Ask HN: Is the cultural practice of the weekend even necessary?

I worked 3 days a week for several years. I could have easily opted for the kind of pattern you suggest but I wouldn't have wanted it. To have a whole day where work is not even considered is a precious thing, and the more of them the better.

Yep. I like going to sleep knowing that tomorrow I don't have to work. Also I like doing things in the woods/river for at least a day, every week.

Yes, it's necessary. Not every activity can be spread out evenly over the course of a week. If I want to go rock climbing this Saturday, I can't replace that day with 40 minutes of rocking climbing every day after work.

Also, there's value in every day not being the same as every other day, and in being able to mentally reset at the beginning/end of every week.

This would be hard to pull off for society as whole. Companies would need to hire 2x or 3x more employees (and train them).

Schools need to be available, groceries etc.

That being said, it does work if you are a contractor (in most cases). That's exactly what I have been doing for the past 4 years.

I don't have a family, I am working 4 hours every day. I don't take unnecessary weekends. I just work from 8am to noon and call it a day.

Afternoon is spent for sports, reading, social activities or just tinkering.

"Because no system whatsoever creates more work the less it operates"

When you're loading a mill, say, a grinding mill in a mine, you want to put enough rocks to maximize output of the mill against energy use. It's a complex optimization problem as the geometries involved are rather complicated.

Occasionally, a mine operator will have the bright idea to decrease energy use by adding more rocks. As they're not very smart, they 'realized' that as they added more rocks, the energy used to spin the mill actually goes down; the mill seems more efficient, as the mill has filled up and the internal movement of rocks creating turbulence inside of it is diminished. There are cases where mills have been filled up entirely with rocks in this way and then they need to be shut down, dug out and repaired.

In principle, you are right, but I would offer that it is possible to find corner cases like this where it seems like a system is doing less but achieving more. It's about optimizing and finding balance. The appearance of operation may not actually map to desired outcomes.

How can you shop in those freed up hours if everyone is working 8-1? This sounds like a luxury belief that completely ignores the humanity of the non-office dwelling class of society, which is most people.

>Every 24 hours we top up in caffeine, affection, calories, and get a few more chores out of the way. So it makes no logical sense to cram as many hours of work in a single day if you can leverage the restful effects of sleep and having a circadian cycle.

>Taking this idea to its extreme, why do we even have weekends? Why do we cram all our creative efforts in 5 days and hope that we recover over two of them? This is not how our body works.

Because that is how our body (and brain) works. We need a break from the drudgery of daily work.

I like going on day trips, having two nights a week I can stay out late and sleep in late, being able to make brunch plans, go out of town for a day, taking day-long hikes or backpacking, being able to go fishing.

I think you could probably make that schedule work well for you, but I think the future of remote/asynchronous work is just choosing your own schedule instead of standardizing a new one.

In reality I am always "on call" even though I am not officially "on call" -- except for the weekend, when it is known that I am not going to be reachable unless pre-planned.

I think the biggest productivity boost, US society could implement.

Is a siesta. 2 hour lunches, 12-2. Just like France and our Southern neighbors do.

Okay, maybe this “ Judeo-Christian idea” is far from being the best option.

But at least it has a few thousand years of growing and evolving civilization to back it.

And it’s not just a random lucky civilization, it’s the one that made most of the modern scientific and cultural breakthroughs to date.

It doesn’t mean the work/life schedule played a major role in it, but it at least mean this approach is not that bad to dismiss in an instant.

And what evidence do you have to support your alternative ideas?

I wonder why people downvote this. Any line there that isn't true?

What about K-12 school? It seems that needs to be synchronized perhaps for cost reasons...?

US schools are actually moving to 4 day weeks in large numbers for cost reasons.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/sep/26/four-day-s...