Humans Are Not Robots by Robert Hawkins

Author:Robert Hawkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Maven House
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

What happened? Was it magic? Did everyone end up working an extra hour the following day to catch up on that missed hour? Highly doubtful. If we go back to the reasons the traditional workplace stifles productivity, we can see how flexibility reversed the situation:

1. The Parkinson Effect was reduced

Reducing the day by one hour reduced the arbitrary amount of time to get stuff done, so the opposite of the Parkinson Effect (known as Horstman’s corollary) took place: instead of work expanding to fill the time available, it shrank to fit the shorter time.

This doesn’t mean that the productive output diminished, it just means that it all fit into a smaller timeframe – the gas easily compressed into a smaller container. There was a little less distraction, a little more focus, et voilà!

2. Energy was increased

In the example, since this was only the first day of the program, there wouldn’t be much increase in energy. But in the following days and weeks, the extra hour a day would be used for more sleep, exercise, time with family, hobbies, etc., and this would help fill energy buckets and enable people to get stuff done during those shorter work hours, and to do it better.

But on that first day, the knowledge that they could leave early led people to waste less time with the news, Facebook, and other distractions. They felt less of a need to preserve energy, so they were able to work faster and with more purpose.

3. The incentive was real!

Being able to leave an hour early was a big and real incentive for people to get their work done. Lasandra’s opportunity to avoid rush-hour traffic was a huge benefit (do I need to say any more about traffic?). She ended up with more than an hour of extra free time because, along with leaving early, her journey was also quicker than usual (she normally gets home after six, today she got home at four forty).

A small increase in flexibility – reducing the workday by a single hour – reduced waste, increased human energy, gave the employees an extra hour per day to put toward other human needs, and increased productivity by over 12 percent.*

What if we follow Lasandra’s line of thought? What if we take it further?

“The Five-Hour Workday Is Here”

Like a gift from the heavens, this headline arrived on my news feed one morning while I was still in bed, while I was drafting this chapter. I clicked on it without high expectations. It would probably just be another political theorist trying to convince people that we don’t need to work as much as we do, which is accurate, but usually empty and hopeful rather than practical and evidence-based.

It was so much more.

A financial services firm in Tasmania, Australia, called Collins SBA had trialled a five-hour workday in its offices for eighteen months straight. I sat bolt upright in bed and read on:

After undergoing a lot of research – including examining similar models in countries like Sweden –

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