The Four-Day Work Week

I remem­ber read­ing an A List Apart art­icle some time ago about the four-day week. It turns out that it was writ­ten over four years ago and there’s been quite a few other art­icles writ­ten about the four-day week since. It’s just taken me this long to try to put it into practice.

Firstly though, the three-day week­end that Jason touts doesn’t work for me.

Three-day week­ends mean people come back extra refreshed on Monday. Three-day week­ends mean people come back hap­pier on Monday. Three-day week­ends mean people actu­ally work harder and more effi­ciently dur­ing the four-day work week.

Yeah, that is def­in­itely not what hap­pens for me. Once I’ve taken a three-day break from work it’s very unlikely I’m going to be able to get straight back into it on the Monday morn­ing. So I thought about it, and wondered why you had to take the Fri­day off, if you’re work­ing for your­self then can’t you take off any day in the week you want? I chose Wed­nes­day. I dont really have any prob­lems with Wed­nes­day, it’s a nice enough day (as days go), but if I take it off then I’ve broken up my work week into two eas­ily man­age­able chunks:

Wed­nes­day now becomes a ‘free day’; to go to beach (if it’s not rain­ing, which it usu­ally is), movies (if there’s ever any­thing on, which there usu­ally isn’t), play video games (which at the moment is Demon’s Souls), or do whatever.

Best of all, I’m get­ting just as much work done (some­times even more) as I was with a five-day week. If you work for your­self, I highly recom­mend it.