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I am a firm believer that I would get more work done with a 4-day workweek than I currently do with my 5-day workweek. I already spend an embarrassing amount of

• maxRN 3y ago
  Yup, another way to think about it is that it’s a difference of 16h, not 8h. You work 8h less and gain 8h of free time.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    Or you work 8h less and gain 24 of "contiguous hours that you control" per week.
    • tshaddox 3y ago
      Yes, the disproportionately huge increase in contiguous time off is the big win in my book.
      • coding123 3y ago
        We could just work Monday and Tuesday with a 40 hour marathon each week fueled by coffee, donuts and an occasional pizza.
  • elAhmo 3y ago
    Well... :D You can't add the gained time twice. It is like saying, instead of spending 20 USD on coffee, you spend 15 USD. You didn't gain 10 bucks, you are still left with only five more than you would have otherwise.
    • hervature 3y ago
      Leisure hours in a 5-day work week: 72 (8 hours per day and 16 on weekends) Work hours in a 5-day work week: 40 Difference: 32 hours Leisure hours in a 4-day work week: 80 Work hours in a 4-day work week: 32 Difference: 48 hours
      • elAhmo 3y ago
        That’s the diffence. You had 72 hours before, now you have 80 hours of leisure time. It’s 8 hours more of leisure time.
        • hervature 3y ago
          GP - "another way to think about it is that it’s a difference of 16h" You - "That’s the diffence."
          • elAhmo 3y ago
            In my reply I said the effective gain is 8 hours. No matter what kind of math you do, working one day less doesn’t give you two extra days off.
      • DollyPartition 3y ago
        [dead]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• isoprophlex 3y ago
  I don't work on Fridays, I'm never going back.
• Negitivefrags 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • imachine1980_ 3y ago
    why, if you are paying him its means he is making more money than you spending on him, if you aren't willing to pay the premium for the effort why he need to make the sacrifice of more work for free.
  • biesnecker 3y ago
    Does your employer pay you for hours or output? I'm a salaried employee, I get paid for output, not the time it takes to produce. I think if anything you're stealing from yourself, robbing yourself of the opportunity to take on more responsibility, grow faster, etc.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • Spivak 3y ago
    > sure you will have all sorts of mental justifications for why that’s reasonable Because I'm salaried and paid for my work not my time. No other justification is needed.
  • ziddoap 3y ago
    >If you don’t have enough work, then ask for more. >You are stealing from your employer. Lol, no. I get paid $X to do Y work. I'm not about to do free labor for Z when I complete Y. If you want Z done, I need to be paid for it.
  • fasttriggerfish 3y ago
    No, sorry but that’s a very dumb way to think about it. If someone can get something done in half the time it takes someone else, and is slacking off the rest of the time, is he stealing from the company ? Obviously not. And would his total output be significantly higher if he tried to work continuously ? Not necessarily. Different people have different productivity patterns. The point is that trying to impose a rhythm or longer hours onto someone does not necessarily improve their output, no matter how much you try to force them.
• woudsma 3y ago
  I feel the same. If I work 5 days I'd feel like I'm wasting so much time, when realistically I can do the same amount of work in 4 days. I'm working as a developer so it's also about retaining my attention span. I just can't do it for 5 days straight anymore. My perfect 4-day workweek is having the Wednesday off so I have a 'mini-weekend' in my week. I only ever have to work 1 more day until I have some time to clear my head, make some music, etc. It feels like a more healthy work/life balance. And I feel sharper after a day off.
  • pseudosavant 3y ago
    My team currently does Monday through Thursday, although we've done Tuesday through Friday before too. M-Th has aligned much better with other teams in the company. It was never great when someone discovered something late of Friday or over the weekend and our team was the only one there not on Monday to help address it. That said, I wish we could go to MT and ThF schedule. Only ever have 2 days in a row with out a break would seem pretty magical to me. I'd either had yesterday off, or tomorrow - always. Fridays are such a slower day though that I feel like I miss out on less than I would on Wednesdays.
