The eight hour day is a solution, not the solution

I have spent my whole career avoiding the standard shape of work. Eight hours, five days, in a building, at fixed times. I have never been comfortable in it and I have arranged most of my professional life around not doing it.

For years I assumed this was a personal defect. Now I think it is mostly that we have confused a solution with the solution.

Every convention you work inside started as somebody’s answer to somebody’s problem. The eight hour day was a genuine victory, won against much worse conditions, by people who were right. The five day week solved a real coordination problem in a world with no way to coordinate at a distance. The office solved information transfer in an era when information could not travel without a body attached to it.

Those were good answers. Some of them are still good answers. The odd thing is that they stopped being presented as answers at all and became the shape of the container, so that any variation now has to justify itself while the default never does.

I want to be careful here, because this is where this argument usually goes stupid. The standard setup genuinely works. It works for a lot of people, in a lot of jobs, and for plenty of them it is better than the alternatives. Predictability is not a failure of imagination. Some work really is best done together in a room, at the same time, and people with children or care responsibilities often need the structure far more than they need the freedom. Anyone telling you the nine to five is simply obsolete is selling a course.

What I do think is that the people who can afford to run the experiment have some obligation to publish the results. Not to evangelise. To document. There are teams working asynchronously all over the outsourcing world, quite successfully and almost entirely undescribed, because nobody involved thinks of it as an experiment worth writing up.

So that is what I would like to do here, eventually, with actual numbers rather than vibes. What I have tried, what it cost, what broke, and the parts I have quietly reverted to because the conventional version turned out to be better.

The claim is not that the default is wrong. It is only that it is a default, and that almost nobody around you is treating it as one.