'It's better for humans in general': The 4-day workweek is closer than you think
marketwatch.com
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Personally I find we work way too many hours. We spend the good part of 5 days a week (if we're lucky) at work, often literally all the daylight hours, at least in winter. I have to take my daughter very early in the morning to the nursery, then I can't see her until the evening.
I want to believe that future generations will look back and find this unconceivable, and I hope AI shows us the way.
I would bet many people agree with you, too! Even many people in these threads.
I think what you may be seeing (I'm speaking for myself, I suppose?) is people who've thought about it for a long while, and we have to think about it in ways we can introduce and fight for that stance with our bosses, or with our shareholders, etc, since those are the people we have to convince, not the people in the trenches doing the work.
For myself, I have to operate as both my boss - trying to make enough money to continue or elevate my desired way of life - and myself the person - trying to live life to the most joyful and fullest.
It's odd there aren't more people questioning this. Wouldn't they rather enjoy their lives while they're young and not worry about having tons of disposable income when they're old?
I guess there's something about security that drives people to the latter. Also I feel like there's an addiction and/or conditioning element to it. I think people are scared of what will happen if certain people (thick people) no longer have to work. What will they do during the day etc?
I’ve been questioning this for a long time. It’s not an enviable position: it’s isolating (very few people understand), it’s very hard to keep any kind of salaried position (since you’re not a devoted doormat), and it’s mentally challenging because you can’t ever really feel safe nor fit in.
Who is going to take care of you if you are sick?
I assume the "commute -> work -> chill -> sleep" cycle is doing a lot of work, you basically have no time to even think about what you're doing. Add some kids, a mortgage, health issues, it's the perfect cocktail. The "work -> vacation" cycle is also a good one, you can rationalise wasting 3-6 months in a work you don't enjoy to have a few weeks of peace (and spend all your money so you have a "good" reason to go back to work)
In a way it's also more pleasing to be fully invested in the rat race, once you start to want get out of it you'll hate every single second of your work week wondering where we as a specie fucked up so bad
But no worries, even more improvements are on the horizon. Within 20 years, you'll get all that, but it's gold plated, and encrusted with diamonds too. People live until they are 200, houses rotate to always face the sun, and TVs are now so big they wrap 360 degrees around the entire room's walls. But you still gotta spend most of your waking hours in an office, copying numbers from one excel to another.
Is that really that good of an improvement? Do we measure quality of living purely in material wealth, and not in the time we get to spend with loved ones, or our passions?
In the distant past, a huge proportion of our lives was spent just making sure you had food to survive on. The part where we "spend a huge portion of our lives" seems to stick, even though food is no longer scarce.
Check out the book “Your Money or Your Life” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78428.Your_Money_or_Your...
"Anyone" unless you're part of the bottom 80% earners, unless FIRE means being homeless you'll need more money than what most people can attain if they saved 100% of their paycheck for 30 years
Not even close, unless your version FIRE is retiring at 63 instead of 67 and still get 80% of your pension
Average salary in germany: 42k gross, 23k net
Renting a small place : 500 euros (let's say it includes heating, electricity/gas)
Let's say you only eat potatoe and drink rain water: 3 * 1kg * 2 euros/kilos = 180 euros
Good job, after 15 years you have 210k euros you can retire at ~35 years old. This money will allow you to buy a flat in a ghost town and to continue your potatoe fuelled life until you die of old age at ~90
Now remember you have to pay water/electricity/gas, health insurance, property tax, &c.
e.g. in New York state, this is available:
https://info.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2024...
You can also switch to part-time in a low-stress role rather than retire completely ("baristaFIRE" or "coastFIRE"). The trick is that you don't want health benefits from your employer so that you can get much better ones from the state instead. Usually part-time doesn't qualify for benefits so that works well.
I'm not saying it's impossible but it certainly isn't "anyone at anytime". In France for example 48% of people earn bellow 2000 euros per months. If you play the game you have an OK life with health care, a good flat, a car, whatever... but if you want to retire before the legal age it's next to impossible, you just can't build enough savings. If you work in a big city you'll never be able to afford a flat there, if you buy cheap property far away you'll need to pay rent in the city + mortgage.
