Work Schedules for Humans

Addi: 0:00

Hey everybody. This is Addison Barry, and you're listening to the Osio Labs podcast. The show that explores the question,"how can we create sustainable businesses that care for people and make the world a better place?" On today's episode, I'm joined by Blake Hall. This is episode number 10, about the rhythms and schedules of work. Everyone is familiar with the 40 hour work week and even the latest chatter about four day work weeks. Blake and I are going to dig into where the work we came from and what that means for real people trying to live lives that don't always line up with the nine to five grind. We take a look at some of the natural and personal rhythms in our lives and how that affects our work. I guess a good place to start off is just some context for why I even wanted to do this podcast because originally it was Because I want to talk about the four day work week and just sort of flexible schedules at work. And then I was thinking more about, even outside of the work week, like what are the rhythms and schedules and things that affect us like throughout our lives, throughout the year, and I was particularly struck by it because it's the middle of winter, like we're approaching the solstice, the winter solstice here in a little bit. It's quite dark here in Denmark and it affects me. It changes my, my energy. And so i've been thinking about well, how does what does that mean for work? Like how am I showing up for work in these circumstances? And you and I had been talking about this a little bit and I think it's a The four day work week is huge. Everybody's talking about it. It's All the rage, since Covid in particular, but I wanted to also just sort of expand and talk beyond the 4 day work week. Because while I think that's a great conversation. I don't I think it's still extremely limited in terms of what we're even talking about. Why are we talking about? The amount of time that we're at work in particular. So I think to start off with, I just wanted to do a very quick summary of how we got to the 40 hour work week. That is the standard in most places today. A lot of that started back in the 1800s. And that's because people were working more like 80 to 100 hours a week. They were working nonstop and that was part of the industrial revolution. Before that, people worked because they needed to, when they needed to. Uh, especially

Blake: 2:26

was a lot more cyclical.

Addi: 2:28

right. Like if you're looking at something like farming, in the summertime, there's more daylight, things are growing. You know, when harvest happens, harvest has to happen. So you work long days and you get it done, but then in the winter, everything sort of comes down and the whole rhythm changes. But then with the industrial revolution in the 1800s, we had machines that changed everything and you know, people wanted to squeeze that productivity. And it was really interesting that, so our current 40 hour work week that we have now. was legally instituted in the United States in 1940. So that's 80 some years ago. And that didn't actually get, established in Canada until the 1960s. So it's quite a bit later. And then the, the article I was reading was, is actually from a place in the UK. And actually, in the UK, in 1998, they now have a law that it's a 40 hour work week for workers under the age of 18. But it's 48 hours if you are over the age of 18.

Blake: 3:30

That blew my mind when I saw that.

Addi: 3:33

yeah.

Blake: 3:35

that was wild.

Addi: 3:35

I was like, what? What just, wow. sO that's sort of a sense of like, you know, the timeline for where this conversation has come from. And also, I want to point out that you and I work for an American company and so our conversation is based on the expectations and standards that we have in the U. S. By and large. I live in Denmark, and. I mean, they have the standard 40 hour work week here too, but there are, I don't know, sort of different expectations around work environment and things like vacation and stuff here. So, I just want to put that out there as context to that. We are definitely talking about this entire conversation from an American lens, a Northern hemisphere lens, like, all of these things. So, just to establish that. So. It's just, it was interesting because I, the, in looking at the timeline to how we got to where we got, Henry Ford actually started a lot of this 40 hour work week thing because people would normally working six days a week or they were working eight, you know, 10 hours a day or something along those lines and he actually determined that the Extra productivity that you got out of those extra hours wasn't actually worth it. Like it was not significant enough to be worth it. And so he cut his people to 40 hours a week. And that's, that was like a big push in, in the, uh, the overall parade to get us to where we are now.

Blake: 5:05

And looking at that from, you know, kind of a current day situation, it's wild that one of the titans of industry is sort of the one responsible for limiting the work week in that way. I mean, I can't imagine,

Addi: 5:19

Mm hmm.