    • xp84 3y ago
      Same on both counts. MT_TF would be cool, but MTWT has big 'economies of scale' benefits and also reduces unexpected "asynchronous" PTO that we get every time someone wants to take a long weekend. Essentially, almost all of our "working days" should then be working days when we're all here. Ideally though the 4-day program shouldn't be a thing only for specific teams because the "that team isn't here" side-eye quickly promotes resentment of the "lobsters pulling other lobsters back into the pot" variety. Teams that need coverage during the full work-week (such as B2B support) should normalize having two schedules which overlap, just as B2C companies have weekend shifts (they don't just force people to work 7 days to achieve this).
  • saulpw 3y ago
    This was true for me, I was more productive at 4-days/week, Mon-Thu. I tried having Wed off for the reason you described, but it was hard to get into the flow, both at work and in my home life. Turns out 4 days in a row for work and 3 days in a row for home was actually better for both work productivity and personal satisfaction.
• patmorgan23 3y ago
  Just watched this interesting video comparing how much we work today to medieval times. https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo?si=uOTc3ndf87enwrZK https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo?si=uOTc3ndf87enwrZK TL;DR we work a LOT more hours now than substance farmers did. They worked 4-6 hours a day and only worked about half of the days out of the year.
  • linsomniac 3y ago
    I think you mean sustenance... But maybe not. :-)
    • hyggetrold 3y ago
      Subsistence farmers, most likely.
      • linsomniac 3y ago
        There we go!
• timmg 3y ago
  > I already spend an embarrassing amount of time slacking off daily, it's not like I'm pressed for time to get stuff done in the office. Just because that is true for you doesn't mean it is true in general. Like, imagine a surgeon -- would he/she spend 8 hours a week slacking? Or a radiologoist -- can he/she read the same number of slides in 32 than 40? Or a barrista at starbucks? Also, if you worked 32 hours, would you still slack off? Is there a reason to expect that your slack/work ratio would change? You claim you'd be "in a better mood" -- but as humans we tend to adjust to the circumstances we are in. So I'm not sure that would be the case long term.
  • epylar 3y ago
    mkaic isn't saying definitely they would be in a better mood, just that they -think- 3-day weekends would be good for their mental health and mood.
  • bluefishinit 3y ago
    "Slacking off" doesn't enter into the equation. Is your output worth more to the company than it costs to pay you to produce it? If yes, then great there is no problem to be solved.
    • TylerE 3y ago
      One way to think of it is that you're not always being paid to be doing something specific, but rather to be available on short (e.g. 15 minutes or less) notice.
      • Draiken 3y ago
        Sure, some roles require that, but most definitely not the majority. In development at least, most of the times I hear this, the "availability" is only needed for random unplanned meetings from useless managers that can't actually plan or work asynchronously. The organization as a whole or individual managers can't do their jobs well and they make the people that actually get shit done pay for it by "standing by" for no good reason. Ironically, they also completely ruin productivity with these interruptions.
• pelasaco 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • epylar 3y ago
    There's probably an optimum number of days to work and the suggestion here isn't that lower is always better, just that 5 is above the optimum amount.
  • unbalancedevh 3y ago
    The point isn't that you could work harder now with 5 days and do more; it's that you could be just as productive in 4 days as you currently are, which presumably is acceptable. The big question is, will people continue to slack off during work hours and lose productivity? I do spend a lot of time in between tasks decompressing from one and gearing up for the next. I'm not sure how that would translate if I just tried to collect all that "slack" time up into a separate day. At the beginning of the Covid shutdowns, my company did go to a 4-day work week. It was great (although our pay was adjusted). I don't think our productivity suffered, but it's kind of hard to estimate because there were a lot of other unusual variables, like the supply chain issues and variable work schedules of people in other companies.
    • pelasaco 3y ago
      > The point isn't that you could work harder now with 5 days and do more; it's that you could be just as productive in 4 days as you currently are, which presumably is acceptable. But that is just true if you are underperforming right now, or are too Conformable in a shitty job. There is always some doc too improve, some stack to update, a new issue to be fixed, a meeting that could be better prepared, a backlog to be improved.. People are just "if nobody says me what to do, then I can just slack off" > The big question is, will people continue to slack off during work hours and lose productivity? You will. No skin in the game, deliver or not deliver, there is mostly no consequence, boring work, company needs you.. I did the same. I was working 36 hours/week (friday free) until I realized, that there was a lot of things to do and to be done, but the team was just "naah, personal life FIRST".
