It often feels like there are only 3 productive hours in typical American white collar work day.
What if we just cut out the rest?
Edit: Some great responses. So responses must have also been said about the 5 day and 40 hour work weeks.
I think big part of that is that the person is available to deliver service at anytime during the 8 hour work day and you have to be good at it. That’s why management allows this. They ain’t giving up 5 houra of that so they have to hire another "overpriced cost center* to fill the slot lol
Overworking certain people ends up costing more if their error rates cuts in operations.
I’m not sure I could condense my work like that. If I have 3 hours of work I want at least 4 hours to do it in. And if you decide you can condense it, employers will simply double everyone’s workload, and we are not computers. Maybe 3 hours of work is all anyone can do in a day, and some of us can do it in 3:15 but most of us like to spread it over 8. Plus there are insights that only come in non-active time, again, we aren’t machines.
Congratulations you just figured out how to have four jobs without breaks.
Some meetings are BS while others are legitimately helpful - I think a 3 hr day would make those good meetings hard to squeeze in.
Then you miss out the unmentioned part of the work - idle thinking. Not only the time spent typing something on the keyboard is work. All the time spent thinking how to solve a problem is also work.
