4‑Day Working Week Much Healthier and More Effective That Today’s System

Do we work too hard? If you work full-time, then you spend 5 days in your workplace, 35-40 hours per week, depending on the country. If you add the time you spend commuting, the total could be 9 – 10 hours daily. If you have some overtime, there is hardly any time left for something people call 'life' as, like it or not, you have got to sleep anyway. I guess we all know the story.

The basic assumption of the traditional 8-hour working scheme is that spending 8 hours at work there are 8 hours for our private life and 8 hours to sleep. As we all know, this model is obsolete, dating back to the time when one person was the bread-winner and the other would look after the kids and do all the household chores. Nowadays things look much different.

With all the progress in the field of technology, we should be working less, expecting the working time to shrink. In fact, such solutions are already being implemented in some western countries. The first outcomes seem to prove that working less not only are we more efficient and effective, but in the first place we are much happier.

Between 2015 and 2019 2500 Irish professionals took part in a study examining the effectiveness of 4-day working week. They worked in offices, hospitals, shops and other institutions. They worked 4 days a week (35 hours instead of 35). It turned out that such scheme proved useful both for the employees and the institutions they worked for.

The people were far more motivated, more efficient and felt much more closely connected with their employer.

If you think that this is yet another implausible theory, you need to remember that it wasn’t that long ago when a 6-day working week was fairly common. Not to mention 19th century when people would work 60 – 80 hours per week. It was Henry Ford who noticed a difference when the working time was reduced from 60 to 40 hours weekly. So the tendency to reduce the working hours is not a new trend and it is very likely to continue.

Experts also try to find out what is the real working time, how long we actually spend working in our offices or factories. Many of them point out that it is really difficult to perform mentally-challenging tasks for longer than 4 hours daily. If we have to work longer, we get less focused and lose our effectiveness. As for manual jobs, it is much harder to determine when our work is just hard and at what point it begins to be exhausting for our bodies.

It does not change the fact that death by working too hard is an ominous yet possible option. According to WHO every year as many as 745,000 people die too early as a result of work exhaustion. It does not mean that they work at their workplace – that can refer to any statistically work-connected medical conditions, including heart and coronary diseases, strokes, heart attacks and other problems that would never be experienced if the people did not have to work overtime, assuming the work is performed in the same conditions and environment.

Statistically it concerns primarily all men over 40.