 Einstein almost got fired from the patent office for developing the theory of relativity when he was supposed to be filing. His boss just said that he worked too much over time. Whenever people meet for the first time, there's a little script that everybody follows in order to make the situation run a little bit more smoothly. In America, it goes something like this. Hi, I'm Josh. Hello, I'm YouTube. Nice to meet you, YouTube. What do you do for a living? The second question that we ask in order to form some sort of an identity for someone is what service they exchange for money. Someone could be a brilliant composer or an Olympic marathon runner, but if they spend 40 hours a week as an insurance executive or a janitor, that's what we base our initial impression of them on. Of course, it is around 40 hours a week, which is a pretty substantial part of their life. It's hard to say that something that takes up that much of your time is totally unrelated to the kind of person that you are. But have you ever wondered where the 40 hour work week standard came from? I mean, we treat it like it's a fact of life, as though human beings evolved alongside time card machines, but it's actually a totally arbitrary number. During the Industrial Revolution, when schedules of production became more regular and large scale machinery required that workers come to factories, it was most profitable for factories to be operational 24-7, which meant getting workers to work as long as they could. This was before labor laws, let alone OSHA or even overtime. There was no overtime, there was just time. And however much you could give before you keeled over from exhaustion, that was how much the boss wanted. But Robert Owen, a well-social reformer, philosopher, and businessman, pioneered the idea of a more conservative work week, as a means of improving the lives and welfare of workers. Before Owen, it was sort of assumed that the only way that a business owner could be competitive and profitable was to abuse their employees within a hair's breadth of a riot. But when people visited Owen's lumber mill communities in New Lanark, which enjoyed such radical programs as free education for children and relatively safe working conditions, they were shocked to see that the towns were clean, relatively crime-free, and massively productive. Owen's philosophy of workers' rights extended to limiting the amount of time that anybody was expected to work. He initially campaigned for a 10-hour work day, but then decided that eight sounded better in his catchphrase, 8 hours labor, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest. Which became a mantra for workers' rights everywhere. So if you've ever wondered why 9-5 is 9-5, or why most of the industrialized world gets up and goes to bed around the same times, it's because Robert Owen decided that that was easy to campaign on. Here in the 21st century, we enjoy many more benefits in employment than just a limited work week. But even with the advent of electricity, industrial automation, the assembly line, computers, robots, and 3D printing, there is still an expectation that every human adult needs to find the same amount of work to do as a 19th century lumber mill worker. And some numbers suggest that we really can't. According to Microsoft's 2005 Office Productivity Challenge, a poll of more than 38,000 people in 28 different countries found that they were at work an average of 45 hours a week, but that only around 29 of those hours were actually productive. The majority of that time, at least in the United States, was built to procrastination. Checking Facebook, texting, chatting with coworkers, checking Facebook again, that sort of stuff. Now that's an average, and averages can be deceiving, but there is a growing trend worldwide of decreasing hours worked per week, and that's probably a good thing, both for a free time and for the quality of our work. We like to think that so long as we've had our coffee, we're good to go. However, regardless of how important it is for you to be on your game all the time while you're at work, the longer you spend at work, the more your judgment is impaired. I mean, who would you expect to have the most stable judgment? How about judges? I mean, that's really important for the entire justice system to work. But if you want a favorable verdict, you'd better schedule your trial, either early in the day or just after lunch, because every decision that a judge makes without a break significantly increases the chances that they're just going to say guilty and bang the gavel to get the trial over with. Other studies show the same general principle across multiple disciplines. The longer a person spends at work, the more their faculties are eroded, and the lower the return for the same time investment. Judgment will power creativity, response time, processing speed, everything gets slowly depleted over the course of a work day. The point at which mistakes and poor judgment are costing more than the time that the employee is spending at work is hard to measure and probably varies a lot between individuals. But personally, insofar as judges are concerned, if I have a traffic ticket, I think that they should have a nice snack, do maybe two things, and then go home. Of course, many people value time spent working as some sort of measure of a person's worth. Culturally, in America, we tend to view people who work 60-hour weeks as people to be admired and emulated, whereas someone who punches out at five on the dot is some sort of freeloader. Some people actually criticize public school teachers for only having to be at school until three o'clock, as though getting 35th graders to sit at their desks and learn mathematics for six hours a day isn't enough to warrant a reasonable paycheck. But a growing body of research shows that working extra long hours is bad for productivity and also bad for creativity and innovation, bad for health, both physical and mental, bad for parenting and bad for family. It's hard to be really gung-ho about how working long hours is good for your character when it doubles the risk of clinical depression. That's not to say that we should all be clamoring for a mandated six-hour work day. There's some data that shows that employees get even more stressed out being super productive in a shorter time frame, especially if they have the same amount of work to do. But many industry leaders like Larry Page and Carlos Slim are realizing that the quality and quantity of automation is increasing every day and that requiring 40 hours a week from every employee just isn't necessary anymore. They're actually advocating for less work, shorter and more flexible hours, and a more goal-oriented salary structure, paying people to achieve a certain result in a certain time frame and letting them figure out their own schedule. And honestly, that could be fantastic for human productivity and innovation. If we weren't so exhausted at the end of each work day, if it didn't take up so much of our collective time and energy, maybe instead of asking what someone does for a living when we meet them, we could ask what they love to do or what they make in their free time. I certainly know what I'm doing for the next six hours. What would you build if you had an extra two hours a day? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.