9 ms·

The 4-day week is flawed – workers still want it

• datavirtue 5y ago
  You can always work five if you want.
• hinkley 5y ago
  This just in: Working 50 hours a week sucks and trying to do it in fewer days, doubly so. 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.
• denimnerd42 5y ago
  4 10 hour days sounds awful. it should be just do less work.
  • foerbert 5y ago
    I'm all for cutting down total hours, but personally 4x10 hour days still sound much better than 5x8. There is a lot of time and effort - both physically and mentally - that goes into the transition to and from work that I'd love to avoid. A few more hours a day meanwhile wouldn't bother me much at all.
    • Gigachad 5y ago
      I just literally couldn’t do it. My brain is completely checked out with 2 hours to go on an 8 hour day. I have to try with all the willpower I have if I want to get any work done in the last 2 hours.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• t-writescode 5y ago
  This article is arguing for 40 hours in 4 days. The general argument for a 4-day work week is 4, 8 hour days, which is meaningfully different.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    And using 12 hour days as an anecdote... Some people round that 4 days down to 30 hours, which is 7.5 hours a day, with a slight chance of missing the worst of rush hour in one direction.
    • 420official 5y ago
      Isn't rush hour a function of the work day? Shift the working hours and you also shift rush hour.
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      If there is a commute then it needs cut down to three days.
  • 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
    Yep, almost all potential 4-day week proposals are predicated on 80% of time for 100% of productivity.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      We really need to consider as a society whether or not our 'cult of productivity' is actually very beneficial.
      • krapp 5y ago
        It is beneficial to those it is intended to benefit.
  • AlwaysRock 5y ago
    It's strange. I hear a lot of talk about 4 day work week but not if they mean the same amount of work in four days or four days with the less total hours. It's a bit frustrating because I don't like the 4 day 40 hour work week. In the winter in many areas it would be absolutely soul crushing. But the 4 day 8 hour per day work week I think should absolutely be implemented into almost every job immediately.
• donatj 5y ago
  I'd rather work seven straight 6-hour days than four 10-hour days. I'd have usable time _every single night_. That sounds amazing.
  • cptcobalt 5y ago
    I used to have this opinion 5 years ago, when my job was some monotonous busy work (using my brain, but no code, engineering, or leadership). But, in my current role (product leadership), I'd far prefer 4 day workweeks for me and my team.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    I'd like to see tech companies have the office occupied 6 (7?) days a week, 12 hours a day M-F, with a revolving door of people coming and going. We are trying to run 24/7 operations and expect everyone to be in the office during the same 'core business hours' which means that wage theft is just one human error away from being a reality. If I have to be there for anyone to make meaningful progress on deciphering an issue in my code, then we're writing the wrong code.
  • wnolens 5y ago
    There is something truly wonderful about waking up and knowing that this entire day will not involve some set of responsibilities. For about a year I did 20h weeks (independent contractor) as 4hour days. Compared to 40h+ weeks, it was awesome obviously. But there is overhead to getting ready for it, expending certain kind of energy, more likely to close laptop on something incomplete.. I thought I would save the afternoons for personal projects but I rarely felt like it.
• quacked 5y ago
  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. 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 real 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. [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"?
  • nine_k 5y ago
    You are speaking as if moving money around is some useless non-work. But it's the mechanism that makes the economy tick at scale, this is why you can easily buy potatoes grown in Idaho and order electronics assembled in China, while also buying a car without paying the cost upfront. Let's declare, say, trucking as non-real work. Trucks produce nothing but pollution; why do truckers work the long hours they work, and command the high salaries they get? All the while the "real work" is done by other people? (Disclaimer: I never worked for financial, trading, or trucking industries; my grandfather was a truck driver.)
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      Ultimately we all need food, shelter, clothing, and other things of decreasing necessity. The way we get those things is to trade something of value; few of us are capable of producing everything we need by ourselves. We all have different talents and abilities, but most of us find something to do that produces value for someone else. So that we don't have to directly trade e.g. eggs for a plumbing repair, we invented money so that the value we each produce could be abstracted into something that is acceptable in trade for anything else we need. Money is an abstraction for the value of productive work. We must each produce enough value that we can trade it for the things we need. It's also why univeral income will never work. If money is given to someone in exchange for nothing, it is worth nothing.
