Before all this—before offices shuttered, unemployment soared, and “work-life balance” became a sneering oxymoron—Banks Benitez had a radical idea: He wanted his employees to work less., and when he said “work less,” he didn’t mean 45 hours per week instead of 50. Benitez wanted his employees to work four days a week—32 hours—for a full week’s pay. Away from screens and work, he wrote in a company email, his team would have the time to live more “healthy, creative, and audacious” lives.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. But if they could prove they’d be successful and productive during a four- day workweek, then why should any of us ever work a Friday again?Zach Strom, Uncharted’s venture- funding director, is a natural introvert, so working 40 to 50 hours a week and then seeing friends over the weekend—on top of the normal chores and errands that chew through leisure time—left him drained. “I wanted to use that as time to recharge,” he says, but he rarely could.
Yet 40 hours has proved hard to cast off. There’s no centuries-old tradition that marries us to five eight-hour days each week. No data that suggests Monday through Friday is ideal. Forty, it’s worth noting, is an entirely arbitrary number. The length of the workweek had been steadily declining for about 100 years before the 1900s. “The question is,” says labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, Ph.D.
Still, the question comes up about whether a decrease in work frequency is offset by an increase in the intensity of the work. Which is no way to live, either.