Work less, live more: is it time to end the five-day week?

I have been meaning to write about the miracles of the four-day week for a while now. Ever since I started working a four-day week last August, in fact. This was prompted by a change in childcare arrangements (our two-year-old, Aubrey, started his own four-day week at nursery) and an upping of my wife’s work commitments. We all thought it best that I should take charge of him on Fridays. Having heard friends hymn their own four-day weeks (“It revolutionised Sundays,” said a friend who had taken Mondays off to look after his boys), I thought the arrangement would suit my right-on, pro-feminist, climate-conscious, kind-of-had-it-with-constant-deadlines sensibility rather well.

And indeed, our first Friday was a triumph. I acquired a child seat for my bike and we pedalled from Bristol to Bath and back in the late-summer sunshine, rehearsing the arguments from key post-capitalist works, such as Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, and Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman, which posit less work as a solution to all manner of 21st-century ills.

“This,” I told Aubrey as we pedalled past the Roman Baths, “was clearly what John Maynard Keynes had in mind in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930) when he looked forward to the day we would ‘value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful”’. Keynes imagined 15-hour weeks would become commonplace by now – I mean, he was right about other stuff? But at this point, four days on, three days off felt optimal. There would be time to cook, garden, hang out the washing, play a bit of piano, see friends for coffee. And, judging from the data, I’d get just as much if not more actual work done, too. The Netherlands and Germany have the shortest working weeks in Europe and among the highest productivity. When Microsoft Japan trialled a four-day week, productivity shot up by 40%. Everyone was also happier.

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