4-day workweeks can boost happiness and productivity
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I'd work 5-day weeks if the pay was so well that I, say, could save up five years of expenses in one year. Unfortunately, my local tax system strongly disincentivizes this by effectively having a 62% marginal tax rate.
So, in summary, I will most likely never have a 5 days a week routine again. It's just that good. In fact, due to the marginal tax situation, it's more likely I'll downscale to something closer to 50% if I can get away with it career-wise.
The only day I could see plausibly doing this is Friday as there are few meetings and lots of senior people WFH/use remote offices then. Of course this also means taking the easiest day off!
How did you make this work, is it a consulting role? Individual contributor? What is the off day, Friday?
My company treats it the same as vacation time. On the occasion there's something that only he can do but he's not in, it'll have to wait.
He is a "regular" salaried dev on a medium sized team.
I think probably 60-70% of the places I have worked, this sentence " On the occasion there's something that only he can do but he's not in.." would end in "we call his cell".
I was just on a medium-urgent outage the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and 2 teams on the call were calling their on-vacation colleagues for help.
If you're part of a team, the team should be big enough to be resilient to this change (and everyone else should do this too, and your team may need to expand by 15-20%).
If you manage a team, your team should be skilled enough to work without your direction one day a week. If they aren't, you need to step up and develop better procedures.
How many people have come back from a long weekend to a 4 day week and noticed it's just 5 days of meetings/work rescheduled to fit into 4 days.
I'll always remember the stunned response years ago while moving when my wife picked up my cell phone (my hands weren't free) to what was a production trading outage at my firm.. and said we are off today, we are in the middle of moving, we have no internet or computers plugged in. On a 30 person dev team in a 20K+ person firm and we had cross team direct dev team escalation to my personal cell phone because no one could be bothered following escalation procedures/rotas/call lists/etc.
My fear would generally be taking the 20% pay cut and not really getting 20% less work/time expected.
I've of course always taken care to not present this as the first thing that comes out of my mouth when interviewing, but I have always broached the subject in the first conversation I've had with decision-makers at the company in question.
That does seem to be changing, but is certainly a cost factor many endure, which ironically shifts people into using their own transport and another car on the road factor plays in.
Now for a company, were before you had 4 staff to cover 20 days of work, you now have 5. That has pro's and con's, and certainly numbers of employee's will entail scaling costs. Making you hit certain numbers more easily and that can see more requirements as an employer. So suddenly you need an extra toilet, or larger kitchen, extra facilities and all becomes the number of people registered working in that location tips you into complying with such requirements. On the other hand, you have more resilience and less dependence upon individuals and the impact of loosing one member of staff is less impacting. That with fresher more focused staff due to working less hours, then it becomes a complicated equation to balance out on both sides of the employer/employee relationship.
I certainly do feel the 4 day week is a good thing, one you appreciate more in later life and does help prevent things like burn out. Also working from home has it's upsides, but also like everything, in moderation.
So if you had a choice of working in an office for 4 days a week or working from home for 3 days and 2 days in the office. I'm not sure the choice would be an easy one for many. Personally the later has much going for it, even if working 5 days over 4.
But one of the best balances I've known somebody to use was that they would do IT contracting in the Winter and would do water ski instructing in the summer. Equally known somebody who would contract in the summer and Ski Instructor in the winter. Which gets down to one of the key aspects in any job/work - variation, if done right can be as good as a break. Just need to look at all the options and get the balance that works for you.
I just hope more public transportation systems adjust pricing to not punish those working shorter weeks as is the case with the model used in many places today (trains, buses).
I am anxious throughout the weekend. It may have to do with the lockdown we have.
But I am glued to mobile anyways or some sort of screen.
How can I work on this mindset?
It was amazing. Two-day sprints separated by a day or two of rest are really, really productive for me. I never had Monday blahs because I was never facing a long haul of 5 days of work.
