Stephan Aarstol is the founder and CEO of Tower Paddle Boards. His company decided that they would shift from a standard 8-9 hour work day and make it a 5 hour work day. This may sound super dumb, but they realized that operating using a work day structure designed by Henry Ford for manufacturing workers 100 years ago didn't make a lot of sense. They say the 5 hour day isn't necessarily the ideal schedule, but it is a lot better.
They discovered something. Despite shortening their storefront and call center hours their sales didn't drop. People just adjusted when they called or came to the store. Shipping processing times dropped from 5 minutes to 3 minutes without managerial intervention. The employees managed to get their work done in three fewer hours. They were motivated to do this because they were still getting paid the same as they had for an 8 hour day. They were motivated.
It isn't that they were being lazy before. It is that work expands to fill the time allotted. Obviously there is a minimum time work can reasonably be done, but if you incentivize faster cycle times, especially with, "you can go home now" it makes that time shrink.
One way that I have applied this to my own life is by setting timers or little personal deadlines to artificially shorten the time allotted. It usually works pretty well.
I respect Mr. Aarstol's thought process and motivation. Rethinking core assumptions is important occasionally. Sometimes the things that made actions make sense stop being true and our foundational structures become out of date, sometimes to the point of being silly. I think he has found one of them.
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