[HN Gopher] Managers say 4-6p.m. is now a work 'dead zone.'
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Managers say 4-6p.m. is now a work 'dead zone.'
Author : jedberg
Score : 19 points
Date : 2023-07-24 20:55 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > Gone are the days of the standard nine-to-five workday for many
| in the US. Say hello to the "triple-peak" workday.
|
| Degrading boundaries and mixing work into all hours of my life?
| No thanks.
| sublinear wrote:
| Why does anyone care about this? You're not going to squeeze more
| work out of people by analyzing or playing games with hours.
| You're just pissing your employees off. Get your estimates, set
| your deadlines, and then leave them alone as much as possible.
|
| If that's not good enough your real problems are bad planning,
| poor prioritization, or just being clueless in general. You want
| more productivity? Fire all non-technical middle management
| immediately and promote technical talent from within. These
| idiots are the direct source of all the wasted time. They need to
| be babysat, maybe even more so than the kids at home, with
| constant meetings or multiple explanations when they've already
| been given enough information long ago and are also the source of
| burnout for the single people working at 10pm. This becomes a
| vicious cycle when work becomes uninspiring at best or chaotic at
| worst.
|
| As the saying goes: people don't quit their job. They quit their
| boss.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| The org structure is broken. One of the reasons why so many
| companies beat large companies in cheap money environment was
| because they could use that money on real execution aka, less
| management.
|
| The large companies could never produce as many useful products
| in a cheap money environment because they have hamstrung
| themselves with layers and layers and layers of managers, each
| with their own agendas.
| jpitz wrote:
| Anyone else think this is a consequence of households converging
| on dual-income due to flat earnings vs cost of living?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know. The majority of households that I'm familiar with
| have always been dual-income. Being able to live on a single
| income became something only the wealthy could afford (in my
| part of the US, anyway) decades ago.
| jedberg wrote:
| For sure. Now that dual income is expected to maintain the cost
| of living, no one is left to do housework and child care. Which
| means either outsourcing that to someone who makes less than
| your lowest earner, or taking time off to care for the kids and
| housework.
|
| But honestly as an employer, I'd rather people take a few hours
| off to tend to their family's needs then stick around being
| unproductive and then having a stressful family life too. But
| most corporations don't think that way. Especially since the
| ones in charge are usually single income earners with staff to
| take care of the house.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > You can imagine the effect on collaboration if your colleagues
| need something from you, but you won't be back on until after
| they've all logged off for the day.
|
| I mean, "core hours" have been a thing long before mass-WFH and
| the pandemic. Companies can keep the overall workday flexible
| while insisting on availability during, say, 11AM to 2PM or
| something.
|
| Where I work, Fridays have become totally dead. Pre-WFH, Fridays
| were pretty slow, but if you needed something from someone, you
| could at least stalk them and eventually ambush them at their
| desk. Now? Good luck, it's almost impossible to get ahold of
| anyone synchronously on Fridays. So how do you deal? Make sure
| everything requiring synchronous communication happens Mon-Thu.
| Not a huge problem.
| eschneider wrote:
| Is this such a huge problem? The coworker I work most closely
| with is twelve time zones away, so we have almost no overlap
| other than a few evening(for me)/morning(for them) meetings
| during the week.
|
| The usual stuff works: write things down, think ahead about
| info you might need, and try not to leave things until the last
| minute.
|
| With a bit of planning and consideration for your coworkers,
| the lack of sync isn't a big problem for a lot of jobs.
| tj-teej wrote:
| "roughly 30% of Microsoft employees in the study now had a third
| productivity peak at about 10 p.m"
|
| Maybe I'm naive but I'm surprised one in three workers at
| Microsoft have a productivity spike at 10pm (they said it's
| measured by keyboard usage).
| JohnFen wrote:
| > (they said it's measured by keyboard usage).
|
| Which is not well-correlated to being productive.
| doubled112 wrote:
| If I'm still working at 10pm, there's a good chance it's
| gibberish due to falling asleep at the keyboard and drool, or
| me waking up really fast as my face hits it.
|
| Even in an outage or emergency, I'm probably bored, exhausted
| and useless before then. Assuming I started at my standard 8am,
| of course.
| theduder99 wrote:
| maybe this is a veiled reference to their offshore employees.
| dangus wrote:
| If you're a parent, you might end up getting real shit done
| when your kids are asleep.
| mydriasis wrote:
| https://archive.is/vEIId
| damnesian wrote:
| It's a dead zone regardless. Most real concentrated work for
| 8-5ers trails off around 3. It's a basic truth of human
| cognition.
| morkalork wrote:
| Then people book meetings in the 10-3 window and not the end of
| the day! Way to blow the most productive hours.
| silisili wrote:
| Quite the opposite for me. I'm a 10 to 6er. 4 to 6 is when I have
| most uninterrupted time...perhaps because it's a dead zone for
| everyone else?
| fullsend wrote:
| Gasp! Next "Managers" will be saying that Friday is now a work
| "relaxed zone".
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(page generated 2023-07-24 23:02 UTC)