Number one recommendation I have for you, regardless of your working situation: change where you are. I don't mean move to another city, I mean keep work things away from personal things physically. If you have a corner that you always work in, never do anything else there. Go get exercise -- if you aren't doing any at all now, pull up a map and find a place about a kilometer from you. Walk there, walk back. When it's raining, take an umbrella. If it's too hot, take a bottle of water and an umbrella. There's nothing shameful about hiding from the sun.
Most people here are smart, hard-working and aspire to be high performers in whatever they do. So when you have an extra day off, you're expected to use it for an ambitious side project, self-improvement, learning new technology or whatever.
I have a part of this mindset in my identity, but it's a source of stress. So after a bit of a history of anxiety and depression in my past, I've made the deliberate decision to relegate this to the part my attention that's focused on employment and earning money. I never let it enter the part of my time that I have for myself.
This means that my three days off are spent on activities I find meaningful: Family, seeing friends, reading, playing computer games, hiking/biking/working out, philosophizing, re-filling my social introvert energy. Occasionally flying airplanes in summer, skiing or snow kiting in winter. I always say yes when opportunities to do activities with friends show up, and this never turns into a stressful thing since I always have the opportunity to recharge before work.
If I feel like doing something more structured and ambitious, something creative, I'll do it. But it has to come from the heart. Generally, I don't have a lot of excess creative energy even when working 4 days a week, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
I always have a lot of excess energy for handling stuff that might otherwise get low priority: Getting enough sleep, seeing enough friends, handling any physical or mental health issues that want attention. That's a big difference.
> I logged into work today (Sunday) and that eased my usual Sunday "fear".
The weekends are short enough as it is!
I’m in the UK, and while I haven’t really heard that particular term used as a common saying, I intuitively knew what you meant! (Sadly)
I recently reduced my working hours (so I now have the freedom to work 3-4 days if I like or more if desired/needed) and I would say if you can make it work it’s 100% worth it.
It’s worth bearing in mind it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can suggest a “trial” to your employer to see if it works for both parties.
From my own experience I think it’s more likely that an employer will agree to this request than not.
Good luck if you decide to go for it.
So high tax rates can be an incentive to work less...
I agree with the benefits of a 4 day workweek but personally going 80% will have disproportionately higher marginal costs. This is one of the occasions where a collective solution (4-day workweeks for all) outperforms individual initiatives.
First, if some of the total compensation is through stocks, usually they reduce both the vesting amount and vesting frequency by 20%, which could translate to some 25% cut in total comp. New stock grants are also prorated, just as your bonus will be prorated by that amount.
You vacation days are also reduced by 20%, a typical figure would amount to being deprived of another week of paid time off. In other words, you could have used one day of that paid time off every week to simulate your 80% work, but now you take a pay cut for it.
The cost of work side of things are not linear either. For example certain fixed costs like weekly meetings do not reduce by 20%, which means your available heads down work time reduces more than 20%. Unless you do overtime to compensate for that (which beats the purpose of part time), that means you also get an additional productivity hit.
Without any WFH arrangement, cost of being housed in a commute distance of work is also constant. If you don't move to a 20% cheaper place while going part time, your rent to paycheck ratio increases, which matters especially for HCOL areas because it hits your disposable income rate disproportionately.
The cost function of going to 80% personally is horribly non-linear. Pushing for a 4-day workweek for all avoids that.
Compensation through stocks applies to a tiny proportion of workers in the US, and a miniscule proportion elsewhere.
And to a substantial portion of the tech workers in the Bay Area.
As an aside, it would be interesting to know what proportion of HN users was actually based in SV; I imagine many times fewer than those who are not.
When you need only 4 days of vacation to take one week off, 20 paid vacation days will let you go on vacation for 5 weeks per year, just like like a full-time employee with 25 vacation days.
In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
My intention (which I'll reach in October) is to get sufficiently close to that 240-hours cap that I will have to take off one day every fortnight to keep under it, for almost every fortnight in the year.
