The Future Workweek
It’s Time for the 40-Hour Workweek to Go.
We are spending our lives working. Why do so many spend so much time at work? Is it necessary?
I don’t believe it is.
I have been exploring the evolution of money. It used to be that your wealth correlated to the time spent working. If you wanted to make more money, you worked more hours. That is the capitalist dream, right? The land of opportunity. All you have to do is work yourself to death and you might be Designing the Experimentlucky enough to hit it big. At least you might be able to give your kids a shot at an easier life.
How Much of Life Should be Spent Working?
I am a product of the capitalist system. I have been working in Corporate America for a decade. I actually did pretty well at maintaining a 40-hour week most weeks. I made sure to spend time with my family, although I had trouble disconnecting fully. But I also wanted to keep moving up the ranks of the corporate ladder. So I kept learning and studying. And I moved slowly up the ladder. Never as fast as I wanted.
Then the pandemic hit. That changed my perspective quite a bit.
I have always worked remotely on occasion. I had a couple of spells where I was working remotely for a week or two at a time, but I had never been fully at home. It made me realize exactly how much I organized my entire life around my job.
How to Burn Out
As the pandemic raged on, I started to reorganize work around my life. And that worked well when I didn’t have a ton of meetings. But once I started having to be in meetings more often?
I realized that my workday just ended up expanding.
I would try to get my work done in the morning and evenings around the meetings I was having.
I don’t want to say all meetings are bad. But I ended up being in quite a few meetings that I really didn’t need to be in. Granted, this is mostly my own fault. I was trying to advance in Corporate America. I wanted to advance faster. So I just kept working longer and harder.
It wasn’t sustainable. I knew it wouldn’t be when I started my rush in August. I was rejected for a new position that I thought I was qualified for. It ended up being the kick in the ass that I needed, although not the one that I thought I needed.
What Do I Really Want?
I thought I wanted to be a tech lead. And I do, in a sense. But what I was really shooting for was the perk that came with that role. That was the level that yearly bonuses for the company’s performance kicked in. I wanted the success of the company to be shared with me. I was busting my ass to get shit done. I was innovating and creating. I worked on multiple teams at once. I was the tech lead for my team, but it was a small team of myself and one other engineer, so it never counted. And I made my salary.
So I worked harder for three months solid. I designed some pretty cool systems and team structures. I presented them to various leaders in the company. I had a meeting set up about two months in advance with a VP. I worked to prepare my proposals for that meeting. I knew that the meeting was scheduled for the first week of November.
At this point, I knew that I wanted to launch a startup. I was tired. I was tired of killing myself to try to advance at a place that wasn’t paying me for the extra time I put in. I decided to give my employer a chance to help me launch my startup.
Then I had my meeting. I discussed my ideas and how I thought that my goals and the goals of the company could align going forward. I attempted to show how there was a possible symbiotic relationship between the company I wanted to start and my current employer.
The VP was straight with me. He told me that the company wasn’t going to do that. They would own any IP going forward from our discussion for anything I built while part of the company. He also told me that if I had something worth going for, to go for it.
I Could See Clearly
That was both the straw that broke the camel’s back and the moment of clarity I needed. The next day, I quit. I wasn’t going to let my employer own my life anymore. I needed to take back control of my time and my work. It was also my dream to launch a startup. I still can’t quite get over how easy it was to make that decision. It wasn’t as easy to carry out, but I never wavered in my decision. For the first time in a long time, I knew exactly what I wanted to go for in life.
But now I have to re-train my brain. Looking back on the last three months, I see exactly how unsustainable my pace was. I completely burnt myself out in those three months. I pushed aside pretty much everything except work. Now, I am learning how to relax again. And I am seeing exactly how much relaxation is needed to keep the brain running. This is where I started to examine our relationship with the 40-hour workweek.
The History of the 40-Hour Workweek
Luckily, Sophia Lee at Culture Amp gives us a very nice breakdown of the history of the 40-hour workweek.
1817: After the Industrial Revolution, activists and labor union groups advocated for better working conditions. People were working 80 to 100 hour weeks during this time.
1866: The National Labor Union asked Congress to pass a law mandating the eight-hour workday. While the law wasn’t passed, it increased public support for the change.
1869: President Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation to guarantee eight-hour workdays for government employees. Grant’s decision encouraged private-sector workers to push for the same rights.
1886: The Illinois Legislature passed a law mandating eight-hour work days. Many employers refused to cooperate, which led to a massive worker strike in Chicago, where there was a bomb that killed at least 12 people. The aftermath is known as the Haymarket Riot and is now commemorated on May 1 as a public holiday in many countries.
1926: Henry Ford popularized the 40-hour work week after he discovered through his research that working more yielded only a small increase in productivity that lasted a short period of time.
1938: Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which required employers to pay overtime to all employees who worked more than 44 hours a week. They amended the act two years later to reduce the work week to 40 hours.
1940: The 40-hour work week became U.S. law.
Experiencing the 40-hour Workweek as an Engineer
As a software engineer, I had to constantly learn in order to do my job well. There were constantly new technologies, architectures, and business cases that came up. I tried to do this learning during the workday, and many days, that was enough. As I was trying to advance more rapidly, though, I also spent much of my time outside of work learning. That way, I could take ideas from outside my daily work and figure out how to work these new ideas in to make the systems I worked on better.
Analyzing these behaviors, I realized that I was typically in one of two phases when I was working. I was learning or I was creating. In a given day, I might bounce between these two phases several times or I might dedicate a whole day to one or the other. It was completely dependent on what I needed to do for that day.
Designing the Experiment
That’s when I developed a new theory that I intend to implement in my startup. I am breaking the 40-hour week down into two 20-hour weeks. I am also anti-overtime, so these weeks will be 20 hours max.
The week will consist of the workweek and the learning week. Each will be capped at 20 hours. I want my employees to work no more than 20 hours each week and I want them to learn no more than 20 hours each week. The rest of the time is theirs and I want them to do what they love. I don’t want them to dedicate their lives to helping me meet my goals. I want them to dedicate a focused part of their lives to help me meet my goals while I also help them meet theirs.
If someone needs time off from the work or the learning, that is totally fine with me. My employees will not be forced to arrange their lives around work. They can arrange their work around their lives.
Will this be successful? I believe it will be, but it is hard to convince people without an example case. Therefore, it is up to me to grow my startup and institute these ideas. Then I can prove my theories.
The 40-hour workweek is an outdated, artificial construction. Let’s see what we can do to get away from it.
Do you believe in the 40-hour workweek or do you think it is time for it to go? Let me know!
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