That's the nicest thing about working across time zones. I almost never have meetings after 3:00, so if the weather is nice, we can get out and go for a good walk, even in the winter when it gets dark early. Of course, the downside is that sometimes I have meetings at 6:30 a.m.
In the 70’s when Boeing was the largest employer in Seattle and had a substantial portion of both its production and professional staff working from one of two facilities near the downtown core, they had mostly 40 hour M-F work weeks but staggered shifts where 10 or 20 percent of the workforce arrived and departed every 30 or 60 minutes (I didn’t work there so not sure the exact numbers) to ease congestion for both employees and other commuters using the same freeways and arterials during peak hours.
I like this, and I'm sure you agree that we should have a four-day work week. But I also think there's a case for a society-wide shared day off. In the past, this was encoded in religious practice to ensure it was observed, but it's really a civic innovation, because even though nobody wants to work 7 days a week, there's an advantage to being the person who will. The sabbath is a solution to a collective action problem that guarantees shared rest. We have eroded these protections in the United States; many places are open Sundays and holidays because there is an advantage to being the only one open.
I wonder if the answer is as simple as keeping the M-F workweek, but with flexibility? For the most part, everyone has Saturday or Sunday off, but if you want to go skiing or camping one week, you could choose to do that mid-week and work on the weekend instead?
And what will you do about school days and school holidays? Shifts are possible. In Singapore, they have two in a day. But it's not simple extrapolated over 7 days - and matching up, say, two parents and three kids ... even if it is a darned good idea!
The way I see it, flexibility just makes everything easier, even school times. Even right now, school times don’t line up with office times, so parents still have to be available when school is out somehow.
There was a great cautionary tales episode on this when they rolled this out in the Soviet Union - overall it feels like a nice sentiment where the downstream effects actually make everything quite worse but I’m all for working less in general!
What I’m going for with this article is that a flexible schedule would allow individuals to better align time off with friends and family. Seems like the Stalin model arbitrarily assigned work hours to people so their time off wasn’t aligned with friends and family?
I agree wholeheartedly! Flexibility to live and work from wherever and whenever should be the new standard and the legacy of Ford should really be an exception.
I used to share this perspective, but Matthew Yglesias changed my thinking in One Billion Americans:
"[S]ociologists Cristobal Young from Stanford and Chaeyoon Lim from the University of Wisconsin ... have shown that subjective emotional well-being rises by 5 percent on average during the weekend. That’s easy enough to understand—everyone enjoys a day away from the grind. But the really interesting thing they found was that unemployed people are happier on the weekend too.
"Young and Lim find that 'workers and the unemployed experience remarkably similar increases in emotional well-being on weekends and have similar declines in well-being when the workweek begins,' and this is 'in large part because social time increases sharply on weekends for both workers and the unemployed.'
"The basic idea here is that if weekends were fun just because you didn’t have to work, they wouldn’t be fun for unemployed people. But what makes the weekend enjoyable is that it’s an opportunity to socialize with friends and family, thanks to everyone collectively not working. Which is to say that widespread observance of Veterans Day as a day off would probably generate more happiness than giving everyone a spare vacation day to use whenever they want to—even though superficially more flexible time off should be better."
This study though—5% is a very very small raise in subjective happiness. And it’s 3% for the unemployed, so an even tinier lift. I feel like that’s not enough to go on.
I think it’s true that we need shared time off, and that makes us happy. But how do we get that shared time off? I know plenty of people where one person works odd hours (a nurse) and the other person works 9-5. If that 9-5 worker could adjust to their spouses irregular hours, or could adjust where childcare would be easier, they would no doubt both be happier. Whether or not someone says they are happier on the weekends probably depends more on whether their community is all free on the weekends, which is why I think those results turned out nearly a wash.
It would be more interesting to do a survey of couples who work at different times vs same times. Or friend groups who work similar hours or not. Is there a lift on weekends then? Or not?
I have friends who work all manners of nonstandard hours, and I find coordinating a time for all of us to be together challenging. Keeping standard work / social hours allows for easier coordination for parties, etc. Also, things like weekends allow for infrastructure maintenance, etc. That said, I do agree in principle that allowing more flexible work schedules would take the load off of things like rush hour traffic.
Yeah, there’s totally a balance. My sister’s work has “core hours”—everyone is expected to be online at certain times on certain days of the week and that’s always when they have meetings. But the flexibility is still there. And let’s not forget that children’s schooling isn’t likely to change, even though work flexibility might help parents manage that!
I will just add that shifting to a 24 hour work week or similar may have an even better effect. Not only will work schedules be more spread out, but people will have more time to allocate to things like socializing and national parks.
That's the nicest thing about working across time zones. I almost never have meetings after 3:00, so if the weather is nice, we can get out and go for a good walk, even in the winter when it gets dark early. Of course, the downside is that sometimes I have meetings at 6:30 a.m.