My wife was offered a 9/80 schedule at her job, where she worked 10 hours per day for 9 days, and got the 2nd Friday off. I'm looking forward to my own version, except it'll only be the 8-hour nominal work day...
Sure, but it is contingent on using your vacation allotments at full week increments, which is not the only way vacation days are used. In your hypothetical scenario, since we're in the realm of managerial approvals, you could as well ask for a 1 month unpaid time off which amounts to a nominal %8 pay cut for 20 some days (which is actually less because stock vesting tend not to stop), whereas a 20% time cut only gets you 45 extra non-workdays with more than 20% paycut due to the non-linearities I explained above. Marginal cost of non-workdays are much higher in the latter scenario.
> In fact, if your employer is flexible about which days you work, you could leave on a Friday and return next Monday (4 days) without using any vacation days.
If your employer is flexible you could work 5 days for 4 weeks and take the next week off without vacation days too. It runs through every person's own objective function for sure. I am not saying costs can never outweigh the benefits, but I am trying to draw attention to the cost function which is not usually as well thought through.
A 3-day weekend feels like proper time off - you have time to do all the chores and stuff that needs doing, and you have time for self and/or family.
My other great move was going almost fully remote around 10 years ago. Because of the pandemic, the benefits are now well known by many, so I won't bore you by detailing them again here :)
Through these 2 decisions, work and life feels well in balance.
I’m convinced it’s nothing but positive for most workers who aren’t constrained by the hours available for meetings, meaning ICs.
I wish there would be ways to reduce work time to reduce unemployment and "share" labor, but my guess is that it's more difficult for employers to organize under such model.
The problem isn't only overwork, but it's also the labor distribution and competition among job candidates. The more work is done by one person, the less labor is left to create jobs.
Honestly I've left this rat race of job competition a long time ago, it's depressing. I live in a country where welfare benefits allows me to eat and have a home. Money is not a problem. I'm not a merchandise.
that just means you're living off taxation of the wealthier. It's not sustainable if everybody did this - at least not under today's technological capability.
Well there always are certain jobs that are necessary to exist, but there is a large quantity of them that has very low value and nothing would be lost if they did not exist.
People don't eat money.
The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.
But nevertheless, we probably are amongst the countries where you work the less (and it never had a negative impact on economy).
Almost all white collar jobs in the UK are 35 hours
> The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.
35 hours is the expected salaried agreement, similar to 40 hours in the US. I expect most of Europe is 35 hours and that is protected by labor laws.
Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit... (in German). The article also contains a table of the average for a lot of European countries, which range from 30.4 in the Netherlands to 45.4 in Turkey. The article also states that the majority of the differences in the average working hours between the countries are typically due to a different ratio of part-time to full-time jobs.
Are they really? I'm British, and I don't think I've ever seen an IT-based job contracted at only 35h per week. 37.5h or 40h seem to be the norm.
The shortest "standard working hours" I'm aware of is 9.00-5.30 with 1 hour for lunch in places with formal time. That's 37.5 working hours.
I know some people in France that say 35 hours is mandatory, but some work more anyway.
Except that in France, the norm for knowledge workers is to work more (38-40h is normal) and get the difference compensated in extra holidays (RTT).
Also most of them don't actually clock their hours and have contracts only stating days ("au forfait"), so the actual worked hours aren't counted at all and often exceed the theoretical amount.
If I missed any that you know of let me know or make a pull request!
Whether it's four ninety-minute shifts (six hours) per day, four days per week, or one intense all-nighter, that should be enough.
That's more like 30 hours.
I would love to have a holiday every Wednesday though. Never working more than 2-3 days in a row would rid me of the feeling of living in the office.
I would prefer we adapt a flex schedule type of work. If you’re done for the day you should be able to leave instead of acting like you’re busy.
