Shortening the workweek to four days gives employees the chance to rest and be even more productive when they are working.
Arif Qazi / Insider
Experts say it could be even shorter
My weekend was in dire need of rescue.
A few years ago, I was spending half of my weekend recovering from the week before, and the other half bracing myself for the next week. Whatever free time I had was often consumed by chores I couldn’t get to on workdays. There was hardly a moment for leisure, and by Monday morning I was always exhausted.
This grim cycle began to take a toll on me, so I started searching for solutions. At the time, back in 2018, a New Zealand firm had just wrapped up a landmark trial to test the efficacy of a four-day workweek. The two-month test found that the 240 participants were more productive, reported lower levels of stress, and enjoyed a much-improved work-life balance when they cut out one working day a week. Intrigued by the findings, I wondered whether an extra day off each week could be a way out of my constant burnout cycle. Since I already had the luxury of a flexible schedule as a freelancer, I decided to try it out.
Almost five years later, I still work only four days a week. While it hasn’t been perfect, working a shorter week has transformed my work-life balance and made me more productive when I am on the clock. My experience isn’t an anomaly: While the science is still in the early stages, a growing body of evidence suggests that the four-day workweek can improve a workplace and make employees more satisfied. And experts told me that as productivity tools with artificial intelligence catch on and more high-ranking executives acknowledge the importance of rest, the four-day workweek could become more commonplace — and the five-day week may become an ancient relic.
Why the 4-day week works
As work seeps into our lives and homes, a typical 9-to-5 workday has become a thing of the past. Not only are people clocking in more daily hours than before the coronavirus pandemic, but a survey of knowledge workers found that over 90% of employees also frequently work in the evenings and on weekends. People have no breathing room to disconnect from work during the week, and weekends have morphed into support systems for our jobs rather than desperately needed time away. This always-on culture has left workers feeling burned out.
Since I first began working a shorter week in 2018, the movement to shift the workweek to four days has gained considerable steam. Hundreds of companies and thousands of employees have taken part in trials across the globe. The largest — involving about 3,000 workers and 61 companies in the UK — concluded earlier this year. The researchers in charge of the project called it a “resounding success,” while the majority of participating organizations announced they’re sticking with the shortened workweek and reported no loss in productivity or revenue.
A lot of the benefits of the four-day workweek come down to a simple, everyday activity: sleep.
And while the UK study was the latest and largest, dozens of experiments undertaken over the past few years have borne out the idea that the four-day workweek is better for workers and companies alike. In 2019, for instance, Microsoft Japan employees worked four days a week with no reduction in pay for a summer, and yet, the company said its workforce was 40% more productive. And in 2022, the fintech startup Bolt made four-day workweeks permanent for its 700 employees after a three-month trial, in which nearly 90% employees reported they were more efficient with their time.
Charlotte Lockhart, the CEO of 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit that advocates four-day workweeks and assists with large-scale trials, says the reason many of these experiments are so successful is that the benefits reinforce themselves. The rest and lower stress levels make employees more productive and engaged while on the job, which means they enjoy work more, and when they go home they’re better members of their communities and families since they have more time for activities outside work.
“They enjoy life more without the pressure of trying to squeeze their personal lives into a small amount of time,” Lockhart told me.
That self-reinforcing loop was exactly what I experienced when I made the switch. At first, I was worried about the hit to my workload and income from taking off every Friday. More importantly, as a business, I worried that my clients would turn to freelancers who are more available throughout the week.
A month into the experiment, however, I could tell I was far more efficient than before, and my income didn’t take a hit. Though I was still working only eight hours a day, I was ticking tasks off of my to-do list quicker.
The three-day weekend gave me the time to recover from work and run errands while still leaving enough time to comfortably plan other activities I enjoy like driving out to the countryside to hike or spending time with family and friends. Because I was better rested and refreshed from recreation, I no longer had a looming sense of dread when I signed in to work on Mondays.
A lot of the benefits of the four-day workweek come down to a simple, everyday activity: sleep. In the UK trial, 40% of participants reported fewer sleep issues or insomnia, which in turn helped them feel less stressed, sick, and burned out. Niamh Bridson Hubbard, a sociology researcher at the University of Cambridge who was on the team that assessed the UK trial, told me happier and well-rested employees are more productive. Other studies have found that employees who get more sleep tend to feel better and work better: Research by the University of Turin in Italy found that the reduction of work hours was associated with an improvement in sleep habits, lower levels of stress, and better working-life quality.
On the flip side, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers found the two-day weekend to be detrimental to health and well-being. The typical weekend cycle of staying up later and sleeping in longer before returning quickly to the work routine within just 48 hours was found to be more stressful on the body, disrupting its circadian rhythm and, hence, our sleep cycles. And as Hubbard noted, there’s a strong correlation between working long hours and an increase in the likelihood of developing mental illness and other health issues. By contrast, the four-day workweek strikes a balance between getting work done and enabling employees to rest, meaning people’s productivity may not dip even when cutting out a day.