Blake: 5:20

you know, Jeff Bezos, for example, Deciding on a four day work week for the folks working at Amazon Fulfillment Centers. That just seems, uh, very far fetched,

Addi: 5:32

Yeah. And I mean, and it's interesting, right? Because it's the same conversation where you have, what is productive time? How, how, what are you squeezing out of a person? Based on time versus effectiveness versus, you know, a million other ways that you could measure their output or their value. And there's this idea of, like, squeezing is absolutely much out of a person's time as you possibly can and that there are diminishing returns. Like, it's proven over and over again. They're just diminishing returns. On that, in terms of what is productive? I mean, that's a whole other conversation and I don't want to go down like the, the productivity guru, you know, realm of things, but it's interesting that like, you know, so that was like in the 1920s or something. And he saw a difference between 40 hours versus 48 hours. There was a significant enough difference for him to make that decision. And people continue to look at things now and like, you can look at reports. It's like in an eight hour office worker day, how many of those hours are actually productive? And it ends up being somewhere between like two to four hours.

Blake: 6:46

Right,

Addi: 6:46

And so again, it's sort of like, what is productivity? Like, what is it that we're actually trying to do here? Like, what are we trying to get out of this, this magical work day that needs to happen? And this can change for different businesses, of course, too, right? Like productivity for our company is very different than productivity in, a factory for instance, or even in. Knowledge work, there are a lot of places out there that have billable hours. And so that, that changes the equation we're talking about a bit. I find it fascinating that we do billable hours, that we charge a third party a dollar amount for an hour of time, pretty much regardless of what actually happens during that hour of time.

Blake: 7:38

Yeah, the whole, the whole concept of time is money is sort of a fascinating thing to try to dig into. Because when you start looking at it, it's like, time is money, ooh, and, and what does that serve, right? You sort of have Your average worker who's selling their labor in exchange for a wage to survive. And then you have a business owner trying to eat as much productivity out of those hours they're paying for, so they can make as much money as possible and the business can succeed. So depending on which lens you're looking at it from the, the time is money conversation can, can be different. And the metaphor for that can sort of be. Kind of a, a tool to exploit people, or it can be, you know, a way to secure your future, or it can be something hanging over your head that makes you anxious and nervous. There's all sorts of feelings and kind of thoughts that come up with the whole time is money thing. And I think. A lot of folks, especially in sort of American tech culture in particular, don't really stop and think about like where that expression came from or what the ramifications of saying something like time is money actually are in terms of impacting the human beings that make up a business.

Addi: 9:07

Yeah. And I mean, it's a whole other road of conversation is of course, just like capitalism and, the using up of a resource. And so time as a resource that needs to be, or can be exploited, can be used and can be exchanged for money to make money for those in power, I know you had mentioned, the saving time book. And so we're not going to have like a book chat about that. But one of the things I found interesting was talking about the history of clocks and the tracking of time. And that also very much lines up with the industrial revolution and being able to coordinate things on time and having these schedules that are imposed imposed schedules. Thank you. Um, instead of say, natural rhythms and schedules that are happening, right? Like, our day is 24 hours long. Yes. In Denmark, right now, my actual daylight hours is about 7 hours. Whereas, when we get to summer, it's more like 18. It's a significant difference in what an actual day feels like versus being sliced into 24 pieces.

Blake: 10:22

Right,

Addi: 10:23

And so it just, that, that whole industrial revolution, obviously, it changed a lot of things and technology massively, you know, it was a massive upheaval in society and culture, but I think we, we don't recognize how much things that happened 200 years ago are still the rails that we're riding on now, even though our technology has changed and pushed beyond that.

Blake: 10:50

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of my favorite quotes from that book, comes kind of towards the end, but, I think she's quoting someone else, but she says that instead of thinking about time as money, we should, we should say time Is beans. And, what she means by that is you can go to the store and buy a bag of beans and make them to eat, or you can use them as seeds to grow more beans and have that be sustainable. And you can, you know, hand them out to other people so that they can then make their own beans. So instead of thinking, thinking of time as sort of this zero sum resource we can also think of time as something that. You can treat sustainably and, share it with people and, make more of it. I mean, I think, you know, as time goes by that, like the time has different qualities, right? Like you're talking about the daylight hours in Denmark, but you can also have

Addi: 11:48

Yeah.

