All right, what do we got instead? All right, next call is about your thoughts on the future of a 40-hour work week in the eight-hour work day. Hey, Cal. For knowledge work, what do you think of the standard eight-hour work day, 40-hour work week? And what's ideal? And do you think that this is likely to change at all in the next 10 years?

It's a good question. So I've thought and written some about this. I had a New Yorker piece in January that was about slow productivity. And it actually opened talking about some of these ongoing discussions to shorten the official work week. And basically, my take is focusing on the number of hours we work or the number of days we work in this broader context of burnout and dissatisfaction and a general reconfiguration of the working world, especially in knowledge work, I think it's a red herring.

I don't think that is the problem that people have. I don't think the problem that people really have with knowledge work right now is that they have to work Friday in addition to Monday through Thursday. I don't think it's that the day ends at 5 versus 4 versus 3.

These are knobs you can tune on the margins. And though I am a believer in results-oriented style of work and I think having a lot of variety in how people configure their work days and work weeks is, in general, a nice thing to explore, it's not the solution on its own to the issues of dissatisfaction and burnout that so many are facing.

And my argument in that piece, and also an argument I lay out in a video-- and again, I'm really pitching these core idea videos today because this is why I recorded them for exactly this purpose so I can reference my ideas easily. But if you watch my core idea video on slow productivity, I make this point.

The real issue is overload. The thing that is burning people out, the thing that's causing a lot of dissatisfaction, or at least one of the many factors in knowledge work, is having more on your plate than you can easily imagine accomplishing and having an incoming stream of ever more piling on top of that.

So you enter the state where you have this overwhelming amount of obligations and three different things happen. One, there is a mental short-circuiting that happens. There's a part of the human brain that is charged with making long-term plans for our goals. That thing short-circuits when you give it 75 different obligations and 700 unread emails.

It can't figure out a plan for all of those things. And then it feels like it's failing to make plans that are things for important. And you feel anxious and you feel overwhelmed. We have a short-circuiting effect that directly makes us feel bad. Then we have a pragmatic negative impact, which is overhead spirals.

Everything on your plate that you agree to do, be it a small thing or a major project, brings with it a fixed amount of collaborative overhead that is required. OK, to get this done, I have to talk to some people and keep people posted and go find some information I need to accomplish it.

Now, that's all fine if you give me one thing to do. Yeah, I got to find information and talk to some people and have some meetings where we can discuss how it's going to happen. The problem is when you have more on your plate than you can handle, when you're in a state of chronic overload, each of those things brings with it its fixed amount of overhead.

And if you have a huge amount of things on your plate, that overhead alone takes up most of your schedule. Everyone experienced this who had a certain type of knowledge work job during a pandemic experienced this when they found their calendars get completely full with Zoom meetings back to back to back to back, and their inbox is completely overflowing.

That is overhead spirals, an overhead spiral. You have too much stuff on your plate, so the overhead takes all your time. And why it's a spiral is because now if all your time is spent servicing the overhead, you're making very little progress on the things that remain. So more things pile up.

And then you get more overhead that you have to service, more meetings, more emails. You get farther and farther behind. This is maddening. It's misery making. It's almost satirical sometimes how it feels, how much you're just in these meetings and doing email. So it completely crushes the soul. And it ends up requiring you to try to fit work into early in the morning or in the evening or on the weekends because it has to get done sometime.

So now you're losing the time that you would ordinarily spend to do other things that are important to you. And that is going to accelerate burnout as well. So that is happening as well. And then you just have the alienation from output because you have so little time to actually do the stuff that you're good at doing, the stuff that actually makes an impact.

You're doing it in small bursts. And you're doing it at night while all day you're on Zoom. And there's a real alienation from your productive potential. So chronic overload, having more on your plate than you can easily handle, creates these three horsemen of the knowledge worker burnout apocalypse. This is why we are predominantly feeling so bad is this overload that we're all feeling.

And if you tell me you don't have to work on Fridays, that doesn't help much because I still have all of these things. I'm short circuiting my brain. I've overhead spirals taking up all my time. I'm just going to put work in that Friday anyways because when am I going to get things done?