Personally 9 hours per day wouldn't work, after a solid day of programming I tend to loose focus too much after about 7 hours, but some of the alternatives work fine.
It is expected that in the last 1-2 months we're not just working 40hrs/5 days but probably 60,70, even 80hrs a week and likely 6 day weeks (the last project was 7 day weeks and I worked 71 days in a row without a day off). I'm not proud of this in the slightest and indeed will be refusing to do this again.
But - my situation isn't unique or even uncommon in many tech jobs that involve delivering projects to a (small) pool of paying clients. Our profit margins are also slim - there is no way my company is going to hire another person who can share jobs with me and have say 2-3 of us on the same 2-3 different projects in parallel to cover the lack of cover 20% of the time. We need to be really zoomed in on the problems to solve and tasks to do - not being there 20% of the time couldn't possibly work.
The dream of a 4 day week is for many, many workers just that - a dream.
Imagine a world where Saturday was a workday, it shouldn't be hard as this was the case for many only a few generations ago.
We could say that it is expected that you will not only work 48hrs/6 days a week, but probably 70, 80, 90 hours likely 7 days a week!
Fortunately, a cultural shift occurred along the way, and the work week is now commonly accepted to be 5 days. Expectations of clients, managers, and employees are based around this standard.
So why can't the standard change again? Why couldn't a broad cultural shift occur in which expectations are better managed towards the productivity of a 4-day work week?
Is the deadline it tied to something else that truly can't be changed, like a holiday? Then what if the project was started earlier? Or if not, then what if we were in the world where it takes N+3 weeks instead of N, but the people doing it are happier and more productive?
I agree that it's not a small step to get to that reality, but I wouldn't say it's a dream; more a vision.
Your work environment does sound pretty crazy, but that has nothing to do with sprints or project based work.
It blows my mind that 99% of jobs are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model?
It annoys me so much that I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ (Software Jobs with a better work / life balance)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Ple....
Maybe we should be the ones submitting and talking about the 4 day work week more often.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534517 (3 days ago; exactly the same (well... I guess they added "absolutely"))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468882 (3 months ago; exactly the same)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114570 (4 months ago; exactly the same (except for the last sentence))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26015969 (4 months ago; mostly the same)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25765787 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25674756 (both 5 months ago; both exactly the same as each other and only slightly modified from today's posting)
In my opinion this 'message' should actually be pushed more and people encouraged to try it. If that means shilling some website with 4d/week jobs...so be it.
Whilst trying to be charitable to the poster (I guess there's no harm in pushing their side project) I would caution that carbon copying comments like this (to articles posted deliberately for the purpose of doing so) could come off as a bit insulting to the HN readership.
On the other hand, perhaps they're onto something since these articles keep rising up to the front page!
A 4 day week is a much easier "sell" in the short term though
That means you have a day off to go to the bank, go to the doctors, call customer service for a bunch of companies that may not otherwise be open on the weekend, etc.
Further, the weekends carry an expectation of doing something. Such an expectation would not exist for the weekday off.
If we do move to a mass 4 day workweek, this obviously implies that the 3rd day off should not be the same for everybody, so basically it shouldn’t be implemented by just making Friday another day off like Saturday and Sunday. It would be much better if that 3rd day is divided for all employees between Mon-Fri.
Ideally, we’d have flexibility around the denominator, allowing something like 4 on/2 off as a step towards 4 on/3 off. The maybe 4 on/4 off instead of all the way to 3 on/4 off. Changing the 7 day week is probably infeasible though… but I see equally crazy schedules from friends with shift work.
Outrageous idea in a wage slave society of course. What? Freedom to choose, for slaves? What nonsense. Big daddy government and big daddy corporations know what's best for you - here, choose coke or pepsi every 4 years, you are free to choose, you are free.
Agreed it would be great for individuals, but having a more predictable schedule would be less disruptive.
All the upper middle class white collar professionals are the main beneficiaries.
