The workload fairy tale
Most people are very surprised when I say that I work around 20-25 hours per week. I then clarify that this is paid work, so not things like blogging, doing lots of reading, looking for business development leads, giving free advice, etc.
Still, it means that I have a life where I can exercise every day, be around for my kids, and manage my stress/anxiety levels. While not everyone runs their own business, most knowledge workers do have a fair amount of freedom. As Cal Newport points out in this article, the 4-day workweek is a way of pushing back against the expectation that a company owns all of your time.
So, I’d say that the 4-day workweek is more of a mindset change, especially if you’re getting done the same amount as before. I’d definitely try it! When I worked at Moodle, I did a 4-day week, and being able to say “I won’t be able to as I don’t work Fridays” or similar is as much as a story you tell yourself as one you tell other people.
Another thing, which we try and do at WAO is to co-work on projects, and not to switch between multiple projects within one day. So, if we’ve got three projects on the go, we’ll try and dedicate either a whole day to one, or a morning to one, an afternoon to another, and leave the third until the next day. Of course, it doesn’t always work out like that, but collaborating with others (not just having meetings with them!) and allocating time to different projects makes them not only manageable, but… maybe even enjoyable?
Most knowledge workers are granted substantial autonomy to control their workload. It’s technically up to them when to say “yes” and when to say “no” to requests, and there’s no direct supervision of their current load of tasks and projects, nor is there any guidance about what this load should ideally be.
Many workers deal with the complexity of this reality by telling themselves what I sometimes call the workload fairy tale, which is the idea that their current commitments and obligations represent the exact amount of work they need to be doing to succeed in their position.
The results of the 4-day work week experiment, however, undermine this belief. The key work – the efforts that really matter – turned out to require less than forty hours a week of effort, so even with a reduced schedule, the participants could still fit it all in. Contrary to the workload fairytale, much of our weekly work might be, from a strict value production perspective, optional.
So why is everyone always so busy? Because in modern knowledge work we associate activity with usefulness (a concept I call “pseudo-productivity” in my book), so we keep saying “yes,” or inventing frenetic digital chores, until we’ve filled in every last minute of our workweek with action. We don’t realize we’re doing this, but instead grasp onto the workload fairy tale’s insistence that our full schedule represents exactly what we need to be doing, and any less would be an abdication of our professional duties.
The results from the 4-day work week not only push back against this fairy tale, but also provide us with a hint about how we could make work better. If we treated workload management seriously, and were transparent about how much each person is doing, and what load is optimal for their position; if we were willing to experiment with different possible configurations of these loads, and strategies for keeping them sustainable, we might move closer to a productive knowledge sector (in a traditional economic sense) free of the exhausting busy freneticism that describes our current moment. A world of work with breathing room and margin, where key stuff gets the attention it deserves, but not every day is reduced to a jittery jumble.
Source: Cal Newport
Image: Dorota Dylka