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I remember when 4 day weeks (7.5/8 hour days) were touted by governments (Euro & Aus) as being good for the workers, although their real intent was to boost employment.
Many companies that tried it found the employees got just as much work done in the 4 days as they used to perform in 5 days, few different reasons:
- employees had a day to get their other stuff done, so not distracted (or taking sickies)
- employees worried the other guy that fills in may replace them worked that little bit harder.
... (commonly considered more likely previously they stretched the same [target] amount of work to 5 days.)
- blah blah whole bunch more "expert" analysis
downsides
- for "customer service" staff no choice, employers needed people to fill those days
- the boost to employment ended up to be bugger all, so govt stopped talking about it
.... ('yes it's good for the voters, but not for us so who gives a sh*t')
yes it's proven to be a damn good idea ...
but mostly because [higher skilled positions] the boss wants you on hand all the time, to ask stupid questions, or be there for 'emergencies' (customers asking hard questions) they generally don't like to offer it.
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10 hours a day is not good, especially by the time you've added two journeys and lunch to it (if you're lucky enough to get a lunch break).
I used to do it 7 days a week and quite frankly, it was a living hell:
Wake up
Quick splash
Catch train
Program bloody computers for 10 hours
Catch train
Pray off-license would still be open by the time the train arrived so you could have half-an-hour of beer-time
Go to sleep
Repeat ad nauseum until burn-out
Monumentally unproductive!
Now, granted, it would feel a little different if there was three day weekend coming rather than no weekend at all, but to be honest the last two or three hours of the shift would rarely produce anything useful. I'd be tired, my head would screaming through eyestrain and I'd pretty much lost the will to live by then.
Assuming your actually working flat out, 7 hours is about the max for a genuinely productive day's coding.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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I ended up arranging mine to work every other day, working Sunday and Monday together with Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday off. My commute was short and the lunch hour was included in the ten hours and consisted of a sandwich or something at my desk.
I kept it up for five years without any real issues.
Seven days a week is nuts even for 7 hour days.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I'd find every other day a bit weird, I think, but maybe I could adapt to it.
Did you find that you were never really switching off at the "weekend", though? It's good to have those two straight days ...
And, yes, 7 days is many miles beyond stupid, I just had a PHB who thought otherwise at the time (needless to say, he was more than happy to bugger off hours before the rest of us and we never saw him at the weekend).
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Of course you burned out. 10 hour days 7 days a week is 70 hours + commute time.
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Why is the song "Eight days a week" now playing in my head, must be friday afternoon 
And rejoice, because tomorrow it's Kings day here in the Netherlands 
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RickZeeland wrote: And rejoice, because tomorrow it's Kings day here in the Netherlands
Pah! That's nothing - it's Poets Day here in the UK today!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Piss On Everything Tomorrows Saturday
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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RickZeeland wrote: And rejoice, because tomorrow it's Kings day here in the Netherlands
My street has already turned into one giant pub!
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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The cynic in me wants to say that 4x10 hours can easily turn into 5x10 hours.
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My experience has been that the "normal" 5x8 tends to turn into 5x10 anyway (or 4x8 + 1x24, or 5xuntil-you-can't-see-straight, or something like that). Point is, once I'm "in the zone," I tend to want to keep going as long as I can, rather than stop at a particular point on the clock and have to reboot my brain the next morning. Plus, with all the typical interruptions during business hours, I often don't really start being productive until 4 or 5pm anyway. Having three days a week off would almost have to be a positive.
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I suppose it mostly depends on who your customers are and what your role is. I'm self-employed and work from home, so I'm basically 'on call' 24/5. Luckily, the majority of my customers are within a time zone and operate 'normal' business hours. (8-5) Also, through years of hard work, current products are stable and don't require a great deal of support. 
Forogar wrote: How would you feel about such a change to your schedule?
To be honest, I think I would wind up working anyway. The truth is, over 10 years ago due to IRS problems and an addiction to golf, I found a Saturday job where I was unsupervised and that allowed me to spend 90% of my time working on my laptop. About a year ago I tried to quit the Saturday job but they begged me to at least work a couple of days a month, so I agreed. (it all goes to taxes anyway)
Another truth...there's been many weekends doing the yardwork where I look forward to Monday! Maybe I'm a workaholic, but they won't let me quit!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Quote: an addiction to golf
That must have been Volkswagen Golf
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RickZeeland wrote: That must have been Volkswagen Golf
I wish my golf involved farfegnugen! (auto-correct is no help here, sorry for the ms!) 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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would love it.