Mark Bolino, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Oklahoma who is researching fatigue and the workweek, agrees the four-day workweek’s underlying benefits include higher productivity and well-being. Nearly half of employees in the UK trial reported being more satisfied than when they started, and “employees who are satisfied with their jobs are more engaged, less likely to quit, and more likely to go the extra mile,” Bolino said.
Less time, more productive
Though the four-day workweek may seem like a recent phenomenon, it’s been decades in the making. In 1956, Vice President Richard Nixon famously predicted we’d have to work only four days a week “in the not-too-distant future.” But economic turmoil in the following years stalled any efforts to experiment with it. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less,” says the four-day workweek was pushed back because of the rise of hustle culture around the 1980s.
But once the pandemic redefined how work can and should be done, both employees and businesses reflected on the possibilities of alternative ways to work, Hubbard, the sociology researcher, told me. More importantly, she added, it underlined the growing work-life conflict among people, as workplace apps like Slack made it increasingly harder to log off.
Despite the growing number of hours Americans are working, people aren’t getting more productive. A 2019 survey by the workplace-software company Asana found that workers were productive only 40% of the time — or two days each week. The rest of the time was found to be spent on tasks such as meetings deemed unnecessary. Salaried employees in other surveys have reported doing only about three hours of meaningful work a day. Thanks to remote and hybrid work, many people, now liberated from the modern office, have realized they don’t actually need five days to accomplish their targets. This realization has supercharged the push for a four-day workweek.
“What we’re finally seeing now is a return to a vision of work that is more balanced, sustainable, and follows closer to grand historical trends of work time reduction,” Pang told me.
At least that was the motivation for Phil McParlane, a developer in Scotland who built 4dayweek.io, a platform exclusively for finding four-day-week jobs. In his previous full-time position, McParlane was frustrated with the amount of time he wasted on office chitchat and soon figured out he didn’t need five days to finish his weekly tasks. Once he became convinced that the four-day workweek was here to stay, he quit his job and developed a platform for accommodating the anticipated demand. It now hosts more than 100,000 job seekers and 250 organizations, including Kickstarter and the UK government.
‘An important piece of the puzzle’
Despite the praise, a four-day workweek is not perfect. For some industries or positions, like doctors and teachers, shortening the week may be less practical. In my experience, there are times when I’m juggling projects and find myself rushing to make deadlines. On several occasions, I had no choice but to push a few tasks to Friday to avoid overworking.
Calvin Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University who is the author of “Deep Work,” acknowledges that shortening the workweek could help stem the alarming spike in burnout and overwork, but he told me that because knowledge workers are evaluated by how much they get done and not the hours they clock, organizations ultimately will have to reduce workloads to fit these new arrangements. Newport added that instead of asking their employees to cram the same volume into a shorter period, workplaces must improve “collaboration systems to the degree where most of every day can be dedicated to tackling things one at a time, with full attention.” That way workers can stay productive.
As AI improves and automates more of our jobs in the next few years, our working hours will most likely continue to dip and drive momentum for a shorter workweek.
Likewise, while the four-day workweek is proved to be a means to tackle job stress, there are plenty of other steps employers will need to take to usher in a more effective workplace like supporting and treating their workers fairly.
“The four-day workweek shouldn’t be considered a panacea,” Bolino said, “even if it turns out to be an important piece of the puzzle.”
For some experts, the four-day workweek is only the beginning. Nearly a century ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that by 2030 we would all be working just 15 hours a week thanks to labor-saving technologies. More recently, the World Economic Forum forecast that machines and algorithms would perform more than half of all workplace tasks by 2025. Google, similarly, predicted last year that by 2025 “AI will allow developers to complete a week’s worth of work in four days or less.” As AI improves and automates more of our jobs in the next few years, our working hours will most likely continue to dip and drive momentum for a shorter workweek.
It’s already helped me save time. When I tried an app that summarized my emails, I was spending far less time reading messages that didn’t matter and saved close to three hours in a week. With more apps cropping up that offer to write meeting notes and design your presentations for you, I expect to soon outsource a day’s worth of work to AI. “If it’s possible to use automation and other tools to create a three-day week or two-day week, why not?” Pang asked.
But for now, the four-day workweek certainly has the potential to be a far-reaching antidote to pressing workplace concerns such as mass resignations and the burnout crisis. I’m optimistic it will stick, because if there’s one takeaway I have from the past few years of working a shorter week, it is that it’s possible to have a healthier relationship with work — one in which our jobs don’t reward overwork and don’t encroach on our lives outside it.
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India whose work has appeared in Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, and more.