Is the 9 to 5 Limiting Our Quality of Work?
A 9–5 office job is how many of us work nowadays. We show up and work until the clock hits a certain time. But are there better ways of working?
And since the pandemic has begun, a couple of things are obvious:
- Many people are facing burnout.
- We can trust people to work from home and meet deliverables.
We are all productive at different times of the day
I recently started watching the Netflix series ‘Abstract: The Art Of Design’. A documentary that explores the minds of some of the most innovative designers, and there is a common theme that occurs.
They work at schedules according to their most productive hours of the day.
So why do we not approach this same attitude?
We all have different times of the day where we produce our best work. For some of us, it’s 6 am and for others, it’s 11 pm.
So why do we follow the same work constraint of 9–5?
Deliverable focused working
What would happen if we purely focused on deliverables, and it was up to the employee to decide their suitable working hours. As long as they complete work to a high standard.
Fixed time-slots for meetings
Regular meetings are essential for collaboration and brainstorming.
But a working day with 5–8 hours worth of meetings can be unproductive.
Founder & CEO of Bolt, recently spoke about moving his company to a 4-day schedule:
‘Less days forces conscious collaboration. Meetings must be concise, intentional, impactful’ — Ryan Breslow
Another potential solution for more impactful meetings is to have one fixed window of time in the day (perhaps 10 am-2 pm), where everyone needs to be available for meetings.
The rest of the day is up to the employee to decide when is most productive to get the job done.
