The whole question of “the best place / time to work” is a challenging one. For me, the vital component of a work environment that stimulates maximum inspiration and productivity is not hours worked; it’s the synergistic and unplanned “meetings” when two or more people start to feed off each other and generate bursts of creativity / coding / new ideas that would never have happened had everyone been working alone. In the corporate environment, a lot of this happens around the water cooler. In a start-up it happens where and when you find it. A lot of really creative stuff comes from those chance conversations that almost never happens when people aren’t in the same office at the same time.

So, the answer for me is to forget about counting hours and encourage some amount of “self-directed” work during the time and at the place of the employees’ choosing as long as everyone has a core set of hours when they’re in the same place at the same time. Give everyone clear deliverables and time tables and make sure that everyone knows who is responsible for what.

And to all of you who feel that icy pressure to “look like you’re working” I’d say you are working in the wrong company, no matter how hip the product is or how famous the CEO is.

@Niket You may enjoy this Ted-talk by Jason Fried (co-founder of 37signals). His main argument: The office isn’t a good place to work.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html

That is a great way to have more inspiration, more productivity, and oh yah, happy marriages too!

What about something like “take an extra day off a week” ? Put only the productive hours in at work and have a better quality of life.

Maybe?

Would you then say that employees can use this argument for more flexibility in their schedules?

For me,I’d say that idling is part of the job. I find myself thinking about problems I’ve been trying to solve while doing the most mundane tasks (showering, walking, etc.). It’s like I’m always working on some problem whether it’s in my direct conscious or not.

Sometimes, when I used to work in an office, I’d have a harder time coming up with solutions just because of the pressure to look like you are working. My best moments we’re simply crunching through an issue with a colleague at a coffee shop, but I always felt like these “breaks” were frowned upon.

I don’t really want to work in a place for 80 hours anyways, but I am more than happy to work hard to provide deliverables that take “80 hours of work.”