Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day workweek.
Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials which unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is about 1% of Iceland’s total working population. These subjects were drawn from multiple different types of workplaces, including, notably, offices and social service providers. Not everyone dropped an entire workday, but most participants reduced their schedule from forty hours to at most thirty-six hours a week of work.
The UK followed suit with a six-month trial, including over sixty companies and nearly 3,000 employees, concluding in 2023. A year later, forty-five firms in Germany participated in a similar half-year experiment with a reduced workweek. And these are far from the only such experiments being conducted. (According to a 2024 KPMG survey, close to a third of large US companies are also, at the very least, considering the idea.)
Let’s put aside for the moment whether or not a shortened week is a good idea (more on this later). I want to first focus on a consistent finding in these studies that points toward a critical lesson about how to make work deeper and more sustainable.
Every study I’ve read (so far) claims that reducing the workweek does not lead to substantial productivity decreases.
From the Icelandic study: “Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces.”
From the UK study: “Across a wide variety of sectors, wellbeing has improved dramatically for staff; and business productivity has either been maintained or improved in nearly every case.”
From the German study: “Employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week, and, in some cases, were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health…and showed less stress and burnout symptoms, as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily stress minutes.”
Step back and consider these observations for a moment. They’re astounding results! How is it possible that working notably fewer hours doesn’t reduce the overall value that you produce?
A big part of the answer, I’m convinced, is a key idea from my book, Slow Productivity: workload management.
Most knowledge workers are granted substantial autonomy to control their workload. It’s technically up to them when to say “yes” and when to say “no” to requests, and there’s no direct supervision of their current load of tasks and projects, nor is there any guidance about what this load should ideally be.
Many workers deal with the complexity of this reality by telling themselves what I sometimes call the workload fairy tale, which is the idea that their current commitments and obligations represent the exact amount of work they need to be doing to succeed in their position.
The results of the 4-day work week experiment, however, undermine this belief. The key work – the efforts that really matter – turned out to require less than forty hours a week of effort, so even with a reduced schedule, the participants could still fit it all in. Contrary to the workload fairytale, much of our weekly work might be, from a strict value production perspective, optional.
So why is everyone always so busy? Because in modern knowledge work we associate activity with usefulness (a concept I call “pseudo-productivity” in my book), so we keep saying “yes,” or inventing frenetic digital chores, until we’ve filled in every last minute of our workweek with action. We don’t realize we’re doing this, but instead grasp onto the workload fairy tale’s insistence that our full schedule represents exactly what we need to be doing, and any less would be an abdication of our professional duties.
The results from the 4-day work week not only push back against this fairy tale, but also provide us with a hint about how we could make work better. If we treated workload management seriously, and were transparent about how much each person is doing, and what load is optimal for their position; if we were willing to experiment with different possible configurations of these loads, and strategies for keeping them sustainable, we might move closer to a productive knowledge sector (in a traditional economic sense) free of the exhausting busy freneticism that describes our current moment. A world of work with breathing room and margin, where key stuff gets the attention it deserves, but not every day is reduced to a jittery jumble.
All of this brings me back to whether or not a 4-day workweek is a good idea. I have nothing against it in the abstract, but it also seems to be addressing a symptom instead of the underlying problem. If we truly solve some of the underlying workload issues, switching from five to four days might no longer feel like such a relief to so many.
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For more on my thoughts on technology and work more generally, check out my recent books on the topic: Slow Productivity, A World Without Email, and Deep Work.
Great article, as per usual. The workload fairytale is an interesting idea. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the amount of studying I *thought* I had to do to be successful during my first couple years of medical school. But after my first child was born while I was still in school, I experienced a dramatic decrease the amount of available time to study. To my surprise, instead of struggling, I was thriving. I was using my precious study time more thoughtfully (Pareto’s Principle).
I can’t help but think of Parkinson’s Law when I read this article: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Perhaps these short-workweek experiments force people to become more efficient in some way, even if the subjects aren’t consciously aware of it.
I agree with everything up to the final paragraph, where I am not so sure. It seems like an extra day for personal & leisure activities might be hard to make up for with an overall reduced workload. Unless we managed to make the same approach to our lives outside work, drastically reducing life-admin and the overhead that comes with, e.g., kid activities. Which would again require society-level changes.
If anyone is willing to take a days cut in pay, that would be a huge boost to Corporations, however many businesses could not survive under that scenario. Ex. Construction!
