§ field notes · may 2025
why the 40-hour work week is industrial age thinking in an AI age
A morning coffee walk, some labor history, and the math everyone keeps refusing to do.
republishing in progress — this essay ran as a LinkedIn long-form and is being moved here in full. the argument, in the meantime:
- The 40-hour week is an industrial-age artifact — a factory-floor convention we carried into knowledge work without asking whether it still measured anything.
- Productivity and compensation decoupled decades ago; the hours stayed fixed while the output curve left them behind.
- AI is the first technology in a century with a real shot at returning time to people — and we are spending that dividend on more busywork instead.
- Skulldrudgery: intentional drudgery plus skullduggery. The work that exists to look like work. Automate it without apology.