Working 9 To 5 Works For Mac

It might sound strange, but let me explain what I mean by it. I am a Gen Y fellow graduated in 2011, so I have roughly 3 years of experience in the labor market. Until now I never worried about when my workday was starting and when it was finishing. I am connected all the time, checking my emails, answering on the phone, tweeting, etc. Moreover I only have one mobile number shared for business and personal purpose and all my emails are centralized in one common application. As a consequence, when I check my emails or message I do it for both private and professional reasons, being it at 7 AM or 11 PM. Until today, considering that behavior as not normal was out of scope.

My colleagues and relatives have a similar behavior, so I thought it was absolutely normal. But recently the normality of such behavior have been challenged here’s why (bit of long story, so bear with me): One of my relatives is facing a lot of challenges at work. She is working for an organization that gives a lot of freedom and flexibility and does not control people in terms of hours of work or performance. This obviously brought at lot of deviance that led to a conflict between someone that we’ll call “Anna” and her colleagues. Anna is a person with strong work ethics. She is doing her best to accomplish all her duties and ensure that her work is always perfect and on time.

Her peers have recognized her performance in many occasions. That’s where the problem might have started. 2 years ago, Anna joined a new team that had already two people as part of it, and since the very beginning has been performing very well or perhaps too well. During her first year, she didn’t want to bring a big discrepancy between her performance and the rest of the team. This year, she has been increasingly put under a lot of psychological pressure by the team leader (let’s call him “Charles”).

Charles is called the “Coordinator”, so theoretically the driver of the team. Yet, in the recent months, Charles started to be more and more aggressive with Anna, trying to undervalue her value in front of other professionals, avoiding giving any feedback, neither assigning tasks. The organization was so flexible that Charles is doing two full time jobs “to pay the bills” as he says. Let’s make some math 35 hours + 35 hours = 70 hours a week!

In normal circumstances we could consider Charles a superhero! But, not so fast. Charles is a smart guy. He is doing the minimum and quickly saw that Anna is a passionate person, highly performing, which will do her very best to ensure herself and her peers are performing well. As a consequence, Charles stopped coming to the office and only goes to his second job, where the control is higher. Very recently, Charles started to have a dual behavior towards Anna.

Either being very aggressive, either being very gentle. Sometimes he would call her to ensure she was not working. Reason being she was working too much. If at the beginning Anna thought that Charles was just being kind and attentive to his team wellbeing, she soon realized she was wrong. Few weeks ago, Anna realized she was feeling oppressed and couldn’t accept anymore to be treated “like a dog” for doing her job and Charles taking the credit, despite the fact he was never there. Anna got to a limit and burst, entering into a strong conflict with him. After intense weeks at work, Anna had a strong decision to make: either leaving the team and going for another assignment or fighting the devil and continuing working in the team doing what she is passionate about.

“You are confined only by the walls you build yourself” Anna chose the hard path. She fought against the climate installed and got the courage to invest her time in changing the ways things were being managed. She spent hours meeting Charles and her colleague in order to express her frustration and make them understand that they were not accomplishing their job anymore and that the whole department was suffering from their behavior. Today, Anna finally got hold of the whole team and after a long meeting Charles recognized at half words the reason of their discrepancy in terms of performance. It all comes down to the meaning of “work”, and the main trigger for me to write this article. For Anna, her team had to respect their 35 hours contract and when they were not working “enough hours”, they should compensate in another moment.

Anna also communicated to Charles that despite understanding that people can work remotely, that was not meant that to work for a second job and sending one or two email to his team during lunchtime. “Succes isn’t just about what you accomplish in your life. It’s about what you inspire others to do” Charles felt bad because he realized that Anna was performing very well and just doing her job, compared to him that was being highly paid and clearly underperforming. His reaction had been to become aggressive and mean with the only purpose of making sure Anna would do less. He is literally pulling her team down to feel better. No solution has yet been found but we can trust Anna’s work ethic to do her best to bring the team back on track and to fight against deviant behavior. So, this story is not unique.

