[Editors’ note: This is in response to an article published in The Punch on Monday about 10-hour, four-day working weeks. Michael Honey’s business does just that.]
The indignities of modern working life are many, and one of the most onerous is the grind of the five-day working week. Two days of play after five days’ work is inadequate to renew our enthusiasm for life: we barely recover from the quintuple routine of waking to the alarm, commuting to work and back (to say nothing of what transpires in between), dining with our weary family and crashing to uneasy sleep; than we have to confront the thought, on a Sunday afternoon, that it all will begin again. A five-day work week leaves insufficient room for us to develop our sensitive natures: it makes us dull and cranky.
We run a small design studio with four fulltime staff. When we started up the place, one of my aims, as a refugee from the advertising agencies where I built my career, was to build a kinder, gentler, more humane organisation.
So as soon as we could, when the cashflow fluctuations evened out and we knew the business was viable, we moved to a four-day week, ten-ish hours a day, 8am to 5.30pm or 6pm at night. Work hard Monday to Thursday: every Friday off.
Our clients and colleagues in other studios are uniformly positive about the idea, and wish they could implement it at their jobs. At the virtual certainty of coming across as a smug wanker, our clients are in par paying for the vicarious thrill of participating in our purportedly creative lives: and we all know that moments of inspiration are far more likely in the shower, while browsing in a bookshop, or best of all, travelling, than at your desk.
The maths is good too: the working week gets reduced by 20 per cent, but your weekend is 50 per cent longer. The inevitable morning half-hour of making coffee, checking emails and general stuffing around only happens four times a week. Same for the commute at each end of the day - we get the same hours of work in with eighty percent of the commuting time. Getting to and from work is never fun: it can only be made more bearable. And the best way of all is to do it less often.
Changing our habits has also made us realise that the other givens of working are mutable: we’ve moved to an apartment instead of an office, so we have shower and kitchen facilities; we’ve tried working a week in Byron Bay. Coming together in a shared work environment is good for communication and team cohesion: but that doesn’t mean it has to boring.
The good: obviously, a long weekend every time. Waking up on a Friday morning and listening to the other poor bastards driving to work. Attracting and retaining good staff who appreciate being treated like adults and who repay you in kind. Time for other interests, new ventures, side projects, fitness, community.
The bad: waking up early in winter and getting home late, darkness bookending your days. Long afternoons, when the gap between lunch and hometime seems uncrossable. Inflexible client schedules, with immovable Friday meetings. To some extent the benefits of the four-day week are dependent on it being a rare thing: if everyone did it, then the quiet daytime cinemas, the short lines at the market, the unhurried cafés will start to fill up. Paying seven days’ rent and only using the premises for four doesn’t make a lot of sense, so we’re looking at other ways to monetize the space. I’m sure we’d make a bit more money if we worked every Friday - but money’s not everything.
Should you do it? Yes. Is a four-day week perfect? No. But I have 52 long weekends every year to think about it. And whatever the problems, the payback is in the most valuable currency of all, the one you can never make more of: your time.
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