Chetan Bhagat's 4-Hour Day vs Narayan Murthy's 70-Hour Work Week: India's Productivity Debate Rekindled

Author Chetan Bhagat has a new productivity suggestion for the Indian workforce: don’t look at the hours and the number of hours you’re expected to spend at your desk, and instead focus on how much work you can actually get done.

He argued that even four hours of dedicated work could be enough for the day, reigniting an old workplace debate about whether longer hours mean higher productivity.

Chetan Bhagat’s four-hour workday boosts productivity

Bhagat made these remarks at the 18th Project Management South Asia Conference (PMSAC) in Bengaluru on October 3, saying, “I work 4 hours a day and that’s enough if you do it with full commitment.”

“If you really work 4 hours a day, that’s enough, good enough. It doesn’t mean you have to include meetings, breaks, Wi-Fi problems and other nasty things that offices often witness. You have to prioritize everything you put on the table during those 4 hours,” he added, according to media reports.

But he also emphasized the importance of prioritizing everything an employee brings to the table. According to Bhagat, people should not simply start focusing on their work for only four hours a day and treat the rest of the day as free. Instead, his idea is to encourage people to identify what is most deserving of their attention and to complete that task with maximum commitment and discipline.

His remarks come as workplaces in India and around the world grapple with questions about how long workers should work and how their working hours can be used more efficiently, even as the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) fuels uncertainty about the future of jobs and how work itself might change.

The Four-Hour Workday Versus the 70-Hour Workweek: The Productivity Debate

Bhagat’s remarks stand in stark contrast to views expressed by some industry leaders, including Infosys co-founder NR Narayan Murthy, who has advocated a 70-hour work week for young Indians, linking longer hours to the need to improve the country’s productivity and competitiveness. Murthy later said that he worked more than 70 hours a week for more than four decades, and during the period when India followed the six-day work week, his weekly working hours often reached 85-90.

Commenting on how employees can prioritize work-life balance, Bhagat noted, “No one cares about you if you’re not. Do what makes you happy; follow the 11 rules of life,” a reference to his 2024 book, 11 Rules for Life: Secrets to Level Up.

His argument attempts to shift the productivity debate from how many hours an employee spends at work to what they accomplish during those hours. However, whether four hours of concentrated work can really be enough for the day may depend on the nature of the work, workload and responsibilities.