• manicennui 3y ago
  Being fully remote gives me 6-8 hours back each week because I don't have to commute. It has been huge for my mental health, mostly because I'm able to get more sleep.
  • asciimov 3y ago
    10-12 hours back a week here. Life is so much better.
    • paint 3y ago
      [dead]
• euroderf 3y ago
  If you're off from 5pm thursday to 9am monday, that's 88 hours, which is 52 percent of a 168-hour week. Goood.
• sandworm101 3y ago
  >> I could easily meet my weekly objectives in 32 hours rather than 40... Sounds like someone needs some more tasks for their to do list. I have to abandon about half of the tasks I am meant to do, for lack of time. I can send you some of them to fill that eight hours. Who here actually works a 40-hour week? HN isn't a bunch of union factory workers punching timecards each day. I'd bet 60 is more common than 40.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Who here actually works a 40-hour week? Uhh, I did? First job I had a total of 5 weeks of OT. 2nd job never had to work above 8 hours a day, de facto nor de jure. I even had a 4 day experiment for 4 months there and it was lovely. Third job, no overtime. Did I do some extra hours here and there off the clock? Sure. Especially with wfh I can get fixated and want to spend a bit of time getting something compileable. But outside of that one OT period listed above, I never worked above 50 hours.
  • pelasaco 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • lolinder 3y ago
      60 being more common than 40 is not obvious (it's not even true), and if it were it should not be treated as okay. The downvotes are because OP is trying to normalize workaholism.
      • pelasaco 3y ago
        He might have had a different experience than you. I too served in uniform, often working (and earning) for more than 40 hours a week. Later, when I managed a team in a different country, the cultural norm there was to work longer hours as well. It's worth noting that while a 40-hour workweek might be standard in some places, others might see norms of 44, 50 hours, or even more. Even in Europe, roles like production management or working in a SOC often entail more than 40 hours a week.
• rags2riches 3y ago
  I'm pretty certain a bus driver couldn't do eight hours worth of driving in six hours.
  • DanHulton 3y ago
    No, but two bus drivers could.
    • rags2riches 3y ago
      No. Neither can two clerks keep a store open for eight hours in six hours. Much like nine women can't give birth to a baby in one month.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Uhh, we call them "shifts". 2 clerks can keep one store open (assuming we only need one clerk) anywhere from 6-12 hours if we do 6 hour shifts. A store isn't a baby, one employee isn't needed 24/7 to keep the lights on.
        • rags2riches 3y ago
          Right. That still takes as many man-hours as the opening hours of the store. Which is much different from the jobs where time isn't part of the output. Which is the whole point I'm making. Picking all the oranges from a grove takes eight hours today. Maybe I can do it in six hours if... Turning an inbox worth of papers takes eight hours today. Maybe I can do it in six hours if... Keeping the store open for eight hours takes eight hours today. It will always take eight hours. Because the hours are part of the output.
          • johnnyanmac 3y ago
            >That still takes as many man-hours as the opening hours of the store. Which is much different from the jobs where time isn't part of the output It's not about output, it's about quality of life and not making people work their lives away for corporate billionaires. If you need more manpower than a full time working hours, said billionaire corporations pay more for it in overtime or reduce hours. To go off your metaphors, you (the corporation) can pick oranges, in the grove in 6 hours if you hire more skilled labor. If that's not possible (or if said labor is too expensive), you hire more people to make it possible. If a store needs to stay open for 8 hours with 6 hour workers, you pay 2 hours overtime or pay for two employees with overlapping shifts. Pay for your labor.