I think this could seriously work. AS others have pointed it out you need coverage 24/7 or 8/5 just have people pick differing days of the week. I would love to have Wed or Mon off and work every Friday. Sign me up.
It is an idea whose time has come for those of us who work a desk job. Seriously some weeks I only need to work about 3-4 hours to get my entire job done for the week. Other weeks. 40 isn't enough. But I find that when I work 40 the quality of the work I produce goes down. So I need that time away from the coding screen and away from work in order to get my mind working right.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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Around 94 I was working half-time.
40-hour-weeks.
Every second week. That made for 9 consecutive days off. Every second week. Was nice ![Beer | [beer]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/beer.gif)
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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For most of '96 and '97 I worked 12 hour shifts with every other Sunday off. (union rules) I was a machine operator at a box plant...running a 2 color flexographic/die-cutter/folder/gluer. For those two years, the 2nd shift position was vacant/training mostly due to hiring people off the street with no experience. It was good money and no time to spend it. I wasn't single when it started, but I was at the end...that was a good thing! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I would love it, but the cynic in me fears it would, over time, lead to 5 - 10 hour days per week.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Years ago, one one my colleagues lived by a 6 day week - 6 days of 28 hours = 168 hours, rather than 7 days of 24 hours = 168 hours. Monday mornings when we arrived at 08:00, he had been working for 5-6 hours already. Tuesdays he started out an hour or two before us, Wednesdays a couple hours later, and Thursdays he wasn't there until after lunch. Fridays he wasn't there at all, having worked enough hours the first four days of the week.
This company employed you to get things done, not to sit there for 40 hours a week. If you completed your tasks in significantly less than 40 h/week, you were expected to be assigned more tasks. If your tasks required much more than 40 h/week, you were expected to ask for an assistant to offload you. Noone counted hours by the minutes. Certainly this simplified the formal issues of adapting to a 6*28 schedule, and the guys in his team managed to schedule meetings to fit his daily rythm.
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One employer I had in the early 90s changed to a two-week schedule consisting of 9 hours on Monday through Thursday, plus an 8-hour Friday and a Friday off.
Scheduling was such that they ensured that they had essential tasks covered every Friday. (e.g. there were two of us doing System Management of OpenVMS systems, and we couldn't have the same Fridays off.)
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: two-week schedule consisting of 9 hours on Monday through Thursday, plus an 8-hour Friday and a Friday off
This is similar to my work schedule; Tuesdays through Friday have an extra hour added, and I have every other Monday off. There are others whose day is Friday. Either way, such is a WONDERFUL schedule: that extra "rest" day is very recuperative and it gives you a day to schedule all of those activities that MUST be during your normal work hours (doctor, dentist, automotive maintenance, home service personnel, etc.).
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Forogar wrote: I am now working a 34-hour week which counts a full-time or part-time depending upon who you ask.
However, the days are 7, 7, 7, 7 and 6 hours (on Friday)
I have what in Germany is called the "Gleitzeit-Job". My contract is for 35 hours per week and a "valid" work range from 06:00h to 19:00h. Extra hours to be taken as spare time 1:1. I theroetically can do what I want, but...
Forogar wrote: and I was thinking of seeing if I can change this to four 8.5-hour days
This is something we can't do, at least oficially on regular basis. We could do several weeks in a row like this, changing the free day. But it has to have an end and then be a 5 days week for a while. But I can still do two days early, two days later and one at home, if I would like to.
At the end, I usually work 5 days a week from [6:30, 07:00] to [14:45, 15:30] and get a day / couple of days off from time to time when I want / need them.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Forogar wrote: How would you feel about such a change to your schedule?
Please do.
I can probably reach 30-40 hrs a week. At the moment reaching 0 hrs.
Flexibility means I could be productive somewhere 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Yipes - you had me really scared for a moment. You mean a four-day WORK WEEK.
It seems that, under (not) your plan we'd have two twenty-hour days between weekends.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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