Cal Newport

they took a day away and yet the perceived productivity or the measured productivity didn't go down.

There's two ways to look at it.

The one way to look at it is to say, oh, this means that we should have a four-day work week because things didn't get worse.

Maybe.

But to me, there's a bigger observation that came out of that, which is like, wait, so what are we doing during the work days?

There's something going on here that should really catch our attention.

What does work mean?

that we could take an entire day off the table with no other preparation and the valuable stuff being produced doesn't change.

This tells us that like whatever we're doing while we're sitting here in work is not just sitting down and trying to produce value.

We're clearly have all sorts of other sorts of distractions going on, context switching, time that's being devoured, Parkinson's laws at play.

Work must be broke.

To me, that was the more important observation is that like, if you can take away a day and nothing changes, then I don't think we're doing in the office what we think we're doing in the office.

Well, we are meant to do, like what would be the ideal workday?

in an office environment, it would actually match the human brain.

It would probably be you come in, you work on something hard for a while.

Like that's what you do in the morning.

You have lunch and then you like catch up with,

have some meetings, talk to some people, hey, what's going on, and do some tasks, and that's your day.

That's basically what we can do, like two things.

One big burst of like, let me focus on something hard, and then we can kind of come down the mountain after that with, let me chat with people, what's going on, some decisions need to be made or whatever.