• coding123 3y ago
  10 years later... mkaic I am a firm believer that I would get more work done with a 3-day workweek than I currently do with my 4-day workweek. I already spend an embarrassing amount of time slacking off daily, it's not like I'm pressed for time to get stuff done in the office. I could easily meet my weekly objectives in 24 hours rather than 32, and having 4-day weekends every weekend I think would be incredible for my mental health and mood. And when I'm in a better mood, I get more work done! One thing I feel like a lot of people don't realize is just how big a difference it is to go from a 4-day week to a 3-day week. Sure, it's "just one day" but when you think about the ratio between time-on and time-off, the shift becomes a lot more dramatic. 4-on, 3-off means you spend over twice as many days working as not working. 3-on, 4-off means you spend a nearly equal number of days on each. It's just one day of difference, but it feels like a major, major shift.
  • jonahrd 3y ago
    You copied and pasted, and edited 5->4 and 4->3 in an attempt to make a point about a slippery slope. But you didn't edit this sentence: > 4-on, 3-off means you spend over twice as many days working as not working. Which now doesn't make sense. Proving that it's _not_ as simple as a slippery slope.
    • saulpw 3y ago
      Yes. I was quite productive and happy at 4 days/week, and felt a strong part of the team that was still working 5 days/week. But when I tried a more "part-time" schedule of 3 days/week, I was less satisfied and less productive and felt less a part of the team. 4 days/week is still full-time, 3 days/week is part-time.
  • standardUser 3y ago
    Continual advances in technology can and should result in people working less for the same productive output.
    • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
      Vote for it! That "should" is a government creature; to the market, on the other hand, advances in technology "should" only increase productivity when (preferably now less) people are working the same amount of time (and maybe how about even more time?).
• zingababba 3y ago
  Same, it has always blown my mind how I'm consistently one of the most productive members on any team I've been on yet I know how much time I spend just idling. It's the spurts of activity where I get my work done and time off 100% correlates with the intensity and length of those spurts/flow states.
• mettamage 3y ago
  It's like I could've written this comment. I'm working on 4 days per week, and I agree with everything you just said. I've worked on both 5 and 4 days per week. The issue in my case with 5 is: I get insomnia issues for a multitude of reasons. I also have them with 4 days per week, but it's easier to build in fallbacks and so on. My 3rd free day is on the Wednesday for this reason.
• b1gnasty 3y ago
  I used to work manual labour in the reforestation industry and there were two main schedules we would work: 4-and-1s (criminal) and 3-and-1s (manageable). That change in ratio really adds up. Sadly, management mostly worked us 4-and-1s because, despite the fact that each day we were less productive, over 3 months more trees would get planted in less time. 4-and-1s of gruelling manual labour inevitably leads to burn out. It did every season without fail, and we all expected it. Burnout was a built-in condition. The key here is that labour tolerated it only because the work was seasonal. There was always an end in sight. And most folks spent the off-season on a beach somewhere it was cheap enough to live off the earnings, surfing and eating tacos all day (or the equivalent activity). The salaryperson should not accept burn out as a built-in; we are labourers for life and we need to learn how to find dignity in such a reality. When I first transitioned to a salaried worker, I brought the burn out mentality to my work and had a lot of pride in that. And though full of bride, the burnt out husk that I as had little dignity. Ratios that allow for more life and less labour is that dignity.
• thegrim33 3y ago
  The simple fact that more or less every company in the entire world does not do 4 day work weeks, when apparently all they have to do is switch their workers to a 4 day work week in order to magically gain more productive workers, as you claim, means either 1) every person running every company in the world is stupid and you're smarter than them about worker productivity, or 2) there's more downsides that make a 4 day work week not worth it, such as in reality only a small fraction of workers actually being more productive
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    You assume the 5 day work week was made with logic and kept due to logic. That's your first mistake. Look at all the forced RTOs happening to show that business logic isn't entirely rooted in hard numbers. They aren't stupid but companies are inherently risk averse. And short of a global pandemic companies won't want to change what they don't see as broken.
  • harshalizee 3y ago
    Except there's no rationale to the 5-day work week either. Not too log ago, the proletariat class worked 7 days, then 6 due to religious coercion, then 5 due to unions. The owner class would have no problem asking labor to work 7 days a week again if it weren't for pesky labor laws.
  • mkaic 3y ago
    Social and institutional inertia is a powerful, *powerful* thing. The longer something's been around, the longer it takes to change. But just because the status quo is the status quo doesn't mean it's the optimal solution!
