40 Hours

Can we turn this aircraft carrier of a country around to the idea of the *GASP!* four-day work week?

People who work a four-day week generally report that they’re healthier, happier, and less crunched for time; their employers report that they’re more efficient and more focused. These companies’ success points to a tantalizing possibility: that the conventional approach to work and productivity is fundamentally misguided.

“We live in a society in which overwork is treated as a badge of honor,” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, an author and consultant who helps companies try out shorter workweeks, told me. “The idea that you can succeed as a company by working fewer hours sounds like you’re reading druidic runes or something.” But, he said, “we’ve had the productivity gains that make a four-day week possible. It’s just that they’re buried under the rubble of meetings that are too long and Slack threads that go on forever.”

You'd think if nothing else, the pandemic has taught us that most companies are perfectly fine when their employees work remotely and not tied to some arbitrary set of rules dictating they have to be in an office "working". Unfortunately this is America, where we still demand on entrenching ourselves in some Puritanical idea of which the "work" is the point, and not the happiness it pays for. Punchline:

But the real case for the four-day workweek is not that it would benefit businesses. It’s that it would benefit people.

In America we fetishize businesses, and tell people to go fuck themselves. 🤷‍♂️