Do we work too much, or on the wrong things?

In 1938, the United States set the workweek at forty hours.

The economist John Maynard Keynes had predicted eight years earlier that by now we'd be working fifteen. Productivity did roughly what he expected. The hours didn't.

So where did the time go?

What's the pattern?

Every era fills the hours it has. Farm work filled the daylight. Factory work filled the shift. Office work filled the nine-to-five, and then, with a phone in every pocket, spilled past it.

What changed is what fills it. Study after study finds knowledge workers spending most of their week in meetings, messages, and updates about work, and a minority on the work itself. The hours are the same. The share that matters keeps falling.

That's why the four-day week trials keep surprising people. When Iceland, then the UK, ran large pilots, output mostly held. Not because people worked harder in four days, but because cutting a day forced every team to find the day's worth of work that didn't matter. It was always there. Nobody had a reason to look.

I write in my next book about attention as the thing that gets hijacked first. A workweek that's mostly reaction, pings, and reporting is a hijacked week. It feels full. It produces almost nothing.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Run the cut as an experiment. Take a day, or a meeting-free block, from one team for a quarter. Watch what disappears. That's your list of things that never mattered.

Measure real work, once. Ask people to log a week: making versus talking about making. The ratio is the most honest productivity number you'll ever see.

And stop rewarding the appearance of busy. The always-on reply, the late email. Those are symptoms. Reward the finished thing.

We don't need fewer hours as much as we need fewer wrong ones. Keynes wasn't wrong about the productivity. He was wrong about what we'd do with it.

What share of your week is the work, and what share is about the work?

Related: Is your attention the most valuable thing your company owns?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote