | because you have so little time to actually do the stuff

00:04:50.040 | that you're good at doing, the stuff that actually

00:04:51.600 | makes an impact.

00:04:52.280 | You're doing it in small bursts.

00:04:53.680 | And you're doing it at night while all day you're on Zoom.

00:04:56.280 | And there's a real alienation from your productive potential.

00:04:58.880 | So chronic overload, having more on your plate

00:05:01.120 | than you can easily handle, creates

00:05:03.120 | these three horsemen of the knowledge worker burnout

00:05:06.680 | apocalypse.

00:05:08.920 | This is why we are predominantly feeling so bad

00:05:11.800 | is this overload that we're all feeling.

00:05:15.920 | And if you tell me you don't have to work on Fridays,

00:05:18.440 | that doesn't help much because I still

00:05:20.120 | have all of these things.

00:05:21.400 | I'm short circuiting my brain.

00:05:22.640 | I've overhead spirals taking up all my time.

00:05:24.640 | I'm just going to put work in that Friday anyways

00:05:26.440 | because when am I going to get things done?

00:05:28.200 | It's not by itself going to solve the problem.

00:05:30.200 | How are we going to solve the problem

00:05:31.740 | is stop having so much stuff on people's plates.

00:05:34.240 | The work should get stopped at a central system

00:05:37.960 | from which you can pull when you have free cycles.

00:05:41.800 | When I'm done with what I'm working on now,

00:05:43.600 | I'll pull something else.

00:05:45.200 | You can't just let that damn burst

00:05:47.000 | and just throw it on everyone's plate with no constriction,

00:05:49.500 | with no restraint.

00:05:50.840 | I think that is really much more important than reducing the work

00:05:54.440 | week or reducing the work day.

00:05:55.680 | Now again, I think flexibility is critical.

00:05:58.160 | Reconfiguring your hours is critical.

00:05:59.960 | But we don't have a crisis of having too many work hours.

00:06:03.320 | And this is a very different way of thinking about this

00:06:05.720 | because in an industrial context,

00:06:09.560 | work hours was the main knob you had

00:06:12.320 | to turn when trying to deal with the employee's

00:06:15.040 | subjective experience of work.

00:06:16.720 | If you worked on an assembly line,

00:06:19.440 | the main metric that seemed to matter

00:06:21.360 | was how much time do you have to spend

00:06:22.940 | working on that assembly line.

00:06:24.200 | So a union was going to fight for less hours, which

00:06:27.080 | they successfully did in the early 20th century.

00:06:29.200 | And that's where the 40-hour work week came from.

00:06:31.940 | In the context of knowledge work, the issue is different.

00:06:34.320 | It's not the number of hours so much

00:06:35.880 | as it is the number of things on our plate that's

00:06:37.920 | causing a lot of the troubles.

00:06:39.400 | So that's where I want to make sure we have a lot of focus.

00:06:41.780 | Because if we don't solve that problem,

00:06:43.000 | it doesn't matter what you say about how many days you're

00:06:45.480 | supposed to work or how many hours you're supposed to work.

00:06:48.440 | We will be miserable until we solve that problem.

00:06:51.720 | Now this brings us back to the first caller who

00:06:54.800 | was talking about the disagreement between me

00:06:57.320 | and Alan Jacobs in the Hedgehog Review.

00:07:00.160 | It is exactly this problem where my style solution

00:07:03.640 | shows up and I think has some merit.

00:07:05.720 | Because when I'm looking at this very pragmatic problem,

00:07:08.040 | I said we have to figure out how to re-engineer work systems

00:07:12.360 | so that you do not have too much stuff on your plate

00:07:14.440 | because it causes a lot of misery.

00:07:15.860 | This is a boring thing.

00:07:17.000 | This is like in the industrial age,

00:07:19.400 | if in the late 19th century, earliest 20th century,

00:07:21.960 | if you're there saying we have to actually change

00:07:24.160 | the way we've configured these assembly lines because the wheels

00:07:27.880 | are moving by too fast and people are getting repetitive

00:07:30.120 | strain injuries.

00:07:31.120 | That's kind of a boring but pragmatic solution.

