Anyway, my weekly productivity measured in terms of actual results (software requirements implemented that actually worked as specified) in The Netherlands working 8h/day completelly blew out of the water my productivity in Portugal working 10h/day.
I don’t really like this rhetoric.
It frames time off as something that should only be given so that it makes workers more productive.
I’m Dutch too, and I used to work 8h/day 4 days a week. And my productivity became even better than when I worked 5 days a week. I could kill it those 4 days, and be rested enough the next week so I could kill it again. It worked wonders.
I like the rhetoric, because it means that my employer got something out of it too. But I don’t think it implies that was the only reason it should be given. I obviously enjoyed the time off for my own reasons.
Working 8h/day (aka 40h/week) is the normal working length around here: nothing at all to do with time off.
Also productivity does not have a liner relation to hour-of-work-per-day, so you can’t really extrapolate from the difference in productivity between 8h/day and 10h/day to working fewer hours per day.
Last but not least, even if time off gave a massive boost to productivity (which cannot be implied from my experience since the relation between hours-worked and productivity is, as I stated, not linear), logically that would still say nothing at all about the existence or not of other equally or even more valid reasons for people to “be given” time off.
What you say does not at all logically follow from what I wrote.
I don’t really like this rhetoric.
It frames time off as something that should only be given so that it makes workers more productive.
If that is the argument that gets through to their thick management skulls, then so be it.
I’m Dutch too, and I used to work 8h/day 4 days a week. And my productivity became even better than when I worked 5 days a week. I could kill it those 4 days, and be rested enough the next week so I could kill it again. It worked wonders.
I like the rhetoric, because it means that my employer got something out of it too. But I don’t think it implies that was the only reason it should be given. I obviously enjoyed the time off for my own reasons.
Working 8h/day (aka 40h/week) is the normal working length around here: nothing at all to do with time off.
Also productivity does not have a liner relation to hour-of-work-per-day, so you can’t really extrapolate from the difference in productivity between 8h/day and 10h/day to working fewer hours per day.
Last but not least, even if time off gave a massive boost to productivity (which cannot be implied from my experience since the relation between hours-worked and productivity is, as I stated, not linear), logically that would still say nothing at all about the existence or not of other equally or even more valid reasons for people to “be given” time off.
What you say does not at all logically follow from what I wrote.