Friday Blog Question: Build your own work week!

The 9-5, M-F work week is a schedule with which we are all familiar, but some adventurous companies are challenging this age-old formula. Many people telecommute, particularly now that gas is so expensive. My sister's company gets every other Friday off. Still others continue to push the envelope, like 37signals and their 4-day work week. HTML5 developer Ian Hickson works four hours in the afternoon, and four hours at midnight. If you could design your own work schedule, how and when would you work? What's your rationale?

I would work 4 - ten-hour days. The weekends go by too fast and do not allow enough time to relax, recoup and re-energize for the next week ahead. - there needs to be three day weekends every weekend. Alternatively, I would opt for the "Siesta" approach and work for a few hours and then take a nap for a couple hours - then back to work for a few more hours. Debby Hrach

My Ideal Work Schedule: 1. Work on weekdays Monday through Friday (I like the steady routine) I can request Friday off for an occasional weekend trip. 2. Shorten the number of hours to 6 or 7 hours per day in order to have time after work to do errands and perhaps enjoy the rest of the day (Go to a park, gym, spend time with friends and family, grocery shopping, watch a movie, read, relax…) I am not a big fan of being all day at work because it doesn’t leave room to do anything else in my busy life. Instead of having three whole days off like Fri, Sat, and Sun, I prefer to space out my free time throughout the week in order to enjoy everyday’s daily moments in between my responsibilities. Rosa Milan

For me an ideal schedule would be working three to four days a week with longer days (10-14 hours). The remainder of the week being dedicated to getting other errands and appointments taken care of and also with a day or two of self development. Most businesses such as doctors, repair shops, etc close around 5 which then forces me to use my weekend to run my errands. As a web developer there are new technologies to learn every week in order to stay ahead in the field. Having one to two days dedicated to learning new technology and seeing what is new in the industry would be very beneficial in staying on the cutting edge. Having longer work days also aids in keeping your flow together with the project you are working on. A lot of the time I end up going home and working for a few more hours anyways which I know is pretty typical, longer work days would eliminate some of this. Nick Hammond

My ideal work week would be four 10 hour days as I usually work more than 8 hours every day anyways. This would allow me to have a three day weekend every week, which is much needed. I barely start to feel relaxed come Sunday afternoon so an additional day would allow me to rest and be ready for my four day week come Monday. In addition, I would have to say that I would like to work from home for half a day two days out of the week which would allow me to buckle down and cross stuff off my to do list without any interruptions. Monique Prehoda

I would work whatever hours were necessary to complete my tasks according to milestones and deadlines from a place where I am likely to be most productive. Most of the time that would mean my home office, working several hours from late morning to afternoon, and more after dark. As a web application developer I can get my work done anywhere I have my Mac and a fast Internet connection. Working from home would save me at least an hour in the car every day, hundreds of dollars in gas each month, place less wear and tear on my car, and would minimize the number of interruptions that come with working in an office environment. With the advent of push messaging and better software tools I can still be in contact whenever it's necessary, and having to travel into the office for meetings emphasizes the importance of accurately deciding who needs to be in what meetings and when (instead of the "get everyone who could possibly need to be here, in here" mentality). Being away from the office would make it possible to set up an ideal work environment without having to worry about impacting others. That means I can get absolute silence when I desire it (often), or turn up the volume on some good working music if it suits my mood. It would also mean I could listen to streaming radio and access online storage without negatively affecting the bandwidth available to my colleagues. Above all, this would reduce the number of arbitrary rules and limits typical of the one-size-fits-all 9-5 M-F schedule, and provide a real incentive for completing work as fast as possible. If a person is assigned X number of tasks to complete in Y hours, the 9-5 M-F schedule provides no incentive to finish work quickly, because that time will simply be filled up with additional things to do. If instead a person is assigned X tasks to complete by Y date, with freedom to choose what to work on and when, that person can benefit from his or her efficiency gains by having more time to do what he or she wants. The key to it all is making effective decisions bolstered by friendly employee competition. Rand makes the case for this in Atlas Shrugged when she writes of the man who is able to shave two hours off his work day, which gives him two more hours every day with which to do whatever he wants. If finishing early still means working the same amount of time, what incentive is there to finish early? If instead finishing early meant having more time to oneself, work would naturally get done faster. Old-school manager types balk at this as wasted man-hours, but this mentality is what leads to burnout, laziness, apathy, and other productivity-killers. Of course, this scheme would require a great deal of trust between staffer and company, but regular productivity checkups would ensure time is well-spent. Clearly this wouldn't work for every position, but recognizing the realities of the type of work assigned would do much to make us more efficient, and that's never a bad thing. Joseph Jaramillo

I made a chart. Chris Sietsema

About the Author: Joseph Jaramillo

Joseph Jaramillo is the coding ninja who heads up Off Madison Ave's CMS software, and is the lead web developer on website projects. He's been building web applications for over a decade, and specializes in the Ruby on Rails web framework.

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