While still knowledge work, when I started my career I was working as a sys admin in a data center. It required 24x7x365 support. No one worked 5 days. All week

While still knowledge work, when I started my career I was working as a sys admin in a data center. It required 24x7x365 support. No one worked 5 days. All weekday shifts were 4x10. All weekend shifts were 3x12. It doesn’t get to a 32 hour week, but it does still give a 3 or 4 day working week. I don’t see why this wouldn’t work for other support or customer facing roles. Many types of businesses are closed on random weekdays, Monday is a popular day to be closed for businesses that operate on that weekend, and they seem to make it work. Ones I’ve called often have an answering service for those days. Where I was at, on holidays we’d run a skeleton staff of 2 people to keep things going, with on-call if anything big happened. I don’t think anything is special about 4 days, just baby steps. I personally think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. It let me hyper focus on work, and really have long stretches of deep work without interruption, while also giving me adequate time to rest and recover from that. I think I’d get much more done if I moved back to that, personally. Working 5x8, as I do now, isn’t that useful. Half the day is full of meetings, and as soon as I start to dig into something, the day is over. What should take a day ends up taking weeks. I’m not necessarily looking to cut hours, but more to get more heads down working time, without working free OT. I actually found 4x10 to be the worst, 3x12 was the best, for me.