Goodness me! Well, considering you didn’t even realize it’s an example, probably best that I didn’t make it more complicated!
how do you know what evidence i do or don’t have?
Mooooom! Johnny and Fanny are fighting again!
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Oh, because you don’t. 
what?
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I would never!
I only love.
Made for a quick scroll.
She’s very entertaining!
The simplest answer is often the right answer. How about just saying yes the studies are wrong. no surprise because people like to put out studies that have conclusions they want to see.
If people run 20 studies and 19 of them say that more work equals more stuff done, and one of them says that more work equals less stuff done, which study do you think is going to get published in that prestigious journal?
Or, they’re just reading the studies wrong. Some more self-fulfilling bs. diminished productivity by hour doesn’t mean no productivity or negative.
If you read studies, like I do, you have to discount all the ones where the opposite conclusion wouldn’t get published. Or else read the data really carefully and only take studies that are on a huge population.
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My bet is this is similar to trickle down economics, which only really worked in extreme cases.
If you grind your employees to the bone then you can probably get more out of them from fewer hours. But if you already work a pretty reasonable 9-5 I too struggle to accept that if we made that a 4-day 9-5 people would suddenly crank up the notch on the other four days to make up for the lost Friday.
I think the loudest people arguing for 4-days just want same money for less work.
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You told me your name, so its strange that you dont think i know where you work.
My experience - and the data from numerous studies, suggests otherwise.
They don’t crank it up a notch to make up for friday. They just work 100% for the four days, because they have the ability to do so. There’s no more hump day nonsense. Or effing around on fridays getting little accomplished. people are working at 60-80 efficiency (source: pulled from my ass) when they’re working 5 days. It’s just too much time with no end in sight. Push it down to four days, and there’s no offtimes.
Again, based on my experience here. If my marketing person worked 5 days a week, they would be exhausted and minimally productive by friday, and in a month they’d be burnt out and quitting. And it’s not like they have deadlines, they just go hard from 8-4. And by Thursday at 4, that’s enough.
The suggestion seems to be that people are ‘working hard’ 9-5, 5 days a week. Not in any place I’ve ever seen. There’s a whole lot of nothing going on a lot of the time with almost everyone in large corp. environments.
I’m obviously just completely speculating but I don’t find it intuitive that dropping Friday would get you from 60% on M-F to at least 75% or whatever you’d need to stay whole (or ideally even greater than that). People go from spending an hour a day on GoA to outright quitting GoA!? Is this the future we want!?!?
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It likely isn’t intuitive. Nevertheless, I’m confident that it’s correct.
And I don’t think it’s 75%, I think it’s 100. The folks that work with me, I couldn’t wring another ounce of productivity out of them without breaking something. And again, that’s without me pushing deadlines or urgency (quite the opposite).
I have to tell folks to take breaks. When you’re going full out on a computer screen for an hour or two, or a whole morning, you gotta walk away, go get a coffee, go for a 20 minute walk something, to reset. And if I don’t tell them, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
Could this be specific to your sample though? If you cut JSM’s workweek to four days you think he’s still going to be able to fit in 5 hours of work?
Aren’t you a small business? I would be a lot more likely to care about my company if I worked for a small business owner. I work for a fortune 500 company; to get me to drastically change my productivity or enthusiasm, my company would first have to do a shit ton of work to convince me that they actually care about me as a human being, just going to 4 workday weeks wouldn’t do it.
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I don’t think it’s strange at all! I think it’s strange that you think it matters 
But I’m the in the extreme! I’m fully aware.
But I’ve worked office jobs before too. I’d say for the most part, people are actually working 5 out of the 8 hours they’re supposed to be there, meetings included. A lot of chit chatting, phone and web browsing, looooong bathroom breaks (probably candy crush), or just disappearance in general.
And even less on Fridays.
So it’s completely possible to cut a full day out of the week.
Its strange that you said that i dont know where you work or if you have a job at all. Is your memory that terrible that you dont remember telling me your name?
Still trying to find the relevance! I’m sure you’ll get there soon~