Blake: 11:49

that you're wasting by doom scrolling on your phone or time that you're really engaged in a book. And the quality of that time is really different, despite the fact that. They both might just be an hour according to the clock. And I think that, that sort of mushiness to how we experience time is, is really interesting just in our, in, you know, personal lives, let alone when it comes to the workplace, because I think the workplace really has the same mushy quality of time, like you're saying a normal eight hour workday has two to three hours of productivity. That's, that's pretty mushy. There's not, it's certainly not eight hours of uninterrupted productivity for. For knowledge workers, folks outside of a factory anyway. But at the same time, a lot of knowledge workers, especially if they have to think about billable hours are working class, their, their income is directly tied to their productivity, their output, the same way that the factory workers are. And I think it's interesting that. That doesn't always get acknowledged, by folks that are doing that kind of work. So, yeah, the more you sit down and think about time and the context and how we perceive it, and all those sorts of things, the, the deeper the rabbit hole gets, I guess.

Addi: 13:13

Totally. And you know, speaking of mushy time, it reminds me, so, because we've had a four day work week now for two years, I guess. But when we first did it, like I, I first introduced it and was like, what do you all think? And everybody's like, well, yeah, of course I want to work less. But. I mean, like, is that gonna work like, you know, so we agreed to have a trial period and then we were like, okay, well, what we want to do is measure something so we can see if it's working and it was like, what are we going to measure? Like, it was, it was such a mushy. Exercise, because it was all like, how do you feel about your time? How do you measure productivity in a non billable hours scenario? Like it was just such a, gray, fuzzy, I don't know, but it feels good, so we're gonna do it, kind of

Blake: 14:11

and, and in retrospect, like even, even feeling like we had to do that to justify it

Addi: 14:17

Totally.

Blake: 14:18

somebody is sort of an interesting situation as well. Like, When you're talking about something like employee happiness, it's a, it's hard to measure because you're talking about, you know, feelings and, and attitudes and that sort of thing, but also as a business, like we don't really need permission from anybody to do something like that. We can just do it. We certainly don't need to provide some sort of objective metric that says less work is better. It's just kind of

Addi: 14:50

Mm hmm.

Blake: 14:51

a choice you can make.

Addi: 14:52

Yeah. What?

Blake: 14:54

I think, I mean, like you were saying, the Industrial Revolution's 200 years old at this point. And if, if the main benefits of that, as folks, you know, write that history in a thousand years, if the main benefits of that are a small segment of the population made a whole lot of money, and that's, and that's the size of the contribution the Industrial Revolution made, that would be terrible. And I think looking at the emergence of AI now, it's sort of the same kind of story. Like, are we going to use These efficiency improvements and the technology that we're developing to actually improve humans lives, or are we just going to turn out more crap faster? And I think that's a, that's a pretty existential question that it seems like a lot of folks are wrestling with and probably answering differently than

Addi: 15:49

Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Blake: 15:50

the industrialists did 150 years ago.

Addi: 15:54

Yeah,

Blake: 15:55

At least I hope that's the case, because looking, looking back, it doesn't seem like that turned out real great for the environment, especially.

Addi: 16:05

so one thing I wanted to explore with you on this call. So we have a four day workweek. That's great. And to clarify for, for people who are listening, our four day workweek is a 32 hour workweek. It's four eight hour days. It's not a compressed schedule, but we still have the idea that you got to show up every week for your 4 days. Like, you know, it's a, and it just sort of marches and exorbitantly on throughout the year. And of course, there's vacations and, and other, you know, holidays and time off. But it's just super interesting to look. I'm curious if having. Investigated the 4 day work week and how that affects people's lives and what we're able to do. And I mean, and we also have, like, a, a flexible day. So, like. Each person determines their working hours, and as long as they communicate those, we don't say you have to be available from this time to that time each day. You get to decide when you're doing your hours. You need to go, you know, pick your kid up at school, then, you know, that's your break in the day, and that's up to you. But how about larger rhythms and schedules that we were talking about earlier with, like, the farming or day length and things like that? Because Seasons change things, not just in day length, or mental health, but like for, for instance for you, I know that you've got, like your year, when you break down a year, that looks pretty different to my year.

