Why eight hour work day

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In the wake of the American Revolution, Philadelphia carpenters organized the first strike for a shorter, ten-hour workday. Over a half-century later, on May 1, , the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called for a national strike demanding an eight-hour workday.

Organized workers around the country answered the call. One resulting protest, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, led to a large police intervention and deaths on both sides. The backlash from the Haymarket affair set the movement for a shorter workday back for decades.

This helped them to dive back in refreshed for another productive hour of work. People who have discovered this magic productivity ratio crush their competition because they tap into a fundamental need of the human mind: the brain naturally functions in spurts of high energy roughly an hour followed by spurts of low energy 15—20 minutes.

For most of us, this natural ebb and flow of energy leaves us wavering between focused periods of high energy followed by far less productive periods, when we tire and succumb to distractions. The best way to beat exhaustion and frustrating distractions is to get intentional about your workday.

The eight-hour workday can work for you if you break your time into strategic intervals. Once you align your natural energy with your effort, things begin to run much more smoothly. Here are four tips that will get you into that perfect rhythm. Break your day into hourly intervals. Beyond getting you into the right rhythm, planning your day around hour-long intervals simplifies daunting tasks by breaking them into manageable pieces.

If you want to be a literalist, you can plan your day around minute intervals if you like, but an hour works just as well. Respect your hour. It turned out that no one was regularly working eight-hour days. Everybody was more in the five- to six-hour range. And until we shared that with each other, everybody was secretly feeling guilty and lazy about it. Many of us in that group are freelancers who work from home. Forty hours of availability, sure. Forty hours of office presence, probably.

Forty hours of thinking about work—at least, and likely more. After engaging in deep work, you feel satisfied and proud. I'm not even saying you should never waste time on social media. Some administrative work is completely necessary in even the most creative and self-directed jobs, and social media is fun as long as it's not taking over your life.

So why not just do your deep work, dip a toe in the most necessary administrative stuff, and then be done?