Having entire days off is so much more freedom than having two extra hours in the evening. Three day weekend every weekend means me and my girlfriend could go on little escapes more frequently.
Yeah, as a programmer I often don't program 8 hours a day and when I do it is wildly exhausting. I still absolutely work for 8 hours a day, most days.
* long commute
* kids, depending on their age: shorter work days to be around when they're not at school, or shorter work week to spend one more day with your baby instead of leaving it at day care
* whether you count your working time: 4-day workweek means nobody expects you to be there one day per week, expectations are less clear with a reduced-time 5-day workweek
* what you do in your free-time, compare hiking weekends vs going to bars and restaurants
Obviously, the best alternative is to be able to choose depending on your personal plans for the week!
In most jobs, you don't have to work all the time while you're on the job - and most people take copious advantage of that.
As I’ve watched my non-software friends (with degrees!) struggle, I’ve grown increasingly disgusted by how much money there is in the software industry. The majority of workers will never have money for a house and/or real retirement, while my only reason for not buying a second house is that I don’t feel like vacationing in the same spot all the time.
I fully expect to get downvoted to hell by all the financially comfortable libertarians that lurk here.
Look, it works for me. I work Mon-Thu and work from home. My employer deals with it just fine. They have a happy employee and pay a day less a week as well. It's all about communication and organisation at the end. I see a lot of jobs that could be optimised to be done in less than 9-5 five days a week.
A cabinetmaker who spends fifty fewer days per year building cabinets isn't more productive (and maybe not even happier). Fifty days spent not building cabinets could mean he produces 6 fewer cabinets per year. Imagine the absurdity of a salary man advising a cabinetmaker to work one day less per week, "You'll make more cabinets!".
And this is why the types of jobs that are the subject of these conversations are those that provide abstract, non-measurable, questionable value:
>Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools...
The company that manufactured your shirt understands real value, real output, real productivity. That's why their workers are at it 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week (as unhappy as they may be, but cheap labor is cheap, what can you do).
(1: Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to know more about productivity.)
Whose? Mine? Yours? Everyone's? Not all jobs are equal, not all people.
It takes me one day (about eight hours, plus or minus one - I'm no machine after all) to build a widget. Some weeks I'll take a few days off. The weeks I work two days, I only produce two widgets. The weeks I work three days, I only produce three widgets. I'm not more productive those two-day weeks.
Point is, it's important to think of jobs in terms of what was done rather than how many hours were spent doing it. In this way, why 35? Why not 30? Why not 25? If you can do your job in just 5, then do that. Do your job however long you need to do it. I need a day to make a widget, and I like to make five widgets per week, so I work five.
Again, this is why the conversation only ever surrounds people who sell their time rather than something more real; people who don't own what they do, but whose time is owned by their employer.
The cabinetmaker laughs when this conversation pops up.
There are days when you do negative work in framing. The most obvious is when you damage artwork. The less obvious is when you mismeasure something. That one act can destroy not just work time, but also calendar time since you may need to wait a week to get replacment materials. Same problem if you mar the product something very easy to do with delicate finishes. And then there’s injuries, cutting oneself can not only end the day, but may also end up with lifelong reduction in capabilities. Oh, and blood can ruin material.
So, it’s very important to have a good frame of mind when doing certain kinds of physical tasks. There were some days I worked, where the first sign I was mentally impaired I backed off and stopped making things. Those days you do the low risk things like cleaning and taking stock. But at some point you’ve done all the things of value and working more hours when you can’t do the thing that pays the bills doesn’t make sense. I can tell you from personal experience that you can easily hit a wall long before 40 hours and the odds of negative work go up quickly when tired or overworked.
Now, if your cabinetmaker is essentially a factory worker, then some of my advice is not as applicable, you can build processes and tooling to minimize mistakes and also to help preserve mental energy, which makes it much easier to work longer hours. But never underestimate the cost of stupid, and stupid goes up quickly as hours worked increases.