Best case scenario you'll need a 20 years mortgage, most likely 30. You cannot be in debt to more than 30% of your net income, meaning 2k net per month gives you a 600 euros mortgage, assuming 0% mortgage you can't even afford a 150k euros property over 20 years
https://fr.statista.com/infographie/25111/distribution-des-s...
We're flooded in useless shit but can't afford the basics. So yes, underfloor heating, smart light bulbs and google maps are great but is it really all there is to life
See how you like it? Assume good faith and have some goddamn manners.
This is the cost of food as % of household income in the USA over the last century: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/foodnew.jpg
My grandfather was born in western Europe, in what is today one of the wealthiest countries in the world. He was one of 14 children (of whom 8 survived), born to an illiterate peasant on a rural farm. This was pretty normal. You may have a retroactively gentrified image of what America was like in the 1940s - nearly half of homes didn't have an indoor toilet or electricity at the start of that decade.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
and worker productivity vs income:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tobias-Arbogast/publica...
I'm 200% positive that both my grandparents and great grandparents had it better in pretty much every aspect (job security, housing, future perspectives) than we currently do. We have unlimited bread and circuses but scratch the surface and we're worse in every other aspects: I couldn't afford 14 kids even if 10 died instantly.
The only way I see long term housing becoming affordable is heavy taxes on single family homes as investment properties. Also open up zoning and allow builders to build.
Also naturally less kids, means less humans, means less demand.
Infant mortality back then was atrocious, my grandpa had two (out of 13) siblings die at birth. He grew up working on the small family farm that was the family’s primary food source with the little excess produced sold to buy supplies for it. A bad harvest meant the whole family starving for months. Healthcare was essentially non-existent.
Step into the 50s during the baby boom and the huge economic boon that came from the post war rebuild and things started to look up, but they were still crap compared to today.
The houses they could so easily afford looked quaint but were absolutely trash quality on average. The ones left today are the nicest from that era. The average ones were gone by the 70s. That’s available today too, go get a manufactured home and it will be roughly the same quality but with better insulation, plumbing and electrical.
>I couldn't afford 14 kids even if 10 died instantly.
You absolutely could if you fed, housed, treated, and schooled them the way they were back when this was common.
Job security was also terrible back then. There was a reason unions were more popular.
You’re really getting a rose colored view of the past and I’m not sure where it’s from.
I just wish people would vote for this.
My weekday: get up and immediately go to work, come home, have about 2 -3 hours spare time, sleep, repeat. In that 2-3 hours I'm supposed to source healthy food, exercise, contact family, maintain friendships, maintain a romantic relationship, do laundry, keep the house clean, volunteer / contribute to society, meditate, read, do endless life admin, plan for the future, and finally relax. Then on the weekend, at least 1 day catching up on all the garbage that inevitably couldn't be done during the week. And maybe I'm left with 1 day out of 7 to do things I actually want to do (if I have the energy left).
And let's not even discuss the range of crap tasks that must be done during the 0 business hours I have free: posting mail, going to the doctor, getting an electrician or plumber, contacting the real estate agent, contacting any business really. Lucky I can work remotely or else do any of these I need to take half a day off work.
It's no wonder people have trouble with anxiety and sleep in modern times. There's literally not enough fucking time in the day to do everything which needs to be done. Even if you try to minimise and optimise every part of your life, you still barely have enough time to enjoy yourself.
And we are living this life for what exactly? So in 50 years I still won't own a home and the environment will be irreparably destroyed?
Me personally I get up at 6:30, start work at 8 (from home), work until 4:30 usually and go to bed at 11:30-12.
A decade ago I was working 5 days a week from an open-plan office, and mentally clocked out around 2pm each day. Office culture meant I was just moistening a chair from then until it was acceptable to leave around 6pm.
For the last few years I've been working 35-45 hour weeks from home, especially during COVID, and that was fine productivity-speaking.
I'm currently working 4 days from a co-working space, and 1 day from home. I know my productivity drops when I'm at home, but I'm not sure why this changed in the last year or so.
