Less time to work. Better work is the result.

Seems so sensible – give people clear objectives, and the freedom to work the way they want to get the job done. Worked for Microsoft in Japan in this oft-cited article.

Reminds me of the brilliant essay and later book by David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs” . He defines them thusly: “A bullshit job is a job which is so pointless that even the person doing the job secretly believes that it shouldn't exist.”

Some poor folks have jobs that are almost totally BS; but most of us have some parts of our jobs that qualify as pointless bullshit.

I wonder if this Microsoft experiment simply helped people eliminate some of the BS part of their jobs - by making time more scarce workers intuitively prioritized the real, important work over the pointless stuff. And that focus – condensing time and energy – made them more productive. And probably happier.

Anyone have other work experiments where having less time actually resulted in better outcomes? Pls share!