The 8-hour Workday is a Myth
What should we prioritize in life? Ask anyone and you’ll get approximately the same list: family, friends, community service, health, leisure, work, and rewarding personal projects.
There are two times in life when we (potentially) have the time to balance all of these: childhood and retirement.
As for the long stretch in between those lovely bookends?
Work, work, work.
That’s just the way it is. Or so we’ve been taught.
The History of the 8-Hour Work Day
I’m sure most Americans would love to imagine that the 8-hour workday, a seemingly fundamental aspect of our society, is here for good reason.
Maybe it’s common sense.
Or maybe we came to this conclusion after countless years of trial and error, through rigorous research.
But the truth is a lot less rosy: it’s largely a result of workers’ movements pushing against greedy capitalists.
During the industrial revolution, most people worked between 12 and 16 hours a day, six days a week, without any paid holidays or vacation. (There was no need to work this hard. It was just a way for the wealthy to maximize profit through exploitation.)
The 8-hour workday is a relatively recent invention.
The first country to implement a legal 8-hour workday was France in 1848. The United States followed suit in 1916 with the passing of the Adamson Act, which regulated the hours of railroad workers.
The idea of the “40-hour workweek” is even more recent. In 1940, Ford Motor Company implemented a five-day, 40-hour workweek for its workers and increased wages by 25%.
This move was not motivated by altruism; it was an effort to increase productivity by reducing employee fatigue. (In other words, they finally realized that working people to death wasn’t optimal and instead yielded to pressure from workers’ movements.)
So here we are, working 40 hours per week.
Our current paradigm represents an attempt to not work until we literally drop. (Hooray.) It’s about as far as we’ve gotten in the fight between strained workers and tyrannical business owners. But have we gone far enough?
Four reasons the 8-hour workday doesn’t even work
There are several reasons to abandon this framework.
(1) We are only productive for a limited number of hours
According to an interview with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, “five hours is about the maximum that most of us can concentrate hard on something. There are periods when you can push past that, but the reality is that most of us have about that [amount of] good work time in us every day.”
Depending on the field in question, some employee surveys indicate that we have as little as three hours of actual productivity per day.
This is what I mean when I say the 8-hour workday is a myth. It’s not real. We are kidding ourselves and it’s not funny.
So what are people doing when they’re “at work” for 8 hours?
In one study in the UK, nearly 2,000 employees reported spending time on these unproductive activities while on the clock:
- Reading news websites — 1 hour, 5 minutes
- Checking social media — 44 minutes
- Discussing non-work-related things with co-workers — 40 minutes
- Searching for new jobs — 26 minutes
- Taking smoke breaks — 23 minutes
- Making calls to partners or friends — 18 minutes
- Making hot drinks — 17 minutes
- Texting or instant messaging — 14 minutes
- Eating snacks — 8 minutes
- Making food in office — 7 minutes
In total, that means 262 (or 54%) out of 480 working minutes are spent on shenanigans. Do you call that productivity? I don’t.
(2) The 8-hour workday was only meant for certain types of tasks
Ford’s paradigm was based on factory line manufacturing, which means someone standing in place performing the same task over and over. In fairness, it is possible to stand at the conveyor belt this long (depending on your health) and it does achieve a certain level of productivity.
But we’ve rolled this framework over into industries where it simply doesn’t make sense. If you have a job that is project-based, you will lose productivity and time by keeping yourself “busy” for 8 hours.
We should be concerned with getting the project done, not with how long it takes. If an employee finishes all of their relevant work in 3 hours, they’re done for the day. They shouldn’t have to play pretend at work for 5 more hours.
(3) The 8-hour workday is technologically outdated
Our approach to work should account for current technology. With the rise of remote work, not everyone is required to work at fixed times in fixed places.
Given advances in transportation and accessibility, we have also developed a new problem: super commuters. If someone does have to drive to work, we should assume that they are covering a significant distance. And there’s no two ways about it: this is work. Their work schedule should either be adjusted for their commute time, or they should simply be paid for the time that it takes to get to and from the office.
Otherwise, we see an all-too-common phenomenon: 10- or 11-hour workdays between commute and work itself.
(4) Health and happiness matter more than work
Working people this hard implies an extreme view: that everyone should work for almost all of their waking hours; that a human being is a dispensable tool; that worker wellbeing and happiness are irrelevant to employers.
It’s not enough to say that the 8-hour workday fails biologically, practically, and technologically. It also fails philosophically. It is wrong on principle.
We don’t have to spend one-third of our lives working. No one wants that.
Correction: billionaires want that from you, but no one wants that for themselves.
But it’s time for a human-centered workplace — to explore ways to create a more flexible and productive workday based on our actual needs and capacities.
Is there a better way to work?
Thankfully, the 40-hour workweek is not universal. We can learn from countries that have already led the way to a more balanced life. Sweden has experimented with 25 hours per week in several locations. In the Netherlands, the standard workweek is 30 hours. In Germany, it’s only 28.
Employers like Rheingans Digital Enabler, Tower Paddle Boards, and Collective Campus have all switched to 5-hour workdays and seen positive results. Even large corporations like Microsoft Japan have experimented with a four-day workweek, and seen productivity increase by 40%.
Most importantly, this is an opportunity for “the little guy.” Those of us who are creators, innovators, and starters have a chance to implement a more balanced life both for ourselves and those who work for us.
We can cultivate greater emotional well-being, allow people more time to invest in personal relationships, and more time for employees to explore things that fill them with joy.
The bottom line
So if you feel there aren’t enough hours in the day, you’re actually right. But it’s not because 24 is too small a number. It’s because 8 is too large.
Far from being a necessary feature of human existence, the 8-hour workday is an industrial-era phenomenon that has only persisted in certain cultural contexts. Simply put, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Companies that are prepared to scrap the outdated notion of an 8-hour workday will benefit in terms of healthier workers and increased production.
Communities that demand a new way of working will be free to reclaim more of their time, energy, and well-being.
I return to my list of life priorities: family, friends, community service, sleep, leisure, work, and rewarding personal projects.
The truth is that we do have enough time for these things if we aren’t working ourselves to death for a job.
Your life belongs to you, not your employer.
P.S. If you read this while at work, confess your sins in the comments.