I think a 4-day week would probably work well for me at the moment. But I'm not sure - I could end up with Tuesdays looking a lot like Mondays do at the moment. Or the extra day to do all the other stuff would be amazing and I'd really focus on the other four days. shrug
Developer productivity is a strange beast. Can't measure it. Can't control it directly. I know it when I see it, but I couldn't explain why or how.
Getting into management is definitely more of a hours thing. But manager productivity is different; it's about talking to lots of people and not maintaining focus on one thing for hours. It's a shit-load easier to do from anywhere. But at the same time, it's definitely time-intensive. When I was CEO of a 200+ organisation I worked 10+ hours a day. The hours were a lot easier, though. Less hard thinking and focused concentration, more half-hour meetings which seemed to be mostly about listening to other people tell me why they decided to do something.
I was in Germany for COVID - I can see why you say this. But that's still only true if you stay in large organisations. In smaller orgs you get more flexibility, even in Germany. You can still become an expert developer and get the decent money without getting into management. Having said that, it is easier to climb the salary ladder if you get into management. But you can never go back; it's very hard to get back into a developer role if you've been a manager. Beware of what you wish for.
The math is so simple, obvious and scewed that I don't understand why you wrote your comment, what is the informational value.
If you consider time for lunch and productivity decline in long working hours; having usable free time everyday without spending all your mental energy has huge benefits.
When we talk about 4 day workweek, it's for some specific jobs. Not for that guy. Culturally, at least in the US, we would be happier if some people worked 7 days, 24 hours a day.
Ex: wouldn't it be better if the bank was open after work? Wouldn't it be better if USPS would show up on Sunday? Isn't it annoying that Chick-fil-A is closed on sunday?
Personally , I would love to work 4 days a week, but if the people that package and ship the product I help develop worked only 4 days, we would have angry customers. They will switch to our competitor who will brag about faster delivery.
4 day workweek is a cultural problem. We will have to give up on our instant gratification mentally to make it a reality.
Edit: it's an increase in full-time workers, with less increase in part-time workers.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2017/08/a-glass-half-full-or...
I don't know if this covers everyone. Anyway you may be right, employers just want all the work from all the people, at the moment.
Why would a capitalist business owner spend more money?
Lean into the absurdity already.
It’s kind of like unlimited PTO. It sounds good on paper but some people will receive outsized benefits compared to others.
Of course. But that has nothing to do with 4-day work week. There are classes of jobs that should be desynced from each other - like e.g. stores and banks and barbershops, etc. should be open outside of core office hours, etc. We just can't figure out how to force society into running on shifts.
There might be a class divide coming that would include 4 day work weeks, but the vast majority of us scrubs are going to be 5 days a week for a while to come. At a minimum we are going to have to ride out this financial crisis for the next decade.
It should be. Most people won't accept less pay even if it comes with reduced hours.
If I remember correctly, a few pilots in the past highlighted there wasn't a drop in output, but it remained the same or in some causes increased.
Most likely the bottleneck in those were elsewhere. It was mentioned that they reduced meetings and other time-wasting overheads.
optional 4-day week with lower pay for the employees that want it = ok
employer-enforced 4-day week with pay equivalent to current 5-day week = ok
employer-enforced 4-day week with lower pay = not ok
Cost of living doesn't magically drop 20% just because you're not working that 5th day.
Nobody living at their cost of living is in the ballpark for a 4-day workweek in the near future.
Or slightly less due to having to spend more time on overhead and reading up on things. There is a minimum amount of time you have to spend just to be ready to do your job, many current jobs are so poorly managed that most of their time is spent that way.
My answer: incentives. I suspect that if you started managing people, you'd start to see some of these issues differently too.
But mostly, the idea it gives you 8h work, 8h sleep, 8h for self seems like rationalizing and not even entirely true if you commute, unless you take half your commute out of work time...
Just an anecdote, but: my productivity definitely took a huge hit when I reduced my hours to 4days/week. All of the "working harder/more efficiently/more focused" doesn't help if you already worked hard/efficiently/focused. If you have a job with a lot of slack/downtime/waiting time... Sure. But sometimes, working 20% less means that 20% less work gets done.
Most people are nowhere close to working fully focused 8 hours a day, and may also benefit from more time to recharge. Others benefit less. The average probably matters more for the company (also shorter work hours will improve retention, or allow you to pay lower wages to compete etc).