Blake: 17:50

Absolutely. Yeah, I, the biggest difference for me is the school year. As a parent, I have a lot more, child care situations to worry about in the summer, just because we don't have a large block of uninterrupted time where my daughter's accounted for, and kept busy by other folks. So. Summers for me tend to be quite a bit more chaotic on that front, just in terms of having large, regular blocks of uninterrupted work time. I can still find those, but I can't always necessarily say, you know, it'll be three days a week. You know, some weeks it might be I get two of those and other weeks there might be zero and other weeks there might be five. It just depends on on what's going on at the time. So I certainly look forward to fall as sort of Time to buckle down and get more productive and do more kind of deep thinking types of stuff just because I know for sure I can protect that time in an easier way. Not that I can't do that during the summer, but it requires more work. So that's a that's the biggest one by far. And also, like you're you're saying in Denmark, we're not that far north and Green Bay, but we're, you know, reasonably far north as well. So The days do get quite a bit shorter and I do find my energy level dwindling a bit this time of year with holiday stress and, and the extra darkness and those sorts of things so I have to make more of an effort to. Eat a little bit healthier and, and exercise a little bit more just to sort of keep my, my baseline where it needs to be. Otherwise things do get slow and foggy and kind of messy this time of year. So I, yeah, I certainly feel like the year has a particular rhythm, but I think if If you don't have, children in a school year to work through or work balance against, I imagine the year looks completely different or it's not bound by the same. Mm-Hmm.

Addi: 20:00

Right. Everybody's got their own things that are going on. And I mean, also, like, for instance, you play golf, and like, other people play different sports, and at different times a year, their social and familial obligations just change, based on seasonal things that are, that are going on. And it was interesting, Talking about like summers and kids and so we have a team of five people three of those people have young children and We were when we were doing our retreat and planning the retreat we ended up choosing to do it in September Which was later than I had originally wanted to do it, but it was because it's just easier to schedule that For people who are like, Oh, God, please not in August, like, you know, and it, of course, that didn't occur to me because that is not one of my rhythms. That's not a thing that I am aware of. But I'm like, it totally makes sense. And there's no reason that we can't just actually take into account what's going on in people's lives and making, making that more of a company rhythm. Just being aware of those things more. And it made me really wonder. What else could we do, or what else am I not aware of, you know, in terms of, of how we look at things, like, we have a very classic, our, our financial years, the calendar year, we, we set our goals and do a lot of our work by quarters, so we have Q1, Q2, and, and I, I love boxes and organizing things, so that works great for me in a lot of ways, and also, it's like, well, wait, but is that, Does do we expect to get the same level of productivity out of every single quarter out of every single month and every single quarter and like, you know, what are the things that are going on? And we often have this conversation, especially in Q4, which is this 1 coming into December, where people are taking more time off. We know there's the holidays, essentially, our customer base gets really quiet because everybody else is up. So, like, for our company, for the business that we do, December is a very quiet month overall. Whereas for other businesses, like retail, it's right. That's the craziest time of year. So I'm like, well, maybe Q4 is just a different kind of quarter for us. Maybe we can use it differently in terms of our intention for the productivity we're going to get out of ourselves as individuals, but like, like what, how do we best make use of that energy? Whatever that is in Q4. Like, what does Q1 mean to us? Like, what does that feel like? I feel like And I don't know the answers, but I feel like it's a, it's an interesting question and it's something that I think is, worth talking about and figuring out. Like, are there other things that we could be doing to give people more flexibility? Like, some companies, you know, would have a, a, a Friday's off during the summer, for instance. Um, and I mean, we already have a four day work week, but, you know, does it, are there ways to shift around our expectation of what works getting done during the summer? For, and maybe not as a company, maybe just for individual people and giving individuals the flexibility to be like, you know what, in December, I'm like toasted, so I'm just not going to work as much in December, but I don't have kids and I have a lot more energy in June so like I'll work more in June and then you know Blake can like chill it out and like deal with the fact that his you know Girl is getting out of school like, you know, like are there ways to work with the flow a little better

Blake: 23:40

Right.