• missedthecue 3y ago
  If you spend only ~75% of your time working (i.e. you can finish your work in 32 hours instead of 40), does this imply that in the event your company switched to a 4 day workweek you would be busy 100% of the time? It seems more likely that people would retain a similar ratio of slacking to working. As an aside, how does "I finish my work in 32 hours" even work? What does that mean? Are most developers out there getting paint-by-numbers printouts they need to color in and then they're all done for the week? Almost all of my roles in a professional capacity have required self-starting, and the project life cycles are much longer than a day/week such that there is literally always work to do. If you're building a house and you're done nailing in shingles by noon you don't go home and come back tomorrow, you go put up sheetrock or install bathroom tiles. The "I finish my work in a few hours" that I see on HN and Twitter must be extremely poorly managed teams or people that are leaving a lot of work on the rest of their teammates.
  • zemvpferreira 3y ago
    A lot of work, maybe more than any creative work, requires long breaks for the best output to be created. When you're well rested, the work often comes easily and you're hungry from it. When you're tired, it's a slog to get going and you'll procrastinate your time away. The next day is even worse. I've managed work in software, marketing, robotics and construction. In every field I have had to send people home to rest who were doing more harm than good with their tired decision-making. Doing the work that was set for the day and going home to rest is a great productivity and morale boost, in my opinion. Individual work capacity varies, but in my experience most people overestimate theirs by a lot.
    • j7ake 3y ago
      > A lot of work, maybe more than any creative work, requires long breaks for the best output to be created. There are many counter examples against this statement. Stephen King writes every day with no breaks, not even on Sundays.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
• 0xRusty 3y ago
  As a boss of quite a large team, I think it's ok to not have everyone be hyper productive 5 days a week and I don't want people cramming 5 days of work in to 4. I want a little slack and room to pivot for my team during the week. I need people to have a spare few hours in the week that they maybe feel is unproductive in order for them to be able to pick up a couple new things that crop up. I'm not able to schedule 40 perfect hours of tasks for people to start on from 9am Monday. Where are as a team Friday 3pm looks very different to where we'd be Thursday 8pm if everyone was nose to the grindstone the whole time. Also if youre a business that is basically a team for hire to a client who works 5 days a week, what do you tell them when they come up with some valid but urgent request during "normal" business time and that key person isn't there because they've already done their 40 hours. "Sorry we'll have to pick that up next week" very often doesn't fly with them ("what do you mean that person only does 4 days a week, we need that thing done today" is not a conversation I want to have). I cannot always afford to hire more people to cover that unicorn 10x team member who wants to work 4 days.
• ClimaxGravely 3y ago
  I've been on 4/32 for a couple years now and I definitely feel I've been more productive than ever. The main difference is a bunch of idle time in between things has largely gone away.
• jalapenos 3y ago
  This would apply to a lot of tech workers I think, especially those working on big tangled mess codebases (which is most companies). On bad codebases, it's simply not physically possible to work 40 hrs/wk and not burn out, so people find all kinds of ways to cut down on hours working, either by goofing off, or going for long coffee breaks, or playing ping pong or whatever. A 4 day week would be way more effective in these cases. The problem, as usual, is management. They just cannot get over the hurdle that their job is to maximise company performance, not to crack whips.
• iamthemonster 3y ago
  You're almost definitely right and I have an experiment with a sample size of one that confirms your hypothesis. I used to work 4 days a week but there was absolutely no reduction in workload compared to a 5 day role and plenty of meetings scheduled on my day off. It was great working 4 days; Wednesdays were my day off and every Tuesday afternoon would have a bit of a "Friday feeling" and I was never more than two days away from a day off. Plus I could go to the psychologist and doctor and so on. When I went back to 5 days a week, my workload was identical and my output was identical. Stress levels were not hugely different because I just slacked off more with the 5 days. The impact of moving from 5 days to 4 days for a knowledge worker is probably a bit less than you would expect in every respect. Stress was not drastically reduced (I did school run and pickup on the Wednesday so it was only about 4.5 hours extra), and there was no huge change to my performance, probably just an increase in quality and efficiency.