Personally I'd think of the extra day as rent paid on not having to hire and onboard someone new.
Also productivity does not go down, because not everyone is doing it. ( so people have motivation to not get fired )
In normal conditions, expected would be some drop in productivity but bigger gain in retention.
It worked well on the management side of things too, but with an actual "changeover", as you'd have a Monday-Thursday supervisor and another Thursday-Sunday supervisor, with one day a week of overlap however that Sunday-Monday changeover didn't have an overlap (although there was a lot of OT on this job so it did frequently happen).
That was an at age when I still tried to take weekend trips and if anything unplanned happens it can make the return trip very stressful, which colors the entire experience if you don’t have to be in until noon you get to use more of Sunday without worrying about logistics.
Honestly with this setup I don’t need a four days week.
Personally I think it'll improve my productivity because it'll give me more time to spend on "hobby" software development, which should improve my general motivation and in turn improve my productivity at work. Well that's what I'm thinking anyway. I've been wanting to do this for a couple years, and finally it's likely that I'll manage to pull it off!
Course, my salary will go down a bit, but it's probably high enough at the moment.
These changes won't happen until workers demand it, regardless of the technology that comes along.
I suspect it’s the same for other information workers.
But, crucially, we're all still present or within arm's reach. It seems more likely that we'll get 5 short days rather than 4 long ones so that everyone is on hand should things arise while, at the same time, acknowledging that long days become quickly inefficient.
(2023) Is the 4-day work week closer than we think? - Nearly half of Aussies think it will happen within five years. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2023/is-the-4-day-work-week-cl...
(2021) Four-Day Workweeks Are Closer To Reality Than You Think https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeswigunski/2021/05/03/four-d...
(2018) Why the 4-day workweek might be closer than you think — and the 10 careers best suited to it https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/24/future-of-the-workforce-care...
.. Maybe it is as close as nuclear fusion.
Contrast to Canada, my 40h week does average to 40h and if I do overtime it is paid (provided I get it approved ahead of time) and I get to take that back as unpaid time off later. Though I am told to report my real hours in my timesheet provided they are 8h per day. So not my real hours.
A lot of this comes from being salaried vs. hourly, but I'm not really hourly other than on paper. As salaried I was expected to do a lot more unpaid overtime though under the guise of flexibility. Oddly the flexibility was rarely in my favor :p
As it is, the current 8 hour work day is really a 9 hour work day since lunchtime is not considered part of that 8 hour day, so if employees take that into consideration, it becomes an 11 hour day (or 13+ hours including commute).
P.S. anybody remember when we used to also work saturdays? Can't be just me...
On the other hand from experience I can say that doing a 32hr workweek in 4 days is, in fact, the bees knees.
Unofficial overtime is a problem, but clearly the solution is not to make the official schedules longer. The solution is to actually do something about unofficial overtime.
Personally, for my own personal startup, I work 4-5 days a week, 4-6 hours a day, so 20-30 hours a week and I'm getting more work done than I did in 4-8s.
The real reduction of stress is invaluable for me to make good decisions and write code both fast, well and with minimal bugs (which just mean more wasted time).
Bouts of near-burn out are infrequent and I can manage through them. The work still gets done and I don’t feel trapped at work.
We both get close to an extra 2 months a year with our son, which is phenomenal.
One thing I wouldn’t recommend is having a Wednesday off - it’s what I’ve had to do, and I find it a big interruption to my week & flow, a Monday or Friday would be better.
Treating healthcare as a benefit (as in the US) also works against expanding employment, as its a large fixed cost per employee that can't really be reduced.
Whether this is how things actually work out...I'm not sure. It probably does in our short-term move fast economy over an economy that values long term investment, stability,\ and quality over quantity. To be able to switch to shorter work weeks, we also have to switch the economy to be more long-term oriented...which seems impossible after a decade of fake economy with free money getting everyone addicted to short-term games via gambling on startups and stock market.
Some jobs are rote work jobs - manufacturing jobs, warehousing jobs, etc.
Some jobs are butts-in-seats jobs, where you need a person physically there to "do the thing" - these are your customer-facing jobs. Your customer support, your banking teller jobs, etc.
