People don't work as much as you think

Is full-time work bad for our brains?

If you’re over 40, working more than 25 hours a week could be affecting your intelligence, new research suggests

Work for only 3 hours a day, but everyday | plumshell

I am an indie iPhone developer, and I've been working for 3 hours everyday for almost 2 years now. It may not work for everybody, but I started this habit in early 2014, and I have continued to do it since have I found that this is the most productive way to work for me.

Doing nothing at work

Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.

Why working fewer hours would make us more productive

A shorter working week could improve our mental and physical health and even mitigate climate change, research shows

Less stress, more productivity: why working fewer hours is better for you and your employer

There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time in pointless meetings instead of getting work done. Once it gets bad enough you can find yourself always scrambling, working overtime just to keep up. Pretty soon it’s just expected, and you need to be available to answer emails at all hours even when there are no emergencies. You’re tired and burnt out and there’s still just as much work as before. The real solution is not working even harder or even longer, but rather the complete opposite: working fewer hours.

Opinion | 5-Hour Workdays? 4-Day Workweeks? Yes, Please (Published 2019)

Sick of round-the-clock work emails and Slack messages? Here’s some hope.

Anarchy and modern convenience

A major part of anarchy and socialism is the concept of anti-work. An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement—a focus on working less overall and sharing labor more equally—is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. A common criticism of this is that reducing the amount everyone works to something like 20 hours a week instead of 40+ means we would have to give up a lot of conveniences.

Making 20% Time Work | begriffs.com

Following Google’s lead many companies have instituted “20% time” for their employees. This is one day per week in which employees can work on projects of their own choosing. The practice keeps developers motivated and sharp, produces tools to solve company problems, and in the best case creates open source which builds prestige and helps recruitment.

Work less, get more: New Zealand firm's four-day week an 'unmitigated success'

Reduced hours for same pay increased successful work-life balance management, cutting stress levels and boosting commitment

You can code only 4 hours per day. Here’s why.

Most of us have felt it: after a few solid hours of coding, your brain starts shutting down.

Maybe you should do less “work”

Working in tech, I've observed developers who work as hard as possible when they don't need to. I’m here today to tell you that it's a bad idea and you shouldn't do it.

This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch - Twenty Sided

Last week I derided permacrunch – the policy of working an entire creative team 70 hours a week all the time – as “the policy of simpletons and sociopaths”. This led to some people asking, “Why is crunch even a thing?” Can’t management just plan the schedule so that the project is done on time using only 40 hour work weeks?

It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? | Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley: The right calls for hard work, the left for more jobs. The dream of mechanisation leading to shorter working hours seems forgotten

2026 State of the Workplace

Get the latest insights from state of the workplace report spanning more than 443 million hours of work activity across 1,111 organizations and 163,638 employees over three years.

The solution to (nearly) everything: working less | Rutger Bregman

Excessive work and pressure are status symbols. But overtime is deadly. If we worked less we’d make fewer errors, address inequality and have a better life

When we say work can wait, we mean it. Really.

We recently had a problem with our interns. Now, in terms of problems, it was a good one to have. I noticed some of them working on their days off or very late/early hours. That’s not how we roll h…