Did I miss the part that you get paid for hours worked? Again a consequence that may be overlooked. Please don’t expect me to pay you for hours you did not work. If you want to be paid by the task or project then you may need consulting work, or quota work. As a current consultant I get paid based on an agreed amount the client and I agree upon. No client no pay so it is not that easy to think there will always be work. Beanie and wienies may become a staple in lean times, which are always lurking around the corner.
I wonder if it’s less about having that extra day compared to lower hours. I work in a UK University (technical role) and my contractual hours are 36.25 a week. I really like that set up as I finish about 4pm after starting early. It gives me loads of time daily in the work-week that’s not work. Thus I can spread the life admin, exercising, resting etc more equally out over the week.
I agree that less is more, what that looks like may vary :).
Thank ou for an excellent write-up of a complex issue. Overcoming corporate biases and entrenched tendencies to associate work hours with wages will also be a huge challenge here is the US. It seems we are coming to the point where capitalism must acquiesce to something more meaningful with which we measure the productivity of our lives.
I worked at an aerospace company right out of college, that offered high rel electronic’s manufacture and test for NASA and the Mil Spec customers. When I started it was like a dream for many, as we worked four ten hour days, 24 hours a day, and on Friday one could get an extended work week to work Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Getting 3 day weekends and paid a professional wage while working on spacecraft hardware was the best job I had in a long career. Might not work for every situation, but I know a 4 day work week was an absolutely great way for me to work.
For me, the key practice here is being “transparent about how much each person is doing, and what load is optimal for their position”
In order to pull this off at an organization like mine where people are routinely overburdened and work frantically, requires that we have someone on staff to oversee and monitor the workloads. Why? Because the staff themselves have so much on their plates that they either:
1) don’t believe they can afford the time to assess their workload
2) don’t believe assessing the workload would change anything
3) lack the skills to assess their workload and adjust their plans.
We also don’t have the budget to hire a PM type person to help us through this headache.
I’ll keep trying though to nudge them forward.
To me, the findings of these studies are not very interesting because I assume that the majority of people in them are not particularly ambitious or focused on being ‘too good to ignore’. I’ve worked in offices that are more like the TV show The Office than a typical academic or startup environment, and in these it’s easy to see why the studies find people getting the same amount of work done in 4 days vs 5. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, but an interpretation is that most people are not working near the limits of their cognitive capacity.
Look at my deep work logs I can show that 4 day weeks vs. 5 day weeks have an impact on this productivity metric. Interestingly I find that it’s more than a 20% decrease. Mondays are often my lowest tally of the week — it’s almost like I need to build momentum through the week to be able to put in maximum effort. There is also a cost in re-learning or ‘reloading the context’ that I have forgotten over the weekend, which is noticeable but difficult to quantify.
This result suggest that perhaps instead of 4 day weeks, we’d be better off with shorter 5 day weeks.
What I have observed in quite a few different “white collar” tasks is that the bottleneck for producing more wasn’t the time spent working but rather some kind of mental capacity or exhaustion. In the very short term, you can definitely get a productivity boost by the team working more hours and a productivity drop by someone simply being off, but even over the course of a couple of months, it seems that for each person there simply is some quantity of “mental energy” that they are able to convert into intellectual output, and for most people it doesn’t take 40 hours a week to spend all the capacity that they have.
Productivity is not the same as raw output. It is quite possible to improve productivity while reducing total output and vice versa. What needs to happen is to reduce input (labor) while maintaining or increasing output. That achieves both.
Since this short post doesn’t make explicit which is being measured in the various pilots, it’s difficult to assess whether both goals are being achieved.
Loved this. We don’t need heroes burning out. We need leaders who steward human energy like beavers stockpiling for the winter. Deep work beats busy work every time. Thanks for the insight!
If people can do in 4 days what they’re purporting to do in five, then as an alternative to cutting the work week by a day, this seems to strongly imply that most businesses could simply cut their work force by 20% and experience no reduction in work.
Obviously, that’s not completely true, as some tasks require simultaneous or complementary work/workers to get done, and having backups is also almost always desirable. But a 10-15% reduction seems like a rational implication here.
The implication doesn’t make me happy either.
Not exactly on point but switching to 4 day work week would automatically give me a 5% raise considering commute and prep time and expenses. If everyone went to 4 days a week, what would be the impact on traffic? No brainer.