Let me summarize: "I usually slack off half the day. I realized I could move all my slacking to the second half of the day, and viola, 4 hour workday! I'm genius!"

I don't know about most people, but I get twice as much done in an 8 hour workday as I do in a 4 hour workday. It may even be more, because 8 hours gives me a greater proportion of time "in the zone."

Exactly. I freely admit that I don't work every minute of every day, but that's because you need to take breaks in order to refocus and mull over what you are working on. You can't cut the time you work in half (which for me often includes evenings and weekends) and expect to get the same amount done. The "extra" work that you add is often work that was unforseen when you started but became necessary as you understood the problem better.

I doubt that anyone gets twice as much work done in 8 hours as opposed to 4. This is like saying that you get 50% more work in when working 12 hours as opposed to 8.

The real problem in knowledge industries as far as I can see is that too many people work more than 8 hours per day.

The article freely admits that you can easily fill more time with more tasks and do more work. But that's not the point. The point is to have clear business goals, work to accomplish them, be satisfied when done, and stop working.

I imagine for most hacker types, that is generally not acceptable.

However, personal development bloggers that rehash old ideas from Zen Habits is not very challenging work.

This feels particular topical to me this week. We just had a 5 day weekend in Japan and I spent most of it programming. It was easily my most productive "workweek" ever, and I probably wasted half of it.

Yesterday was pretty representative: started working at 10:00, madly hacking away at client/server integration. Worked four solid hours and finally broke for lunch at 2:00, figuring that I would just tweak the integration when I got back and then start working on the web side. Tweaking the integration required installing Delayed::Job, which required learning how to use Git. Several hours later I was knee deep in Linux permissions errors and cursing loudly -- the wheels were spinning but no progress was being made, and I hadn't even coded the first screen for the web. I ended up doing at 7:30 what I should have done at 2:00 -- called it a good day's work.

(Sidenote: version 3.0, coming to a blog near you soon enough.)

> Several hours later I was knee deep in Linux permissions errors and cursing loudly

On the other hand, these diversions have taught me a lot of assorted technical knowledge that I wouldn't have picked up otherwise.

Not to mention improving my vocabulary - mostly of swear words.

"How to complete a full workday by noon?"

Hmm. That would require going to sleep before 5am and waking up before noon.

This might be stupid, but I'm not seeing the joke (if it is a joke). What do you mean, going to sleep before 5am and waking up before noon?

many of us stay up until 5am and then don't wake up until noon, making it mathematically impossible to complete a full workday before noon.

I wonder if Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome) is more prevalent among hacker-types than the general population.

That makes a lot of sense, thanks :-P

I wonder if Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is more prevalent among hacker-types than the general population.

Given the sample size of "me", absolutely.

Make that a rate of 100% with a sample size of 2...

200%?

0.15% in the general population? Definitely more then that! At least in double digits among the people I know.

Stay up late, and then go to bed at 5AM. Then you'd sleep for 7 hours or so and wake up at noon. Then you can't really work until noon because you slept through the morning.

Same idea in a different light:

"It's not how many hours you work, but how much work per hour you get done"

This might come off as a bit sad, but save moving to a warm country, I wouldn't know how to spend my time if I really did follow this and end at noon.

Watch LOST.

I recognize myself into this article. I always add more work to my day when my daily list is done.

Me too. A more balanced approach would be to have "minimum" and "maximum" hours. Say that you would work at least until 13.00 and at most until 19.00. Finishing in this time frame you will call it a day, but you add more work before 13.00 and just stop after 19.00.

So, looking at the definition of noon it says it's twelve o'clock...

Now lets do the math - starting from 9 and working until 12 is 12-9=3 hours.

Well, maybe I got something wrong:

  9 -> 10 = 0 + 1 = 1 hour
  10-> 11 = 1 + 2 = 2 hours
  11-> 12 = 2 + 1 = 3 hours

hmm...

How on earth can I trust someone writing this kind of lengthy blog post if he cannot even get the simple math right. I wouldn't complain if it was a bit smaller issue - but the whole article is talking about 4-hour workday that starts from 9 and ends at noon :)

You complain about error on simple math, but you wrote 1 + 2 = 2 ;-)

I didn't read anything saying his day started at 9. how on earth can i trust someone writing such a lengthy complaint when he can't even get the simple facts right :)

"If you view work as something that starts at 9 and ends at 5, you won’t be able to finish everything by noon."

"If You Work at Home, Never Work 9-5"

But it's only a fencepost error.

During Daylight Savings Time, noon is at 1:00 pm.

Some people work 8-5 with a lunch break.