How many times have you been in a situation where have different understand of what “working” really means? Is it just doing something that roughly occupies you from 9 to 5 and pays your bills? Is it something that has to be done because you are forced to? Is it right to always do the minimum and even less if possible? “Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow” Anna and Charles are having similar ages, so claiming a generational gap does not explain the differences. Probably the reason comes from their culture of work (background and previous experiences). Charles works for the same organization for more than five years now and the lack of control and structure from its very beginning clearly influence his behavior and leadership style.

But do we have to completely blame an organization for the behavior of its employees? I believe it’s a complex question and we are in a grey zone, in between organizational responsibilities and individual responsibilities. However, individuals have a choice. Charles has always been free to choose another path and perhaps leave the organization. Yet, he’s still there and enjoying more than ever the possibility of being paid for few work. Why would people do this?

In my perspective working is not a duty, it’s a right! We should not work because we are forced to, but because we want to. Working occupies more than 50% of our awaking time during the week. Shouldn’t we try to find a way of doing something we love, something we are passionate about? Working is a great way of knowing ourselves, of doing something we can be proud of. And I don’t talk about changing the world, it’s sometime just about changing our own world!

Think about the satisfaction one’s have when you have a great day at work. Don’t you get immediately in a better mood? Isn’t your environment shinier, happier, afterwards? I am a young professional, savvy, passionate about my job and will answer to my professional emails at 1 AM, if I am awake and concentrated. If I have a great idea during the weekend I’ll share it with my team and I’ll be proud of it. I am a true believer that we can be happy at work and that every company should support us in reaching that goal.

In my opinion working is not a 9 to 5 job, but a 24/7 journey that will lead you somewhere yet unknown. Thus let’s do our best and ensure our journey leads to an awesome destination!

Why the 9 to 5? The average American today works 8.8 hours per day (Bureau of Labor Statistics), but how effective are we really working 8 hours per day? Before we dig in, I decided to do some background research about how the 9 to 5 came to be in the first place. The answer comes from a man named Robert Owens, who started a campaign during the Industrial Revolution. Back then, 14-hour days were the norm in order to maximize the output of the companies’ factories.

Owens bravely advocated the notion that people should not be working for more than 8-hours per day. His famous slogan was: “Eight hours labour.

9 To 5 Work Day

Eight hours recreation. Eight hours rest.” -Robert Owens The 888 rule soon became the standard when Ford implemented the 8-hour day with Ford Motors Company in 1914. Despite the doubts he faced, the results were astonishing.

“With fewer hours worked by the employees and double the pay, Ford managed to increase his profit margins by two-folds. This encouraged other companies to adopt the shorter, eight hour work day as a standard for their employees.” That’s right.

There’s no scientific or a well-thought out explanation of why we work 8 hours per day. It’s simply a standard that has been passed on over a century ago, used to run factories most efficiently. Work Smarter. Time has become a measure for productivity because it’s an easy metric to measure. We constantly try to jam in more hours during the day because we feel like we accomplished something by the end. But time is a vanity metric when it comes to measuring productivity.

In today’s creative economy, how long we work per day isn’t what is important. It’s what you do with the time you have. According to, referring to various studies done by businesses, universities, and industry associations: “On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day In fact, every hour you work beyond 40 actually makes you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul” Long hours, in other words, are often more about proving something to ourselves than actually getting stuff done. This doesn’t apply to how we work, but also how we learn. For example, if you’re looking to learn, you could spend years learning with free language apps.

Or you could take private with a professional tutor who can significantly accelerate your learning curve. Doing less, but getting more. I’ve been on the hunt for ways to get more done during my day. After experimenting with various tips and tricks, here are 5 things that’s been working for me:. List your 3 most important tasks. Before you leave the office, list 3 tasks for the next day that will be the most impactful to what you are working on.

Tip: If you already have a to-do-list, pick the task that is on the bottom of your list or the one that you have been avoiding the longest, and put it on the top. Work in 90-minute intervals, then take breaks. Rather than looking at your day as a 6 or 8-hour work day, break your day up into three or four 90-minute chunks (1 task per 90-minute interval). Take breaks in between to go stretch, run, flirt — whatever you need to get your mind off work for a period of time.

