• DrunemetonEnglish
    47•11 months ago

    But how do you define “productive”?

    I work from home and I get the same amount of work done. However if you define it as, “Doing X amount of work in Y amount of time,” then yeah I’m less productive because nowadays instead of getting that work done in an 8-hour shift I take about 10–12 hours to do it.

    Same work, same day, so my productivity hasn’t changed. I just take longer to do it by taking breaks, going out to long lunches with friends, and my stress level is almost non-existent!

    I find that to be a very equitable trade-off: Almost no job-related stress for a slightly longer working day.

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod
      14•11 months ago

      I think people leave out the fact that their commute should also be considered time working. If you’ve got an hour commute and an eight hour shift, you really have a ten hour shift.

      So you are taking ten hours to do eight hours of work, because part of it means dragging your brain through meatspace to be there. Since you don’t have to do that, you can take longer doing the actual job.

    • Pisodeuorrior
      12•11 months ago

      There’s also to take into consideration the fact that people experience dips of productivity throughout the day. Like, I’d never be able to start something that requires most of my brain power after 3.

      For others it’s early morning.

      So, when I was in the office I would just kill time, go on coffee breaks or just do fucking nothing until it was time to go home, and I know for a fact that it was like that for most of my colleagues.

      No one works 8 hours straight out of an 8 hours work day. Working from home just removes the torture of sticking around looking busy.

      I actually complete from home the same amount of tasks I used to at the office, really, because my productivity (and that of others) wasn’t constant there either.

      • @[email protected]
        1•11 months ago

        Had a summer job as a customer service agent for a big company, and pretty much did work 8 hours non stop, the phones were ringing constantly. I had two 5 minute breaks that I could take whenever and one 20 minute break that I had to take at a set time. The break time wasn’t payed, so you ended up having to be there for 8.5 hours. It was very stressful, but it kinda helped that every customer had a new problem, so it wasn’t very repetitive.

        Now I some days take longer and other days shorter, to accomplish from home what I could’ve gotten done working from the office.

    • @[email protected]
      6•11 months ago

      nowadays instead of getting that work done in an 8-hour shift I take about 10–12 hours to do it.

      “For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the 8 hours supposedly left after 8 hour of work and 8 hours of sleep” – Doug Larson.

      An 8-hour shift quickly turns into 10-12 clock-hours when you factor in all the extraneous crap that goes along with it. I mean, just lunch and a commute easily adds 60-90 unpaid minutes per day. Add the time spent getting ready for work and settling down after work, and you’re easily up to 10 hours a day.

    • HobbitFoot English
      -7•11 months ago

      But how do you define “productive”?

      Studies that I’ve seen have seen both an increase in time to perform work and a decrease in quality of work.

      You are noting that you take more time, but you work that additional time. Not everyone does that.

      Increased employee happiness/retention and reduced office rent may be good reasons why to pick full remote over the increased productivity of the office, but the idea that people are more productive at home isn’t proving itself to be true.