The 9-to-5 is dumb
Let's get real about work.
It’s been almost 100 years since Henry Ford first introduced the 9-to-5 workday. Until then, people had been working 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and the only job roles were coal miner and child coal miner. It was the revolution the working world needed, and a massive gain in worker’s rights. Now, people could enjoy lives where they would work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours, and enjoy 8 hours of free time everyday. Despite being a schedule that was designed for factory workers in the 1920s, it actually proved to be the perfect work schedule for almost all jobs, for the rest of time.
Except, that would be really weird wouldn’t it?
The 9-to-5 has become such an institution among the working world that questioning it is a bit shameful. You can’t help but feel you’re lazy, or somehow uncommitted for suggesting that a work schedule invented 100 years ago might be outdated. Except, on the face of it, that seems like a really sensible thing to think. The sort of work we do now is so vastly different compared to 100 years ago, that we should expect the optimum schedule be different now. Our working lives are changing so fast that everything should be up for review.
In 2018, 2000 British office workers revealed how much they actually work each day. The average response was 2 hours and 53 minutes. At first glance this looks borderline despicable. These white-collar schmucks are getting paid ridiculous salaries to make a couple of Powerpoint decks and look at Reddit all day. Anyone who works a blue-collar job would probably look at this number and despair - but having worked both types of job, I totally get it.
People who work in trades, warehouses, and construction are probably productive for much larger chunks of their day. I helped fit kitchens for a while, and I can confirm that we really were using the full work day to get things done. However, this was because most of what we were doing was fairly mindless. Learning the skill wasn’t (the people I worked under spent years being educated) but we didn’t spend an enormous amount of time actually focusing. Most of the time you’re just doing physical labour. Lifting, hammering, sawing, etc. - you’ve seen Bob the Builder before.
This is made possible because it turns out the reserves of our bodies are way bigger than the reserves of our brains. There’s a reason people can run ultra marathons, but you can’t pay attention after 5 hours at your desk. The brain runs in sprints. If you know any white guys who take ice baths, you’ve probably heard of the book Deep Work. It’s on their shelf next to Atomic Habits, and their framed photo of Andrew Huberman. It suggests we’re only able to focus on cognitively taxing work for about 4 hours a day. If you’ve worked cognitively taxing jobs, that sounds about right!
There’s a moment each day where the mental cost of more thinking becomes too high. Your brain is a hot mush that needs to nap, or watch YouTube shorts until it’s dark outside. It’s like holding a light dumbbell above your head. At first, it seems pretty easy, but after a while, that 5kg feels like you’re holding a Kia Sorento. I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, but this strikes me as expected. Our ancestors didn’t spend 8 hours a day doing spreadsheets. They spent most of their time walking around, scavenging, and driving cars that you power with your feet.
So, I can’t help but wonder why we’re all still pretending that this work schedule is a good fit for the modern office worker? How much time, energy, and well being is wasted each day by people staring blankly at a screen to keep up appearances in front of their boss? Why are we holding on, desperately, to Ford’s schedule as if it were carved into a marble tablet that floated down from the heavens?
Despite what hustle grind-set people may think, rest is very important for productivity. I once heard Arnie say that if you want to get ahead, you should “sleep faster” so you can work more hours of the day. That’s really dumb!
“Come with me if you want to burnout, be depressed, and do shit work.”
I think I’ll dedicate a whole post to this at some point, but sleep is so underrated. Being well rested can defend against depression, improve judgment, improve attention span, and improve physical fitness (among many other benefits, like not feeling shit all the time). Getting proper sleep is one of the closest things we have to a silver bullet for improving health. Yet, we still need to peel ourselves out of bed at 6am, to make it to the office for 9am, just to work for 4 hours over the course of the next 8. It’s lunacy!
It’s at this point where I start to feel like our commitment to this work schedule almost becomes a moral issue. An increasing number of us are engaging in Revenge Bedtime Procrastination - delaying sleep so we get some time to actually do what we want. I don’t think it’s a rare experience to feel that despite only being at work from 9-to-5, the added commute makes you feel like your entire life from Monday to Friday is dedicated to work. You wake up early, commute, work, commute, make dinner, shower, and are then left with a choice. Go to bed to start the whole cycle over, or do something you actually like and be sleep deprived. It’s unsurprising that some people choose the latter in order to feel like they have some control over their lives, but the increased stress from sleep deprivation inevitably catches up with them.
All this harm, and for what? So we can feel safe doing things how they’ve always been done? Why care about that? When the data says we can be just as productive working fewer hours, it seems like a great opportunity! We can achieve all we want, but spend more time with our loved ones. We can have hobbies. We can exercise. We can save money on childcare. We can cook better food. We can do housework without having to cram it all on the weekend. Hell, we can even just sit down and watch a show we like. These are all good things that are currently being exchanged for unproductive bullshitting.
Most of us know that in the coming years we’re going to be needed less and less in the workplace. However, we’re already needed less. We did it! Thousands of years of human toil and effort to get to a point where we can live good lives with less work, and some of us are actually there now. An irrational and dogmatic attachment to a century-old expectation of what the work day looks like is a crappy reason not to grasp such an enormous gain.
I worked a 40 hr/week job over the summer. This fall, I’m working a similar job 20 hr/week. I don’t have any hard numbers, but I feel like I’m getting work done within a similar number of days at my current job as I did over the summer. At first, this might seem wild - am I being twice as time-efficient as I was during the summer? But it makes a lot of sense given what you describe. My efficiency is the same for the most productive hours of the day as it was over the summer; I’ve just cut out the less productive hours.
This needs to be said!