It's not by itself going to solve the problem. How are we going to solve the problem is stop having so much stuff on people's plates. The work should get stopped at a central system from which you can pull when you have free cycles. When I'm done with what I'm working on now, I'll pull something else.

You can't just let that damn burst and just throw it on everyone's plate with no constriction, with no restraint. I think that is really much more important than reducing the work week or reducing the work day. Now again, I think flexibility is critical. Reconfiguring your hours is critical. But we don't have a crisis of having too many work hours.

And this is a very different way of thinking about this because in an industrial context, work hours was the main knob you had to turn when trying to deal with the employee's subjective experience of work. If you worked on an assembly line, the main metric that seemed to matter was how much time do you have to spend working on that assembly line.

So a union was going to fight for less hours, which they successfully did in the early 20th century. And that's where the 40-hour work week came from. In the context of knowledge work, the issue is different. It's not the number of hours so much as it is the number of things on our plate that's causing a lot of the troubles.

So that's where I want to make sure we have a lot of focus. Because if we don't solve that problem, it doesn't matter what you say about how many days you're supposed to work or how many hours you're supposed to work. We will be miserable until we solve that problem.

Now this brings us back to the first caller who was talking about the disagreement between me and Alan Jacobs in the Hedgehog Review. It is exactly this problem where my style solution shows up and I think has some merit. Because when I'm looking at this very pragmatic problem, I said we have to figure out how to re-engineer work systems so that you do not have too much stuff on your plate because it causes a lot of misery.

This is a boring thing. This is like in the industrial age, if in the late 19th century, earliest 20th century, if you're there saying we have to actually change the way we've configured these assembly lines because the wheels are moving by too fast and people are getting repetitive strain injuries.

That's kind of a boring but pragmatic solution. Now in that early 20th century context or the late 19th century, the sexy stuff would be we have to rethink capitalism. What we need is to socialize the plants or we have to have a Marxist style revolution. That's the sexy stuff.

That's big think theory. We've got to rethink how we even allocate and make profit off of capital and the alienation of labor. And that's the exciting stuff. The boring stuff was we need to give more breaks to the workers and slow down the steering wheels. I'm like that boring guy today with knowledge work.

The sexy stuff is these post-capitalist visions of reimagining the role of work and rethinking what work means in our life and how much we have to do to support ourselves and et cetera. That's the sexy, interesting stuff. And I'm in here saying, yeah, but also we have to make sure that you can't have 50 tasks on your plate at the same time.

And this is a workflow system problem. It's a productivity system problem. It's not exciting. It's not sexy. But it's the stuff that can actually make a difference right now while we're waiting for the overthrow of capitalism. I think that's a good question. That's where I'm putting my focus, though, is in the short term, overload is one of the biggest problems that I think we could solve.

And the reason why I think we can solve it, by the way, is it's not a-- the relationship here is one of more win-win than other type of labor issues. So the chronic overload makes workers less productive in a lot of ways. Clearly, if you're in an overhead spiral, it limits the amount of good work you can produce.

Clearly, if you're burnt out and leaving your job, that's bad for the employer. So pull-based systems, where you have a small number of things on your plate at a time, but you work on them really intensely and then pull in a new thing when you finish, will probably actually, from a company's perspective or an organization's perspective, more things will get done at higher quality.

Their employers will be more happy and not burn out as much. I mean, it's a bit of a win-win situation. It's just complicated. So this is the nice thing about this versus other labor movements we've had in the past. This is not so much labor versus management. It's more like labor and management versus complexity.

The way we work now is easy. The way I'm talking about it is a pain. And things that are a pain take a long time to get right. Who wants to be the one that first wants to completely rethink their work? And what if it doesn't work? And I've talked about this before.

It took Henry Ford years to figure out how to make the assembly line profitable. Until then, he looked stupid. So it's a whole complicated mess. But that's where I'm putting my focus. I like flexibility in work. I like to be able to control when my hours are, to some degree, great.

But let's fix the overload problem. We're going to get a huge immediate benefit. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)