TBSP (Too Busy, Summary Please): Work hours aren’t a law of nature. For most of human history, they didn’t exist. Cities and factories invented them, a century of strikes and one wild cereal-company experiment reshaped them, and most of us have never once asked why ours look the way they do. This week: where “work hours” actually came from, and why knowing your own reason matters more than the number on the clock, whether you set hours for a whole team or just for yourself.
Why are your working hours set the way they are? 9 to 5, 6 to 4, 11 to 1. Is it because they have always been that way? Is there a specific customer base you are trying to reach or serve? Because of Dolly Parton?
You probably don’t give a lot of thought to work hours, until an issue comes up. Because we don’t give a lot of thought to why work and business hours are set the way they are, it can be hard to defend them. Understanding why, being intentional, and openly communicating the reason for business or work hours can alleviate many a difficult conversation about schedules.
For much of human history work hours weren’t a thing. You lived your life, did what needed to be done to eat and be part of the group or society, slept, and did it again. Industrialization and the growth of cities created the need to establish consistent schedules and routines.
Historians have a name for the earlier way of working. They call it task-orientation. You worked based on daylight, weather, and whatever job was in front of you, not a clock (Thompson, 1967). A farming weaver kept a diary in the 1780s that shows this well. Some days he wove almost the entire day. Other days he split his time between weaving, harvesting, mending a coat, and tending a sick cow. There wasn’t much difference between “work time” and everything else. There wasn’t a reliable clock to check anyway, and there wasn’t a boss who needed you at a bench by a specific hour.
Cities and factories changed all of that. Once production depended on many people working the same hours, in the same building, at the same pace, task-orientation didn’t work anymore. Clock-orientation took over, and it was enforced. One of the earliest examples happened before the Industrial Revolution most of us learned about in school. Around 1700, the Crowley Ironworks in England ran on a rulebook over a hundred thousand words long. They had a “Monitor” whose job was logging every worker’s arrival and departure to the minute. Workers were fined for loitering, drinking, or simply working at their own pace instead of the clock’s (Thompson, 1967). This is really where “work hours” as we know them got started. Not as a natural fact of life, but as a tool to keep people synchronized around machinery.
From there hours kept growing before they finally shrank. For most of the 1800s, a 70-hour week was normal in American factories. That’s roughly 12 hours a day, six days a week, and some industries ran even longer. Pushback started early. Welsh mill owner Robert Owen was calling for “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest” back in 1817, decades before anyone in power took him seriously. It took another century of strikes, one federal law the Supreme Court struck down, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act before the country landed on 40 hours as the legal standard.
The best part of this history isn’t in Washington. It’s in Battle Creek, Michigan. In 1930, in the middle of the Great Depression, cereal maker W.K. Kellogg cut his factory’s shifts from eight hours to six. He wasn’t chasing a productivity formula. He wanted to rehire workers who’d been laid off, and he believed people deserved more of their own time. It worked. Within two years, employees were earning in six hours what they used to earn in eight (Sahadi, 2023). By the late 1950s, most of those same workers had gone back to eight-hour days on their own (Sahadi, 2023). Money had started to matter more than time off. The six-hour day didn’t survive that shift, once the original reason for it stopped being the point.
Look at the farmer, the Crowley Ironworks, and Kellogg’s factory together, and the same lesson shows up three times. The actual hours mattered less than the reason behind them. Kellogg’s six-hour day worked as long as people believed in the reason for it. It fell apart once that reason stopped mattering to the people living it. If you don’t know why your hours are set the way they are, they’ll eventually drift toward whatever’s easiest, not whatever’s smart.
That question from the start of this piece is worth sitting with, whether you set the schedule for an entire company or just for yourself. Are your hours set because that’s when customers can actually reach you? Because your team spans time zones and needs a real overlap window? Or did you just inherit them from whoever had the job before you, the same way most of us inherited 9 to 5 from a factory floor none of us have ever seen? “I don’t know” is a completely honest answer. It’s also worth pondering, because a schedule you can’t explain is a schedule you can’t really defend, and eventually it gets tested.
That’s true whether you’re setting hours for a whole team or just deciding when you personally start answering email. The habit of asking why applies at every level, and it’s a genuinely tough habit to build. The moment you name a real reason for your hours out loud, you’ve drawn a line, and something will push on it. Maybe it’s the person who wants to start at 6 because that’s when they’re sharpest. Maybe it’s the client who wants a call at 8 p.m. their time. Maybe it’s your own inbox at 9 p.m., daring you to just check it. None of those pulls are unreasonable on their own. The problem is answering them one at a time, with no “why” to check them against.
Be clear with yourself first, whatever seat you’re in. If the honest answer is shift coverage, own that before someone asks you to bend it. If it’s “that’s when our customers are open,” decide that on purpose instead of defaulting to 9 to 5 because everyone else does. If it’s simply “this protects the two hours a day I actually think clearly,” that counts too. Once you know the real reason, say it out loud, to your team or just to yourself, and keep saying it when something pushes against it. Revisit it once or twice a year, the same way Kellogg’s should have. A reason you can name is a reason you can hold onto. A reason you can’t name is just a habit wearing a schedule’s clothes.
None of that holds if you quietly work against it. Answering emails at 10 p.m. “because that’s when you had time” teaches everyone around you, including yourself, that the hours are negotiable the moment it’s convenient. Consistency starts with actually living the reason you decided on, not just stating it.
Set your hours on purpose. Know the why. Hold yourself to it. Even Dolly knew 9 to 5 was worth writing a song about. The least you can do is know why yours look the way they do. Got a schedule you’re still defending out of habit instead of reason? Tell me about it at garth@experiencebetterllc.com.
References
Sahadi, J. (2023, September 9). Why do we work 9 to 5? The history of the eight-hour workday. CNN Business. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/09/success/work-culture-9-to-5-curious-consumer
Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past & Present, 38(1), 56–97.