In the 70’s when Boeing was the largest employer in Seattle and had a substantial portion of both its production and professional staff working from one of two facilities near the downtown core, they had mostly 40 hour M-F work weeks but staggered shifts where 10 or 20 percent of the workforce arrived and departed every 30 or 60 minutes (I didn’t work there so not sure the exact numbers) to ease congestion for both employees and other commuters using the same freeways and arterials during peak hours.
People just need to work less overall
I like this, and I'm sure you agree that we should have a four-day work week. But I also think there's a case for a society-wide shared day off. In the past, this was encoded in religious practice to ensure it was observed, but it's really a civic innovation, because even though nobody wants to work 7 days a week, there's an advantage to being the person who will. The sabbath is a solution to a collective action problem that guarantees shared rest. We have eroded these protections in the United States; many places are open Sundays and holidays because there is an advantage to being the only one open.
I wonder if the answer is as simple as keeping the M-F workweek, but with flexibility? For the most part, everyone has Saturday or Sunday off, but if you want to go skiing or camping one week, you could choose to do that mid-week and work on the weekend instead?
Resource saving idea....
And what will you do about school days and school holidays? Shifts are possible. In Singapore, they have two in a day. But it's not simple extrapolated over 7 days - and matching up, say, two parents and three kids ... even if it is a darned good idea!
The way I see it, flexibility just makes everything easier, even school times. Even right now, school times don’t line up with office times, so parents still have to be available when school is out somehow.
There was a great cautionary tales episode on this when they rolled this out in the Soviet Union - overall it feels like a nice sentiment where the downstream effects actually make everything quite worse but I’m all for working less in general!
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/when-stalin-killed-the-weekend-a-happiness-lab-cautionary-tales-crossover
What I’m going for with this article is that a flexible schedule would allow individuals to better align time off with friends and family. Seems like the Stalin model arbitrarily assigned work hours to people so their time off wasn’t aligned with friends and family?
I agree wholeheartedly! Flexibility to live and work from wherever and whenever should be the new standard and the legacy of Ford should really be an exception.
Totally!
This is a great example of thinking outside the box. Thanks for writing this up!
Thanks Akhil!
I used to share this perspective, but Matthew Yglesias changed my thinking in One Billion Americans:
"[S]ociologists Cristobal Young from Stanford and Chaeyoon Lim from the University of Wisconsin ... have shown that subjective emotional well-being rises by 5 percent on average during the weekend. That’s easy enough to understand—everyone enjoys a day away from the grind. But the really interesting thing they found was that unemployed people are happier on the weekend too.
"Young and Lim find that 'workers and the unemployed experience remarkably similar increases in emotional well-being on weekends and have similar declines in well-being when the workweek begins,' and this is 'in large part because social time increases sharply on weekends for both workers and the unemployed.'
"The basic idea here is that if weekends were fun just because you didn’t have to work, they wouldn’t be fun for unemployed people. But what makes the weekend enjoyable is that it’s an opportunity to socialize with friends and family, thanks to everyone collectively not working. Which is to say that widespread observance of Veterans Day as a day off would probably generate more happiness than giving everyone a spare vacation day to use whenever they want to—even though superficially more flexible time off should be better."
I love One Billion Americans!!!!!
This study though—5% is a very very small raise in subjective happiness. And it’s 3% for the unemployed, so an even tinier lift. I feel like that’s not enough to go on.
I think it’s true that we need shared time off, and that makes us happy. But how do we get that shared time off? I know plenty of people where one person works odd hours (a nurse) and the other person works 9-5. If that 9-5 worker could adjust to their spouses irregular hours, or could adjust where childcare would be easier, they would no doubt both be happier. Whether or not someone says they are happier on the weekends probably depends more on whether their community is all free on the weekends, which is why I think those results turned out nearly a wash.
It would be more interesting to do a survey of couples who work at different times vs same times. Or friend groups who work similar hours or not. Is there a lift on weekends then? Or not?
I have friends who work all manners of nonstandard hours, and I find coordinating a time for all of us to be together challenging. Keeping standard work / social hours allows for easier coordination for parties, etc. Also, things like weekends allow for infrastructure maintenance, etc. That said, I do agree in principle that allowing more flexible work schedules would take the load off of things like rush hour traffic.
Yeah, there’s totally a balance. My sister’s work has “core hours”—everyone is expected to be online at certain times on certain days of the week and that’s always when they have meetings. But the flexibility is still there. And let’s not forget that children’s schooling isn’t likely to change, even though work flexibility might help parents manage that!
I will just add that shifting to a 24 hour work week or similar may have an even better effect. Not only will work schedules be more spread out, but people will have more time to allocate to things like socializing and national parks.
Yes that’s true. Some combination of less work and flexibility shifts that time, as we saw during the pandemic.