Addi: 23:42

in terms of our expectations

Blake: 23:45

I think the, an important first step in that is even acknowledging that it's a thing.'cause I feel like for a lot of folks at companies like that would be taboo to even talk about. The fact that like you're more productive at certain times than others, which seems obvious and true for probably everybody, but it's not something that gets brought up very often. So I think I think sort of, you know, the classic like recognizing you have a problem is the first step in fixing it. Even thinking about that and having the conversation, I think is the first step. And I do think that, the different quarters have different rhythms, for our business and probably a lot of other businesses also. But the nice thing about the quarters is it's a large enough chunk of time that some of that messiness can kind of smooth out a little bit. Like, we're talking about a three month chunk, so December does tend to be kind of quiet and reflective, but then, October and November are a little more, frenetic and frantic to sort of get, get your things done for the year so that December can be quiet, can be a little quieter and, and more reflective. I think it's nice to sort of have that. The smaller cycles within a larger cycle to kind of help manage those ups and downs a little bit.

Addi: 25:07

Yeah, it would be just, I think, an interesting experiment for people generally to sort of track more of what is my week feel like? What is my, this month feel like? What is this quarter? Like, what are those rhythms for me? Like, you know, and like, and people also just have personal. Rhythms as well, right? I mean a million reasons But you know, there's a lot of physical things that go on that completely affect productivity and mental health and things like that That are rhythmic. So I mean people with a uterus know this so It'd just be an interesting experiment to sort of really figure out, like, what is, what is my personal rhythm? And then, sort of, how does that line up with other people's rhythms within any, you know, a company, or a family, or a, you know, organization? And then, how can you support each other with those rhythms instead of trying to, like, jam everybody into the same box, you know?

Blake: 26:09

Yeah, absolutely.

Addi: 26:11

cool. A cool experiment to try. So maybe that's the next one after the four day work week. Mm

Blake: 26:19

me a little bit of this past weekend I was going through and looking through my old bullet journals from the last five or six years. And, just before. Probably about a year before the COVID 19 pandemic started, I, saw somewhere online, someone who had a mood tracker where they just, set up a little key with different colors for the different emotions. And then in the morning and evening, they would just color in a little box with how they felt that morning or that evening. And I managed to keep that up for three years and going back and looking at it, I can definitely pick out some rhythms. In the colors comparing year over year, and it was interesting to sort of think about that and then flip through and figure out like what was causing all of the stress that seems to happen in August and You know, it turns out that it's like the end of summer, back to school, hurry up and get all the things done before school starts. And that's pretty consistently, there will be a week in August where I feel like the world is on fire. every year apparently. And I don't know that I, I mean, I, I definitely feel that and can remember it, but I wouldn't have been prompted to think about it without having a reminder like that in front of me. So I, I, I get a little bit skeptical of some of the personal measurement stuff, just because it, it starts to travel down the, the productivity guru and like,

Addi: 27:48

Exactly. Mm

Blake: 27:49

why am I, why am I measuring this or why am I trying to do this? But, that the mood tracker thing in particular felt fuzzy enough that, I'm thinking about going back to tracking that again, starting next year, because it was pretty interesting to look back on and I'm not. I'm not great at doing the whole diary type journaling, so that was sort of a low enough bar to entry that still gave me some interesting information. But I, I do think more, I do think more people's lives are cyclical than, than probably appreciate.

Addi: 28:26

Yeah., one of the effects of the Industrial Revolution is that we got extremely disconnected from nature, natural rhythms, generally, and also personal natural rhythms. Because that didn't that doesn't fit the machine. So we have to let's ignore that and fit yourself into a machine and Yeah, so it's just interesting to be like, oh Yeah, that's like really a thing like we're still humans and it's still a thing that affects us every day Maybe we should think about that

Blake: 29:05

And there are side effects to ignoring it, I think

Addi: 29:08

Yes, very much.

Blake: 29:10

And, you know, that's a whole different conversation, but, I think trying to just. Optimize and squish yourself in a box that, I don't want to blame Henry Ford for it, but, trying to fit yourself into a productivity box and ignoring all of the other complexities of life, can be dangerous in its own way.

Addi: 29:33

We should probably wrap this up. It's a good conversation though. I certainly don't want it to end necessarily this podcast Lots of food for thought. Thank you for thank you for talking it out with me a little bit and we can continue to talk about it. Sweet. All

Blake: 29:52

Absolutely. Thanks.

Addi: 29:55

Hey, so thanks for listening and let us know if you have questions, comments, or suggestions for what you'd like to hear more about. You can find all of the various ways to reach us on our website at osiolabs.com. That's O S I O L A B S.com. Also, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your podcast provider of choice. We'll catch you on the next episode.