Our working day lasts seven hours. That’s enough. 

It wasn’t born out of some grand HR strategy, at the height of the employer branding craze, nor did a presentation titled The Future of Work suddenly land in everyone’s inbox one Monday morning. It happened much more simply than that. 

During the pandemic, our office, like most offices, stood empty for a while. When we started coming back, we did it gladly and gradually. At first, just for a few hours a day, long enough to sit around the same table again, exchange ideas in person, and remember what a conversation without a “Leave meeting” button felt like. 

Then the advertising industry slowly got back on its feet. 

There was more work, our days at the office grew longer, and those few hours naturally turned into seven. We’d come in around 10 a.m. (truth be told, we’re not morning people) and leave around 5 p.m. It turned out to be more than enough time to get the job done properly. 

Along the way, we discovered a few practical advantages too. We head to work after the morning rush has eased and Belgrade has had a chance to breathe, while the hour that would otherwise belong to work stays ours, for all those personal errands and everyday things that somehow never fit into the working week. 

And that’s how it stayed. For six years now. 

Now for a little math. If a month has between 20 and 23 working days, working one hour less each day adds up to more than 20 fewer hours spent at work. Almost three full working days. Ask the agency team and they’ll tell you that’s a pretty good deal. Ask management and they’ll nod just as happily: the work still gets done. 

In our line of work, working days don’t always have neat edges anyway. The events we create for our clients sometimes begin just as most companies are wrapping up for the day. Sometimes we’re on-site in the evening, sometimes all day, and there are periods when a project simply sets a different rhythm. 

That’s why a well-organised working day makes more sense to us than insisting on that eighth hour. 

The eight-hour working day became a standard more than a century ago, at the first International Labour Conference, held in Washington in November 1919. We arrived at seven without any intention of challenging a de facto century-old standard. It simply turned out to be all the time we needed. 

And 10 a.m. isn’t set in stone either. Our start time is flexible, because life, traffic, meetings and projects rarely follow perfectly drawn-up plans. 

For us, seven hours isn’t a productivity experiment. Nor is it a promise that every day will look exactly the same. 

It’s simply the rhythm we arrived at by working. 

And one that has been working for us for years.