Our team worked only 6 hours a day. Here’s what we learned.

The nine-to-five workday has been a hallmark of the working world since it was ratified as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Until then, American labor unions had fought for decades to do away with the inhumane working conditions that plagued factory workers and had seen children as young as six years old in the coal mines.

After eight decades, work has largely evolved from algorithmic, assembly line tasks to heuristic, critical thinking tasks. Despite this, most modern organizations are still designed to manage hours – something organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant doesn’t agree with. “The more complex and creative jobs are, the less it makes sense to pay attention to hours at all,” he wrote.

How modern organizations are sabotaging productivity

In order to perform at a high level, heuristic and creative workers need to get into the “flow,” a model coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975 and better known by most people as the “zone.” Management consultancy McKinsey and Co found that top executives are up to five times more productive when they’re in a state of flow.

However, the modern organization ultimately inhibits its people from getting into flow by setting unrealistic expectations on availability and responsiveness as well as making no qualms about interrupting people to pull them into pointless hour-long meetings.

Moreover, employees are in such a state of hyper-availability that they check their emails 74 times a day. Your typical executive will find themselves immersed not in flow but in pursuit of clearing their inbox, responding to the ding of desktop and smartphone notifications, and traveling long distance for meetings.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, says that “three to four hours of continuous, undisturbed deep work (or flow) each day is all it takes to see a transformational change in our productivity and our lives.” Getting more shallow work hours in won’t necessarily offset a lack of uninterrupted deep work.

Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried agrees. On my Future Squared podcast, he says, “If you don’t get a good four hours of flow to yourself a day, putting more hours in isn’t going to make up for it. It’s just not true that if you stay at the office longer you get more work done.”

Our 9 am to 3 pm experiment

Having conducted a two-week 9 am to 3 pm experiment with my team at innovation acclerator Collective Campus, I can confirm that we had a positive outcome. The team was just as productive – if not more productive – than a standard workday. They also reported being in an improved mental state.

If you’re the manager of a small team with limited resources, take a moment to reflect on the following productivity techniques. And remember: your job as a leader is to facilitate outcomes, not just the illusion of them.

1. Prioritize: Identify and deliver only on value-adding tasks that move your organization toward its goals.
2. Cut: Channel kaizen and cut waste out of your business. This extends to hour-long meetings that don’t need to happen and quick wins such as notifications, which should be turned off.
3. Automate: Algorithmic tasks should be just that – algorithmic. So automate them.
4. Outsource: If rudimentary tasks are too difficult to automate, then they can be delegated or outsourced. Focus your and your team’s efforts on US$100+/hour tasks, not on US$10/hour tasks.
5. Test: If you can measure it, you can manage it. Avoid paralysis analysis and jumping to conclusions (both of which cost organizations untold thousands in lost productivity) by testing key assumptions underpinning your decisions.
6. Start: Your engines. Whether it’s working on the hardest thing first, blocking out your mornings for uninterrupted flow time, or using the Pomodoro technique, leverage one of the many triggers to get you into deep work.

Reset expectations

The biggest thing I hear from employees is that while they’d love to apply these techniques, they can’t because of unrealistic expectations set by the management.

If you truly want your people to do their best work and live their best lives, then make it OK for them not to respond immediately. On the other hand, make it not OK to interrupt people at a whim. Use asynchronous communication – whether through email or a messaging tool – to support people responding at a time that suits them.

Despite apparent conventional wisdom, most things don’t require an immediate response. Giving people more control over their work has also been found to be a key factor in the fight against workplace stress.

In the long run, fostering a flow-friendly workplace not only makes your people more productive but also boosts revenue numbers, employee engagement and retention, and gives your people more time for a little thing called life.

This is a condensed version of an article first published on Harvard Business Review.