This one is interesting

- 9 to 5 (including breaks) aka WLB
- Building products in my area of passion (Music, Art, or Travel)
- High paying (I don't care for those perks like free food or bean bags)
- Enough vacations without judgement
- Continuous innovation (fuck your 1830s product)
- Good social capital (teams should trust me for my decisions)
- WFH where I can opt to go in to office whenever I want (so that I can build my awesome battle rig at home)

Where is the catch?

@Benutzername you are the smartest person in the room.

9 to 5 including breaks is almost like that 4-day work week.

@kamen how?

Wait.. that's a good idea. 4 day work week with Thursday as no meeting day.

Brilliant. I am god.

@Floydimus If I got that right, 9 to 5 with one hour break included in that means you're working 7 hours a day; that's 35 hours a week, which is almost as if you're working 4 8-hour days.

@kamen the ideal should be 35 hours in 5 days.

Capitalism guilts you into believing that anything less than 40 hours across 5 days is working less.

9.00 to 17.00 times 5 days per week with breaks sounds too low. Well, it depends, when you have a family you may need the free time but for me it would be way too low. You can't get enough done in this time and your projects will be slow. Everyone else will be annoyed when you have so long to do your work which they need to continue there work.

If it is 6 days a week, it is bad, because you have to travel one day more and traveling can cost a lot time. I would rater work 5 days a bit more.

I would want a 42 h work week with a short travel distance, something like 5-10 min. If you need 50 min (like i need), you lose 8-9 h.

@happygimp0 Not everything is about efficiency. Sometimes is good to do anything besides working. I know some people define themselfs by the work they do but DAMN. Scary.

@Benutzername 40h per week are less than 25%, there is plenty of time to do something else.

@Floydimus What do you think why i wrote things like "for me" and "I would want"? Because it is my opinion.

"you can't get enough done"

I read "Enough vacations without judgement" as "Enough vaccinations without judgement"

Yup, I'm officially broken

@happygimp0 I'm sorry, but if people are upset that I take time to finish tasks because work is just a means to stay alive and not my main interest in life, maybe they should consider working less as well. If making other people wait is frowned upon then making other people work extra should be as well.

@happygimp0 I'm calling bs on 40h beeing 25%. The work week is 5 days long.
24h a day
- 8h healthy sleep
= 16h actual available time
- 8h work
= 8h of free time or 50% of your available time

@Benutzername This guesstimate is bullshit anyway. The total available time includes weekends, but excludes time you spend travelling to and from work which can easily be an extra 25%.

@homo-lorens For 25% travel time you have to travel 42 h per week, or, if you work 6 days per week, 7 h per day. I don't you have to either move or search a new job when you travel that long. But yes, travel time can eat up a lot of unproductive time.

@happygimp0 You miscalculated something, if we go with 40 working hours then the 25% travel time would be a third of that which is 13:20, 2:40 per day or 1:20 for a single route. I know people who travel a lot more than that.

@homo-lorens Ah i see, you mean 25% extra worktime for traveling, yes that is true.

Before COVID i would use the train so i can do something while traveling, but since we have restrictions i don't travel with the train anymore.

As @Benutzername said, sleep time is not productive. So a week is 168 - 56 = 112 hours, and assuming 1h for travelling (which is optimistic) a 40h work week takes away 50h, that is, a little less than half of it. If you don't work overtime or weekends ever and you never pick up your phone outside working hours (depending on your role and manager this might even get you fired), you have 62 undisturbed hours - on average 9 per day - to manage your life and entertain yourself. Add another working hour and you'd be working longer than your free time, not counting unproductive time to either.

I'm intentionally not calculating recreational time by excluding things like meals because time allotted varies widely and personally I consider making food a recreational activity.