• beerandt 5y ago
  Engineering firms have commonly done 4x 9 hour days with the remainder (to hit 40) either half day Friday or alternating Friday's off. I've always enjoyed it. 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. And you don't feel overworked by Thursday night, as the guy interviewed said after doing 4x 10s.
• jon889 5y ago
  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...
• manuelabeledo 5y ago
  > 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.” So? I for one am fine with this, thank you. If I want to socialise, I can have plenty with actual friends and family.
  • cogman10 5y ago
    Yup, this sounds like the same people that have to go into the office for "culture" or some BS.
    • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      In my junior days I learned a lot, both technical and socially, from that "culture BS" from the office. I don't like being just a random avatar in a chat app that takes Jira tickets on input and pushes git commits as an output. The new hires that joined in the post Covid WFH days have it really rough in our org. They just fade into the background of anonymity. I guess it's fine if you already got a huge and reliable network of friends and contacts in the industry and your only goal is cashing bigger checks to retire early, which is also fine, everyone has different ages, lifestyles, goals in life and expectations from their workplace.
      • eecc 5y ago
        Yeah, but refining tickets, programming and getting good code review feedback from a competent and professional senior engineer are what you need to acquire experience and competence. Over time this means a better salary, a faster career, and more significant lifetime achievements. Water-cooler BS, pandering to the local hierarchy is just investing in your regrets-folder. Sociality and networking are more effectively cultivated and owned long-term on neutral-ground: user-groups, gym, local-whatever-chapter, Meetup. Hear me
        • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
• bendbro 5y ago
  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.
• lemax 5y ago
  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.
• fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  I worked 4x10 a week. I can speak to the experience. At times early in my career I took breaks away from programming. The role wasn't as mentally engaging as programming and you could leave your brain at the door when you left each day. It was amazing, I almost stayed there permanently, I wasn't enamored with the work but each week was true mental reset. I think we have to divide roles that requires deep work from roles that don't. Just like we have to separate butt in seat inbound sales roles from programming. For programming type roles, 5x5or 4x8 would work better in my estimation depending on meeting workload.
  • travisjungroth 5y ago
    > I think we have to divide roles that requires deep work from roles that don't. Very similar is the background mind vs not roles. Some people are great at completely separating their professional knowledge work time from the rest of their life. I am not. If a company pays for me to write software, they’re also getting my time in the bath tub thinking about software. This is different from when I was parking cars as a valet. I would never, ever take a “reduced hours” software job for this reason. A job that had 25 hours on the books would occupy a similar amount of my headspace to a normal full time job but probably expect to pay less. For how many employees seem to want it and what a deal it is under the right circumstances, I’m a little surprised more companies don’t offer reduced hours schedules for software. Maybe some adverse selection component.
• cptcobalt 5y ago
  I think this article fails to appreciate a few things that should change in a 4-day week: - We (as individuals) should value our own time more than time working for a company. - 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. - 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 not restful. - The company should not encourage work on the traditional 5th day.
• f6v 5y ago
  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.
  • malermeister 5y ago
    Yes - this whole article and people who talk about lower productivity are missing the point. Productivity per worker has been going up for decades. Real wages have been stagnant and we still work the same amount of hours even though we're a lot more productive now per hour worked than we used to be. It's fine to lower productivity a bit in exchange for higher quality of life - it's been going up dramatically forever, but what's the point if we still all toil away just the same?
  • Hokusai 5y ago
    So, if Amazon employees work 4 days instead of 5 Bezos' yacht would be smaller and fit under that bridge? That seems a good solution that the Dutch did not take into account.
    • krapp 5y ago
      Amazon warehouse employees, at least, do work 4 days (4x10).
• jrockway 5y ago
  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"). Optimizing for long-term mental health should probably be the only goal. (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.)
• aseerdbnarng 5y ago
  Incredible how this Wired article knows whats better for workers than workers themselves
• paxys 5y ago
  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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• mr_tristan 5y ago
  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. 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. 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. 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
• ricardobeat 5y ago
  Nice piece of establishment propaganda. > The company changed its schedule to four 10-hour days Yeah, that's not the idea. They even acknowledge it, but still make it the center of the piece.
• lbrito 5y ago
  >“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,” Sounds like any day of remote work to me.