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The real debate isnt / wasnt about how long the work week should be (70/60/50/40).

It’s should and will always be about how productive those hours actually are. You see, no knowledge worker puts out more than 2.5 to 5 hours of real work in a day. That’s 12.5 to 25 hours of productive work in a week. The rest? It’s just meetings, updates and moving things around. Five-day work weeks? If you’re measuring by butts in seats, sure. But if you’re looking at actual output, it’s a joke. We need to obsess over productive time, not clocking hours. The attendance/week hours mindset is a pseudo-metric killing the workforce, making us focus on quantity over quality. Think about it: As a knowledge worker - your days are filled with meetings, status updates, and email threads. How much of that is real, impactful work? Very little. We’re stuck in busyness, mistaking it for productivity. But then again, if orgs obsess on outcomes only, employees will call them out: 'You don’t see my effort to go from A to Z, you don’t acknowledge it.' Hence, orgs measure you by hours. And for those thinking, 'Pay me by hours, overtime factored in' – great on paper, but useless for knowledge workers. IMHO, we are way more more comfortable measuring by hours than outcomes. We rave about deep work, about focus hours, but in reality we laude how long someone stays logged in. Weird isn't it.

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StudentInDilemma

Student

3 months ago

We Indians have an inborn dihaadi wala attitude that's why we are measured by hours and not quality work. But I know many startups where no of hours don't matter . If you have finished 5 day work in 2 days then you can relax those 3 days.
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SweatyDonut2

Student

3 months ago

Nah man, you will be given work for the next 3 days straight away. Also there is no EOD in startups although everyone knows how much the task will take, according to my experience.
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