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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

I currently work a 4 day week with Wednesdays off and it's like magic

And to show how much of this is personal, during normal times, I'd consider a singleton day in the middle of the week an incredible waste relative to 3-day weekend (or even better a 4-day weekend once every two weeks) so that I could travel places.

Have you actually tried this?

I’ve tried both, for extended periods and I ended up much preferring the Wednesday off.

Not systematically but when I take an odd day off it's essentially always Friday for a 3-day weekend. Taking a day off in the middle of a week because of an appointment or whatever tends to dump me out of the work week routine a bit. I can deal with it--I have to when I travel--but it isn't my preference if I'm in all week.

I think that makes a big difference. I would (and did) make the same choice as you when it was a sporadic thing, but when I had the ability to do it every week, I quickly realized I felt (and performed) a lot better with the Wednesday off.

The Wednesday off is not so bad for this; 2 vacation days and you're looking at a 5 day holiday

That goes for any weekday though, so not really a benefit except that you can have a five day holiday with only two extra days off that can include any specific weekday in it, but this holds true for Monday and Friday as the fixed day off as well.

Only if you have Tuesdays and Thursdays off you won't be able to get a contiguous five day holiday with only two days extra off that can include any weekday (e.g., with a fixed Thursday off, you can't include Tuesday in your five day block without taking a third extra day off).

My wife and I both work four days a week and have Fridays off. It makes it much easier to get into the weekend mindset.

Yeah the best thing about Wednesday for me is that you can only accumulate so much stress in 2 days

you can take friday before the weekend and monday after the weekend, with your tuesday to get five days. moreover, just tsking off one day gives you 4 days. the latter is true if your regular day off is any day except wednesday.

Sure, any arbitrary day off can be bridged to a weekend using vacation days. But normally I overwhelmingly use my vacation time for week or multi-week trips plus maybe some days around business travel.

Having every second week a Friday off (or random other weekday, if I announce it ahead of time) gives me an amazing amount of breathing room and flexibility compared to my girlfriend who has to be on the clock 10:00-16:30 ("key hours") every day of the week without fail (well, holidays, but those are planned months ahead and not flexible at all). It docks 10% of my pay but it's so worth it.

Same here! Wednesday used to be the day I had college while working four days a week but when I quit college it just became my day off. I find that it works quite well for me while most of my colleagues seem to prefer having a three day weekend with either Friday or Monday being their day off.

I suppose there's pros and cons to either approach (which I haven't really researched at all yet) but to me right now breaking up a continuous stream of work days makes total sense (while still fitting for the 9-5 custom, which I, like many people, don't prefer but I haven't had any better opportunities yet).

It probably depends on whether you tend to favor a midweek break or whether you want to take trips or do other activities on weekends that benefit from a longer block of time. (If you just hang around the house or otherwise do short local activities I'm guessing people are more likely to "waste" that extra weekend day than if it's a midweek break.)

I love 4 day work week with Wednesdays off. It makes life so much better. The main issue is that not everyone is on this schedule so people try to plan mandatory meetings on Wednesdays.

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