Give yourself less time. Apply the for everything you do during the day. As Tim Ferris puts it, “a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted to complete it.”Basically, if you have 8 hours to do something, you’ll take all 8 hours for something that can be done in less time.

Branch similar tasks together. Whether it’s replying to e-mails, making phone calls, or sending out tweets, do them in bunches. Multi-tasking is the devil, and you do not want to waste your mental energy going back and forth on different tasks. Ask for help. Emphasize what you’re good at, but don’t waste time trying to correct weaknesses. If you’re stuck on something, take 5 seconds to ask a neighbour or phone up a friend who may know the answer. Start leveraging your network, and it could save you hours of stress and time. I’ve personally felt much happier after implementing these few tricks, and as a result it has only improved the work I do in the office. Hope this article was helpful in reconsidering the 9 to 5 worklife.

I’d love to know how it turns out for you. Feel free to recommend it to anyone that you think would find this useful. Priyanka Singh March 21, 2014, I read a book titled, “Power of Less” by Leo Babauta a few years ago that reminds of #1. I list 3 MIT (most important tasks) for the day and knock each one out, and it seems to set direction for me. I’ve also applied #3, Parkinson’s Law. But what really helps is the Pomodoro technique, ever tried it? I’m sure you must have heard of it.

These are all great tactics! What’s been working for me is pure, undistilled focus. Lately, whatever I am working on, I set the intention to make that one task my “world”.

I find myself trailing off quite a bit, but perhaps you may agree, the more you practice your focus muscle the stronger it gets. January 17, 2015, Hi Sean. I apologize I didn’t reply but I didn’t see this until now. Can you believe that I’m on the verge of being self-employed?

All thank to many people, including you. The Pomodoro technique was invented by an Italian man (unsure what his name is) who purchased a kitchen timer that looked like a tomato. He set the time for 25 minutes at a time and focused completely on one task for that time.

When the timer rang, he would it again. Essentially, you set 25 minute intervals and focus on your work. Of course it’s the practice that matters, not the tomato timer. I just use an app on my iPhone.

It’s releases resistance. You’re less likely to think about the difficulty of the task and just entrench yourself into doing it. It’s an awesome way to get into flow of life, in my opinion. Folwart July 7, 2014, “On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day In fact, every hour you work beyond 40 actually makes you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul” So 40 is the magic number for everyone, that’s where the line is drawn? I have doubts that it’s as tidy as that.

I’d imagine it varies from person to person and the average is probably not 40 hours. I read some information that suggested we have somewhere around 4 to 6 hours of our highest productivity, that’s where most of the work gets the done. If one worked every day that would land around 28 to 42 hours per week, which averages out to 35 hours. A technicality, but the message is essentially the same. There’s a point for us all when we’re just not as effective and productive, and it’s rather tedious. Louis Lee October 24, 2015, I disagree with the 8 hour shift, 5 days per week. I used to do it, and 8 hours goes by way too quickly.

I also don’t think the trade of 2 days off for 5 days working is great. I currently work 10 hour shifts, which isn’t bad at all. 2 hours is not a lot of time, but to make your shift an extra 2 hours long, you won’t be as rushed to get work done so you can work at a slow, steady rate. Plus, I get a 3 day weekend every week! I still work 40 hours per week, but the difference is I have an easier workshift as well as a longer weekend to relax. 4 days of work for 3 days off is a much better balance than 5 to 2.

Kb100 January 30, 2016, I typically work 9 to 5 (read as 9:15 to 4:50), but actually take a one hour lunch break. I never get why anyone would want to spend a full 8 hours inside a stuffy office, five days a week, never leaving during the work day to refresh their body and mind. As it is, quantitatively, I probably total 28 hours of actual work per week.

Maybe that is even a stretch. The only time I work more than that is when I’m working on something really juicy.

I can tell you, there are few that can match my productivity, yet I don’t believe I’m working that hard. I can only assume either I am that much keener because I take ample breaks, or others are that less capable. I like to believe the latter is true, but who really knows. Thanks for mentioning that hours worked is a “vanity metric”.

The poor curmudgeons working 45+ hours a week are busting to break-through to higher positions, but the odds are stacked full stop against them. Only one may make it, or they all will get outpaced by an external candidate.