From HBR: “The Case for the 6-Hour Workday”

The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19-century socialism. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week. But so much has changed since then. The internet fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and play, and the nature of work itself has transitioned in large part from algorithmic tasks to heuristic ones that require critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and uninterrupted stretches of time to get into a state of flow. How can you foster a shorter, more productive workday for your own team? Make it okay for employees to not be in a hyper-responsive state. Encourage employees to turn off notifications and batch-check e-mails. Block off time in calendars to allow for several hours of uninterrupted work each day. Cut your default meeting time from 60 minutes to 30 minutes. By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life.
— Read on hbr.org/2018/12/the-case-for-the-6-hour-workday

We are fans of the idea surrounding the 6-hour workday. As we have said before, this is definitely possible. Sure, it’ll take some effort to implement, but it’s completely possible. Our interview with Charlotte Lockhart delved into some of the methods to do this.

We here a TBP don’t like using time as a metric for performance. Time is easy to measure, we recommend finding better metrics than time to evaluate performance.