Do you work for a firm where managers think employees really have to work (what is called) “full time”? That forty hours per week (or whatever is considered “full time” in your profession) is really a necessity? Perhaps you are one of those people with that conviction yourself — that in your job it is really not possible to work “part time.”

Of course you are wrong: working five out of seven days is really just as arbitrary as six days, or three – or twenty-eight for that matter. Chopping up the total amount of work that needs to done in your firm into blocks that suit our human physiology has nothing to do with the actual work. If the total amount of work that needs to be done in a firm in one week equals 20,000 hours, it is just as arbitrary to chop that up into 500 40-hour work weeks as it is to chop it up into 800 blocks of 25 hours. A five-day work week consisting of eight-hour days happens to be the social norm in many of our societies at present, but I have long thought that a company that disrupts that kind of social norm in its industry could potentially build a momentous competitive advantage out of it.

Continue reading… “Is Working When You Want More Productive?”