Research shows that working fewer hours can be far more productive. Richard Godwin clocks on to find out if it’s true
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.
