‘The company was achieving as much in four days as they had before in five’ – Stolen Focus, Chapter 11 Notes

Posted on: June 15, 2022

Last Updated on: June 20th, 2022

Post Category: Book Notes

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About #onepageonepoint

#onepageonepoint aims to summarise new ideas from books on personal and professional development – with (approximately) one point for each page. Read more about this project here.

Today for #onepageonepoint, we have summary notes for Stolen Focus, chapter 11: ‘The Places That Figured Out How to Reverse the Surge in Speed and Exhaustion’.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learning more about the book, click here.

Chapter 11: ‘The Places That Figured Out How to Reverse the Surge in Speed and Exhaustion’

• After 1987, Andrew Barnes worked for large corporations in the city of London, during a time where everyone believed working better meant working more. Eventually, he would realise that his wild overwork cost him his twenties and his family later in life.

• Andrew Barnes owns Perpetual Guardian, a company based in New Zealand, and he hired academic researchers to measure the change in productivity after implementing a four day work week (for two months). The change resulted in hundreds of changes across the company to advance productivity e.g. reducing instances of entering the same data into two different systems, and using a desk-flag for employees to signal they require focus time.

• Employees who were interviewed by Hari believed there was an increase in productivity was because the extra time off gave an opportunity for them to get a clearer head – “[Gemma] found that with ‘that extra day to relax’, she could start to wind down – and so when she came back to work, her mind was clearer” (Hari 2022, p. 182).

• Findings from the team of academics at Perpetual Guardian showed that distractions radically went down: time spent on social media decreased by 35 percent, the level of engagement and stimulation increased by 30 and 40 percent, stress levels were down 15 percent, and people commented that they were sleeping more and reading more. The evidence from this experiment was strong enough to make the four-day work week permanent at Perpetual Guardian.

• Helen Delaney, one of academics from the Faculty of Business and Economic at the University of Auckland, and one of the senior managers at Perpetual Guardian commented that the extra time gave them an opportunity to nurture their relationships and have more “me-time”.

• There have been other studies where reducing hours/days led to increased productivity, reduced failures and higher profits e.g. ‘Toyota cut two hours per day off the work week, and it turned out their mechanics produced 114 percent of what they had before, and profits went up by 25 percent’ (Hair 2022, p. 183).

• However, we live in a culture that gets us to walk faster, talk faster, work longer and we are taught that these things contribute to productivity and success.

• Today, only 56 percent of Americans take one week of vacation a year.

• The introduction of the weekend, the eight-hour work day and the five-day work week (which was initially the ten-hour work day and the six-day work week during the industrial revolution) was the biggest challenge to the speeding-up of society that has ever happened – after persistent strikes made by the workers. Only a comparable fight will deliver the four day week, and a long term solution is to steadily rebuild unions.

• During COVID-19 lockdowns, work hours actually went up: during the first month-and-a-half of lockdown in the US, the average worker worked three extra hours a day – ‘What this shows is that no big outside force is going to come along and free us from the ratchet to work more and more hours – not even a global pandemic. We will only get it through a collective struggle to change the rules’ (Hari 2022, p. 187).

• Barnes comments about COVID-19 and the four-day work week: ‘[if a 60,000-person British bank could run from home] surely you can run a business in four days, not five?’ (Hari 2022, p. 187)

• In France, with the advent of email, there was an always on-call way of working, where workers were expected to respond outside of working hours, but this led to burnout and anxiety. After this, in 2016, there was a law passed by the government so people have the ‘right to disconnect’: ‘any company with more than fifty people has to formally negotiate with its workers to agree the hours in which they can be contacted – and all other hours are out of bounds’ (Hari 2022, p. 188).

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Interested in reading more? See my notes for Chapter 12.