00:07:34.600 | Now in that early 20th century context or the late 19th

00:07:37.320 | century, the sexy stuff would be we

00:07:40.000 | have to rethink capitalism.

00:07:43.680 | What we need is to socialize the plants

00:07:47.280 | or we have to have a Marxist style revolution.

00:07:49.600 | That's the sexy stuff.

00:07:50.480 | That's big think theory.

00:07:52.160 | We've got to rethink how we even allocate and make profit

00:07:55.080 | off of capital and the alienation of labor.

00:07:57.440 | And that's the exciting stuff.

00:07:58.800 | The boring stuff was we need to give more breaks to the workers

00:08:03.200 | and slow down the steering wheels.

00:08:04.920 | I'm like that boring guy today with knowledge work.

00:08:07.560 | The sexy stuff is these post-capitalist visions

00:08:10.400 | of reimagining the role of work and rethinking

00:08:13.960 | what work means in our life and how much we have to do

00:08:16.360 | to support ourselves and et cetera.

00:08:18.320 | That's the sexy, interesting stuff.

00:08:19.780 | And I'm in here saying, yeah, but also we

00:08:21.240 | have to make sure that you can't have 50 tasks on your plate

00:08:23.740 | at the same time.

00:08:24.760 | And this is a workflow system problem.

00:08:27.240 | It's a productivity system problem.

00:08:29.200 | It's not exciting.

00:08:30.000 | It's not sexy.

00:08:30.640 | But it's the stuff that can actually

00:08:32.120 | make a difference right now while we're

00:08:34.000 | waiting for the overthrow of capitalism.

00:08:36.960 | I think that's a good question.

00:08:38.280 | That's where I'm putting my focus, though,

00:08:41.280 | is in the short term, overload is one of the biggest problems

00:08:45.640 | that I think we could solve.

00:08:46.800 | And the reason why I think we can solve it, by the way,

00:08:49.440 | is it's not a--

00:08:53.000 | the relationship here is one of more

00:08:55.800 | win-win than other type of labor issues.

00:08:57.880 | So the chronic overload makes workers

00:09:00.920 | less productive in a lot of ways.

00:09:02.720 | Clearly, if you're in an overhead spiral,

00:09:05.960 | it limits the amount of good work you can produce.

00:09:08.000 | Clearly, if you're burnt out and leaving your job,

00:09:10.400 | that's bad for the employer.

00:09:11.960 | So pull-based systems, where you have a small number of things

00:09:16.280 | on your plate at a time, but you work on them really

00:09:17.880 | intensely and then pull in a new thing when you finish,

00:09:20.240 | will probably actually, from a company's perspective

00:09:22.480 | or an organization's perspective,

00:09:24.200 | more things will get done at higher quality.

00:09:26.040 | Their employers will be more happy and not

00:09:27.400 | burn out as much.

00:09:28.000 | I mean, it's a bit of a win-win situation.

00:09:29.800 | It's just complicated.

00:09:30.840 | So this is the nice thing about this

00:09:32.400 | versus other labor movements we've had in the past.

00:09:35.400 | This is not so much labor versus management.

00:09:37.960 | It's more like labor and management versus complexity.

00:09:42.560 | The way we work now is easy.

00:09:44.560 | The way I'm talking about it is a pain.

00:09:46.360 | And things that are a pain take a long time to get right.

00:09:48.200 | Who wants to be the one that first wants to completely

00:09:49.960 | rethink their work?

00:09:50.760 | And what if it doesn't work?

00:09:51.920 | And I've talked about this before.

00:09:53.640 | It took Henry Ford years to figure out

00:09:55.360 | how to make the assembly line profitable.

00:09:56.960 | Until then, he looked stupid.

00:09:58.160 | So it's a whole complicated mess.

00:09:59.920 | But that's where I'm putting my focus.

00:10:01.500 | I like flexibility in work.

00:10:03.160 | I like to be able to control when my hours are,

00:10:05.120 | to some degree, great.

00:10:06.280 | But let's fix the overload problem.

00:10:07.720 | We're going to get a huge immediate benefit.

00:10:10.520 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:10:13.880 | (upbeat music)

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What Do You Think of the Standard 40-hr Work Week? | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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