Section 2: The History and Science Behind the Rationale for Never Working More than 5 Hours A Day

THE HISTORY OF WORKING HOURS

So, let’s trace the history of working hours and how we got into this modern muddle of inhumane, brain mushing, working hours in the first place… There’s a modern myth that unions and champions of worker’s rights have bravely reduced worker hours from madness to tolerable.

This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern 40-hour week with its 80-hour counterpart in the 19th century. The prevailing belief is that slavery-like hours prevailed for centuries, but in reality, they only existed for the short duration of industrialism.

The Original Home-based Business

The laboring man will take his rest long in the morning; a good piece of the day is spent afore he come at his work; then he must have his breakfast, though he have not earned it at his accustomed hour, or else there is grudging and murmuring; when the clock smiteth, he will cast down his burden in the midway, and whatsoever he is in hand with, he will leave it as it is, though many times it is marred afore he come again; he may not lose his meat, what danger soever the work is in. At noon he must have his sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon, which spendeth a great part of the day; and when his hour cometh at night, at the first stroke of the clock he casteth down his tools, leaveth his work, in what need or case soever the work standeth.
James Pilkington, Bishop of Durham  1570

One survey of the contents of five top-tier business and economic history journals published in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2000 to 2016 finds that only 20 per cent of the articles concern the entire period before 1800 and that, among those articles, most are national or regional in scope, with a disproportionate focus on Europe, and on England in particular.

Scholars debate why there is such a lack of interest in the pre-industrial period and although they wax lyrical about the lack of enthusiasm to study the period, they miss the simplest of points… there are hardly any records to study. Reading and writing were the skills of the elite. We have to consider the agriculture-based economies of the time and how that matched the societal structures.

The easy conclusion is that before capitalism, most people didn’t work very long hours at all and they certainly didn’t have a corporate office culture to contend with.

The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed with life balanced between work, church, and family. Our ancestors may not have been rich as we judge it in terms of having ‘things,’ but they had an abundance of leisure and far richer, balanced lives than most people today. They were much wealthier in the balance of life between work, leisure, and family time.

People lived mostly in a village-centric culture consisting of cottages and rooms surrounding a green close to the local manor. There they worked on crafts or agriculture, making products needed by the villagers or the manor. A blacksmith made farming tools. An apothecary treated ailments. The people worked right where they lived and often inside their homes. A home-based office is not a modern idea. Other people made baked goods or weak beer, or they weaved or whittled wood into musical instruments or cutlery. Then they sold their wares from the kitchen window or barrows and baskets on the green. There was no concept of commuting.  Rush hour had not been invented.

Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (16 hours in summer and 8 in winter), but was intermittent working—called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks.

These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was abandoned. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, the medieval workday was not more than 6 hours even on the days with 16 hours of daylight.

One important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day’s work was considered three to four hours, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as ‘two-days-works.’

All of this relaxed, balanced, and nature-driven lifestyle changed in the industrial age.
Machines that could mass produce were invented and capitalism arrived as the consequence. Children were forced out of the fields and into public schooling to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic in order to work the machines when they turned twelve years-old.

Machines were housed in one place for the convenience of the machine owners and builders, and with that decision came labor commuting from villages to towns and towns to cities. Those over twelve years-old became the first commuters, and eventually whole families, villages and towns migrated toward the machine.

Machines made money when they were working. At first, there was no artificial means of lighting so the machines were kept going from pre-dawn to post-dusk. ‘Shift-work’ came into being. Long working hours replaced the six-hour workday.

Vacation time

For all those of you delighted with your annual vacation day allowance, consider this:  The contrast between capitalist and pre-capitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays.

Some were official—that is, church—holidays, which included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer, but also numerous saints’ and rest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking.

Most were casual. In addition to official celebrations, there were often ‘ales’, celebrations that lasted for weeks to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale).

All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up one-third of the year, and the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed 52 Sundays, 90 rest days, and 38 holidays, which is half the year resting. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled more than 5 months per year!

But those were just the official holidays.

The peasant’s free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There’s considerable evidence of what economists call the ‘backward-bending supply curve of labor’—the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. For example, during one period of unusually high wages (the late 14th century), many laborers refused to work “by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day.” And they worked only as was necessary to earn their customary income—which records show amounted to an average of 4 hours a day, 120 days annually.

A 13th-century estimate finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from 14th-century England indicate an extremely short working year — 175 half-days — for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer/miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

So really…

“Do you still feel blessed to work 50 hours a week, fifty weeks of the year… in ‘the land of the free?”

Today, we’re experiencing a new industrial revolution…

Technology can allow all former ‘slaves to the machine’ to return to their previous hamlet lifestyle if he or she so chooses. One can work from anywhere and engage a global audience. There has also never been a better or easier time to start your own venture and set your own work hours.

Your challenge is to change your mindset from a fixed 8 to 10 hours of labor a day because, as a single- person business owner, working that long will burn you out quickly.

THE SCIENCE TO SUPPORT 5-HOUR WORKDAYS

I’ve shown you the history, now let’s consider the rest of the story…

It’s a scientific fact that it’s foolish to work more than 5 hours a day.

Studies show that over the course of an 8-hour workday, the average employee works for just 2 hours and 53 minutes.

The rest of the time?

Well, according to a 2016 survey of 2000 business offices, people spend it on a combination of:

• Reading the news
• Browsing social media
• Eating food
• Socializing about non-work topics
• Taking smoke breaks
• Searching for new jobs

The actual amount of ‘productive’ time is less than 3 hours in the workday. In most traditionally structured companies, however, that 3 hours is often spent in meetings, and it is well known and reported that most meetings are unnecessary and unproductive.

A study of UK office workers also suggests a shorter workday might be more sensible because people can only concentrate for about 20 minutes a time. One particular study found people struggled to stay on task for more than 10 minutes.

Additionally, toward the end of the day, performance begins to flatline or even worsen, according to K. Anders Ericsson, the foremost expert on the topic of studying the most successful people on Earth and figuring out what exactly helps them rise so high.

He discovered that successful people don’t work long hours at all, but engage in a certain kind of practice known as “deliberate practice.” They spend a few hours at a time purposefully, and then stop and recuperate.

The same psychological principle that explains why deliberate practice works also applies to ordinary tasks like writing reports and composing spreadsheets. In both cases, the brain has a finite number of cognitive resources it can devote to substantive, creative thought.

People who are pushed past their productive limits run the risk of forming bad habits that bleed into their more productive hours, Ericsson says.

Change is in the air, however…

Some companies are starting to figure it out. Rather than simply restructuring the workday, however, they’re choosing to shorten the workweek. Instead of asking people to work five 8-hour days, many have switched to working four 8-hour days.

Ryan Carson, CEO of the technology education company Treehouse, has seen his employees become happier and more productive since he implemented the 32-hour workweek back in 2006. Core to Carson’s leadership philosophy is the belief that forcing people to work 40-hour weeks is nearly inhumane.

It’s not about more family time, or more play time, or less work time—it’s about living a more balanced total life. We basically take ridiculously good care of people because we think it’s the right thing to do Carson says.