The "n-hour workweek" is arbitrary. We work as much as we do because that's what the lending institutions need us to do so they can justify and manage the global trade and manufacture of calories, textiles, fuel, shelter, and implements.<p>We don't work 50-60 hour weeks at software companies because we'll die of starvation or exposure otherwise, we work that much because the finance trade our work supports allows us to live in a 2-story houses in the first world without knowing anything about construction, defense, farming, etc. The <i>real</i> work [1] gets handled by other people who make less money than us. But we still have to work so the lending institutions can make the debt contracts balance correctly.<p>[1] Yes, some of us do actually work on real projects, with real consequences to downtime, I understand. But how many brilliant engineers work for F+N or Spotify or whatever that could work on domestic engineering projects instead? Would they still have to work 60 hour weeks? Is such a project even possible without involving lending institutions, and the second those institutions are involved, doesn't that put us right back at the "justify the global finance infrastructure"?
> When work is squeezed into four days, the human interactions that fill the interstitial time can suffer. “There wasn’t time for banter,” said one employee whose startup made the switch. Another said that he no longer had “time to daydream at work.”<p>So?<p>I for one am fine with this, thank you. If I want to socialise, I can have plenty with actual friends and family.
Oh. People are trying to fit 40 hours into 4 days, or trying to do 5 days worth of work in 4 days? I don't think anyone thought that would be good. 4 day workweek is committing to do 4/5ths less work so that people get less burned out. I don't think it would ever improve productivity (like in terms of "number of tedious todos done" or "number of meetings attended").<p>Optimizing for long-term mental health should probably be the only goal.<p>(For software engineers, I feel like most of the job is in-the-background thinking, so not having to wake up at a particular time 3 days a week instead of only 2 is definitely going to help that process. But I don't think it will ever scale to "call each customer and exchange pleasantries for 30 minutes a week". There is simply a hard time bound on how much work you can do in X hours with jobs like that, and doing less hours means doing less of those calls. No way around that.)
I think this article fails to appreciate a few things that should change in a 4-day week:<p>- We (as individuals) should value our own time more than time working for a company.<p>- We continually, clinically, undervalue the role rest has in our ability to do better work. Sure, a four day week won't directly lead to more rest, but three days off would likely lead to people resting more.<p>- Many of us often spend a whole day or more of our weekends on personal things that pile up through the workweek (chores, paperwork, childcare/events), which is <i>not</i> restful.<p>- The company should not encourage work on the traditional 5th day.
This just in: Working 50 hours a week sucks and trying to do it in fewer days, doubly so.<p>Someone (possibly Carlin) once complained that it's too bad stupidity doesn't hurt. I must be looking in different places than whoever it was has been looking.
As a software engineer, no company I have worked for has ever enforced a 40-hour work week. Heck the magic "40" number isn't even written down anywhere. The expectation is simply that you work Monday-Friday and are available during your team's standard working hours (which differ wildly based on location, role and more). People put in anywhere from a couple hours to 12+ in a single day, and it varies based on the workload, time of year, project stage and more.
I've worked at a couple of companies now that introduce a "month off" day, which isn't tied to a particular holiday. At one place, they made it a "use it or lose it; your choice", so typically the last Friday of the month became an unofficial holiday. At my current place, it's preselected to be a day everyone takes off together.<p>When this was introduced at one company, they noticed that "sick days" actually dropped massively, to the point it really cost them nothing to introduce month off days.<p>Personally, it's amazing what that one day does for your mental health. You just pile on chores or take an extra day off, and boom - 4 day weekend which feels like a real vacation. And because everyone realistically is off together, you're not missing much.<p>I kind of see the 4 day week as an amplified version of the month off day, and would be curious to see if there's any comparison between the two ideas. And I'd be curious what the frequency of "sick days" taken are in a 4-day week company vs a 5-day company
I worked 4x10 a week. I can speak to the experience.<p>At times early in my career I took breaks away from programming.<p>The role wasn't as mentally engaging as programming and you could leave your brain at the door when you left each day.<p>It was amazing, I almost stayed there permanently, I wasn't enamored with the work but each week was true mental reset.<p>I think we have to divide roles that requires deep work from roles that don't.<p>Just like we have to separate butt in seat inbound sales roles from programming.<p>For programming type roles, 5x5or 4x8 would work better in my estimation depending on meeting workload.
Engineering firms have commonly done 4x 9 hour days with the remainder (to hit 40) either half day Friday or alternating Friday's off.<p>I've always enjoyed it.<p>Plus it makes adjustments easier and feel less burdensome - where if you need to take a few hours off during the week, it's easy to stay a bit later on Friday's without working past normal business hours.<p>And you don't feel overworked by Thursday night, as the guy interviewed said after doing 4x 10s.
Workers expect that incredible progress in automation (all the computers) would allow them to work less than before the automation has been made possible. And instead the Dutch will take the bridge apart to let Bezos’ mega yacht out into the sea. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like when people bash Amazon and the likes. It’s just a fact that the rich have become richer during the pandemic. People see it and they don’t like it.
I would love a 4d/10hr workweek. This schedule aligns much better with how I work. Starting work on any effort requires an initial investment of time to get spooled, and then anything after that is productive. This makes me prefer large chunks of working time, rather than smaller ones. Additionally, once I've started on something I feel a strong impulse to finish it in one sitting, and a 10 hour workday lets me do this without compromising my time off.
I know I could do the same amount of work in less time, which is where the 4 day work week comes in. It's not about the same amount of hours in a week...
Why is this premise of this 40 hours compressed into 4 days? To me, reduced hours means making more of the time you actually spend working. 40-50 work weeks involve a lot of thumb twiddling and doing nothing in between the impactful stuff.
>“It is really cool to be able to get up on Friday, mow the lawn, do your grocery shopping when nobody's at the grocery store,”<p>Sounds like any day of remote work to me.
Nice piece of establishment propaganda.<p>> The company changed its schedule to four 10-hour days<p>Yeah, that's not the idea. They even acknowledge it, but still make it the center of the piece.