I know that I have about 5ish hours of good programming work in me a day. I know that I like to take a 45ish minute lunch. I know that I have some admin type stuff to do on occasion.
So, sign me up for a 6 hour day and you'll get my full attention all day. I won't "need" to spend time on HN or twitter or whatever to kill time because I'll be fresh enough to work all day.
Also, because i believe there is a hell of a lot more to life than work, we'll work 4 days a week.
I wish we were more actively working towards such a world. Instead, we keep getting caught up in political discussions about how people who don't work are lazy.
Depends on who is working, what they're working with etc.
After about 7 hours of coding, I feel my code starts slipping off. Also, I code better at night. I know people who can't code for more than 6 hours a day or their work gets shitty.
I usually code 6 to 7 hours a day, and I take my friday afternoon (or part of it) and night off. This sometimes means working just the morning and the first half of the afternoon, and sometimes means working until 4am on the Thursday and then not working at all on Friday.
I think when you have great people on your team, that love their work (Not their jobs. Their work), it gets eaasier. This people will do their best, and that can't be measured in hours. That's why a fixed schedule actually sucks and many, many people don't like it.
Do you not have an hour of "administrative" or "meeting" work to get you to at least 8 hours? I find that my non-coding overhead is easily an hour a day.
It actually originated from shift work. It used to be two 12-hour shifts, and then Carnegie and others realized three 8-hour shifts were more productive.
