The 9 to 5 workday is a product of nineteenth-century socialism. Back when there was no upper limit to the hours that organisations could demand of factory workers when the industrial revolution saw children as young as six years old working the coal mines and 100 hour work weeks were the norm, the American labor unions fought hard to instill a 5-day work week and 8-hour work day.
As is still the case today, Government — or in this case the United States Congress — lagged behind industry, ratifying the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, a decade after industrial behemoths such as Ford had already mandated forty hour weeks.
It was arguably a much simpler time as far as the means of production was concerned. While white collar work and creative industries did exist, they were the domain of the elite few as opposed to the domain of the many. The masses were employed by industry to execute on simple algorithmic tasks, on the factory floor, where one’s level of output was almost always conflated with their hours worked.
Since the first industrial revolution of the 1800s gave us machines, chemical manufacturing, iron production, steam power, and the factory system, we’ve lived through two more industrial revolutions. Today’s third industrial revolution has given us computers, the internet and new sources of energy, all helping to reduce the cost of producing and distributing goods and services virtually to zero.
While the services industry and manufacturing are not dead yet, human beings are, in great numbers, transitioning to jobs that require us to move beyond the mindless execution of procedure towards jobs that require critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, and people management, particularly in the west. Hours worked is not directly conflated with, nor is it a good indicator of output when it comes to such work.
This is reflected in US Labor Statistics which demonstrate that since the turn of the Century, manufacturing output has increased whilst manufacturing employment has decreased (see below), while in Australia, manufacturing jobs dropped 24 percent in the five years to 2016 alone.
Additionally, over the past ten to fifteen years we’ve seen the emergence of affordable digital technologies that empower us to do much more with much less. For example, Blockbuster Video’s bricks and mortar business was worth US$5 billion at its peak, and it had to employ 60,000 people worldwide to achieve this feat. Today, Netflix’s digital business is worth over US$170 billion and has little more than 5,500 employees. That’s 34 times the value with one-twelfth the workforce — the power of exponentially growing digital technologies at work.
Yet, despite this transition from algorithmic to heuristic work, despite having access to technologies that empower us to work and collaborate from anywhere, at any time, and automate much of what we previously did (including diagnosing diseases and painting Rembrandts), the 9 to 5 workday still reigns supreme. Not only that, but in many organisations and professions, people are expected to be physically present long after 5pm, regardless of whether or not they are actually being productive or have any cognitive channel capacity left.
In a recent Linkedin post by Adam Grant, Wharton Professor and bestselling author of books such as Originals, the case was made for transitioning to a 6-hour workday and calling time at 3pm. His reasoning for this was that productivity is more about attention management and less about time management. The modern psychology and neuroscience literature seems to agree.
Flow has been defined as a mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus — think surfing or writing an article. First coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, you might yourself have referred to flow as being “in the zone”. What is less widely understood is that it is, in fact, a physiological state. A 10-year McKinsey study on flow and productivity found that top executives are 500 percent more productive when in flow — 500 percent! There are a number of psychological, environmental and social triggers that help people to get into flow such as an intense focus on a single task where the challenge to skill ratio is just right (neither getting bored by ease nor disgruntled by difficulty). Author Cal Newport echoed these sentiments in his bestselling book, Deep Work, a term that is synonymous with flow. He says that “in order to produce at an elite level, one must get into flow”.
Yet our organisation are plagued with anything but flow. Just a fraction of the ways many organisations and their day-to-day practices sabotage flow:
But here’s the thing, even if you have the ‘perfect environment’, one that is geared towards your people getting into flow, you can only really operate at this intense level for several hours a day. Cal Newport says that “three to four hours of continuous, undisturbed deep work each day is all that it takes to see a transformational change in our productivity and our lives”. Sherry Walling, author, host of the Zen Founder podcast and clinical psychologist, echoed these sentiments on my podcast, putting the upper limits of flow at “about five hours”.
I’ve felt this many times, especially when writing, or doing some manner of work that requires me to be completely and uncompromisingly creative and/or focused. While writing my forthcoming Wiley book, Employee to Entrepreneur, I took some time out and spent a week in Bangkok to work on the manuscript. Each day, I’d wrap up an early morning work-out and make my way to a local cafe for some an 8am start, powered by some black Thai coffee. I’d do away with all distractions, turn off all notifications, put my phone away and instead of listening to music, I’d listen to binaural beats (check out Brain.FM) to help me get into flow.
Once there, I was focused, and managed to churn out 5,000 words most mornings. But by 11am, I was proverbially cooked. I’d head out for a wonder, maybe sneak in a cheeky Thai beef salad, and by the early afternoon, I was back at it. Only this time, I usually managed another 2,000 to 3,000 words and by 3pm or 4pm, I was more or less done for the day. I could persevere but by this point, any subsequent efforts would have been mostly in vain, generating a much lower quantity and quality of words per minute for my time. I opted instead to spend the rest of the day exploring temples and museums, exploring the city by bicycle and partaking in Muay Thai classes.
With this in mind, I decided to challenge the 9 to 5 work day at Collective Campus and run an experiment; the 9 to 3 workday.
For context’s sake, we’re a corporate innovation accelerator (which means we train, consult and run startup accelerator programs for big corporates wanting to become more innovative). We’ve been around since early 2015, generate seven figures, have a core team of eight employees with an extended team of about 20 contract-based facilitators, consultants, assistants, designers and developers. We’ve worked with over 50 big brands globally (including the likes of BNP Paribas, National Australia Bank, Clifford Chance, Microsoft and Village Roadshow) and have incubated over 100 startups that have collectively raised over US$20M. During this time, I managed to self-publish two books and subsequently scored a book deal with global publishing house Wiley, and I launched a podcast which is now almost 300 episodes strong. As a team, we launched Lemonade Stand (a children’s entrepreneurship program that’s been rolled out to over 1,000 kids) and Konkrete, a distributed share registry on the blockchain, which we’re currently raising capital for.
In terms of output, we’re no slouches. This output has been made possible because we’ve leveraged many tools and tactics to optimise our output, some of which I touched on earlier.
For example, we:
Interestingly, on 80/20, when I announced that we were embarking upon this experiment on LinkedIn, the founder of a company fired back with the following.
Several — most likely false — assumptions underpin this comment:
Since our inception as a company, despite offering the team the opportunity to work remotely, we’ve more or less found ourselves working what has amounted to an 8:30am to 6:30pm work day, give or take, despite often feeling that afternoon slump at around 3:30pm. So it was time to run an experiment. Doing things because “that’s the way they’ve always been done around here” or because “that’s what everybody else does” is rarely a good reason to do things, especially not when you run an innovation accelerator! Given how much our world has changed since the Fair Labor Standards Act came into effect, it makes sense to experiment with different styles of work.
Peter Drucker said that if you can measure it you can manage it. It’s not enough to run the experiment and simply use people’s opinions and your own observations after the fact as to whether or not people were productive.
We didn’t only want to measure productivity, but employee wellness, energy and morale.
2. Define how you’ll measure it.
Use smart metrics that you can compare to previous periods.
As an aside, watch out for false positives and false negatives. This was not a completely isolated scientific experiment by any stretch of the imagination. For example, I had just returned from a week away so my general energy and wellness numbers may have been impacted accordingly. Similarly, one of my colleagues is on the fund-raising trail, which means an uphill slog and can sometimes mean hearing “no” nine times for every single “yes”, and people saying one thing but doing another, which ultimately could have adversely impacted his energy and wellness numbers — something he admitted to.
The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.