Each of these jobs has a comfortable "max amount of continuous" work time for different people. Since I can speak to it, in software, I'm only productive 4-6 hours a day with the rare day I enter obscene levels of flow and disappear for like 9 hours. I imagine many of the creative jobs are similar.
I suppose the implications for 3-4 day, 'very high hour count' work week, in general* is one of the positions that can handle operating in the specific way they need to work for that long.
* I understand that nursing is a 3-12's job. There's special details that make that the way it is - I think it has to do with nurse-patient changeover? I dunno, very outside my field.
People being free to choose their own hours and schedules provided they meet the performance targets required to justify their compensation.
Until it becomes standard then its 3 days a week. Im all for it, if you can increase productivity, but it's likely too many people won't be able to.
how long do you reckon it'll be before a 4 day work week is standard?
do you think an additional day off takes less time than the prior one took to get? the same time as the prior one? more time than the prior one?
i feel like you're getting way ahead of yourself and remarking on events that have only taken place in your mind.
We work unusually hard compared to our ancestors [1].
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
Also: ancient Rome, one day off in eight, revolutionary France, one day off in ten, Han China, one day off in five.
Working so much that you can't spend the money was absolutely a thing before the pandemic too.
But I do hope I see a 4 day week in my lifetime. That would be massive.
> Any increase in productivity will be captured by s/the owners/society/
The population will grow to the limits set by our productivity.
You'd hand off work, to humans and machines, with a bit of overlap to sync expectations. With enough automation, it becomes plausible. But not in the near future.
Why?
An automated factory that has a team come in once a week to monitor and maintain isn't beyond our current capabilities for several simple products. It's simply uneconomic. It's not unfeasible to imagine that changing in the future.
The set of all coworkers who work the same day as me is disjoint to the set of all employees who work on days when I do not work. Because anyone who works on Monday by definition of a one day work week does not work on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. if I see them at work today they will not be at work tomorrow.
The best I can do is if there are split shifts on the same day, where someone shows up to work a few hours before I leave. But if for instance the problem is that a requirement for my work won’t show up until tomorrow, now I have to communicate with them.
There are three options I see. The most likely is that my communication is one-shot through a computer system, where I can try to tell someone who works tomorrow what needs to be done, in which case the task will have a bimodal completion time of either 2 days or 8 days with very little in between. Second option is I can tell the late shift person who will have to play telephone with two or three more split shifts to make it around to tomorrow morning.
And the last option is that I’m communicating to my fellow coworkers on my days off. Which means I’m working multiple days a week. Which only counts as one day a week to managers who are touched in the head.
In summary, there are many, many things one can do with a >1.5 day work week that simply stop once you reach 1.0.
Good sign you’re missing something.
> anyone who works on Monday by definition of a one day work week does not work on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.
Why are they coming in so much? Everyone comes in on Monday, does some work, tasks the machines and then fucks off.
> most likely is that my communication is one-shot through a computer system
You’ve never heard of a West/East team handing off that never meet? It used to be quite common in trading.
Hell, I’d venture Tarsnap could run today with less than a day of work on Colin’s part each week.
For me, 4 days is perfect. I get a three day weekend every weekend, but I don't actually dread Thursdays because I feel like a failure in work.
In the past we have had paper archives, expensive office machines to handle paper and so we are bound to the office, this is not true anymore and there is NO REASONS behind the desire of human slavery to keep up the dense city model, needed only by surveillance capitalism and big real estate businesses, practically incompatible with the Green New Deal.
4-day work week, benefits and so on are this: gift in exchange to remain bound to the office. Not something else.
I highly recommend picking it up if you ever have down time like that!
Learning to weld has actually augmented how I conceive system designs.
I'd love a 4 day week if the daily rate went up so the pay doesn't change. Somehow I'm not holding my breath.
The AI Legacy Code - an AI-UBI inherited collectively by all humans - can make that happen.
Let's work to end work!!!
The 4-day workweek only appears possible due to the peace divident, and the peace is rapidly coming to an end. We'll need the fifth, and maybe the sixth day of the week to produce shells, missiles, trucks, tanks, ships, planes, and to make up for the lost productivity of those who are on the battlefield.