Science says: whatever you do, don't work more than 5 hours a day

A quarter of an hour idling by the coffee machine, certainly spending five times five minutes a day on a toilet visit, the lunch that runs a few minutes late and that little walk to combat the afternoon slump. To be honest: you are never fully productive for the full eight hours a day. Add it all up and people quickly take an hour off.

My ideal rhythm is to start at half past seven in the morning and then work with full focus until around eleven o'clock. Between eleven and twelve, I prefer to get rid of some emails and call whoever I need to call. After lunch, my low hours begin, during which I really produce less from my typing fingers, and around three o'clock I find my mojo again. If I only worked during the most productive hours of my day, I would hit the ideal number, research shows. Namely: five (!) hours.

Alex Pang is the founder of Strategy and Rest and says that we can only concentrate for five hours, the other hours we apparently work for nothing. Research even showed that there are people who are only productive for two hours and 53 minutes. Wow, I feel a bit sorry for the bosses. The rest of the time they chat at each other's desks, scroll on social media, and very little work actually gets done. In a previous job, I worked four days a week and I always jokingly said that I had a full-time job in those four days. Research shows that this is indeed the case. If you work fewer hours, your productivity in the hours you do work increases significantly.

In Iceland, there was an experiment with a four-day workweek, where employees were paid for five days, by the way. This seems like motivation in itself, right? From this Icelandic pilot, it turned out that the 2500 people who were monitored achieved a better balance between work and private life and experienced less stress, which reduced the risk of burnout. Win, win, win. But the most remarkable thing: productivity remained the same as in a five-day workweek or even increased. Meanwhile, 86 percent of the working population has switched to a shorter workweek.

A small side note is that the camaraderie decreases with a shorter workday AND not everyone has the same rhythm, which sometimes disturbs each other. But that can of course be tackled with the Friday afternoon drinks and a lunch lull at the beginning of the afternoon. Something for you, those five hours a day?

Source: RTL, Workjuice