It often feels like there are only 3 productive hours in typical American white collar work day.

What if we just cut out the rest?

Edit: Some great responses. So responses must have also been said about the 5 day and 40 hour work weeks.

  • @j4k3
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    4 months ago

    I think logistics job titles would be numerous and intense.

    Like, not office work, but with my auto body business in the past. I can absolutely crush it in a day when all the pieces come together. While I may only be working an average of 3 hours a day, my time is spent moving pieces around. I might be able to knock out $2500 in a day, but this is a stupid number. It doesn’t account for my 75% overhead, or how it took all week to setup all that work that happened to align with one day of intense effort. Never trust anyone saying what they can make in a day, week, or month with their business. What they did on their best day has no bearing on their average.

    I get the skeptical impression that these shortened hours figures neglect the setup and true nature of most jobs. Like some grad student went to an office for a week, took notes, and extrapolated meaning that lacks perspective, but I could be wrong.

    When painting, I’m much more effective in a shorter amount of time but it wasn’t a choice.

    Personally, long term, I think we are beginning to recognise the barbarism behind allowing a complex social hierarchy to develop based on the fundamental human need for survival. There are other forms of complex hierarchical display that do not kill people and oppress billions. Some examples are awards based accolades in academia and performing arts, another is merit from physical performance in events and Olympics. This will ultimately happen in the distant future. A wealth based social hierarchy is unethical barbarism if you step outside of cultural norms and objectively assess the ethics. The hard part is always convincing the winners to step aside and play a new game with new rules.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      24 months ago

      You raised a number of great points. I won’t address all of them.

      Setup and organizing parts/resources would need attention. Deliveries, messages, and decisions would all need adjustments. I expect that while one may work 3 hours a day, they may not be the same 3 hours every day, or even continuous.

    • sunzu
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      14 months ago

      Yeah corpo drone being able to execute their jOB in 3 hours likely has advanced degree and/or skills that took decade or decades to acquire along with “proper” socio economic background etc pointing being it happens but this ain’t prevalent. Most work closer to fulltime and some entry level just slaving prolly providing free OT due to pressure.

      A regular person is not cruising 3 hour into such a job without some serious life choices and executing on them.