We’ve been told many lies about work. The 5 day workweek is a big one

Let’s stop living life according to arbitrary rules that don’t serve us

Photo by Vladimir Kudinov on Unsplash

‘4-day week an ‘overwhelming success’ in Iceland’.

That was the title of the article that caught my eye the other day while browsing my newsfeed.

A study conducted on workers between 2015 and 2019 showed that productivity stayed the same or even improved with a 4 day workweek, with employees reporting feeling healthier, more balanced and more inclined to engage in hobbies.

What a shock.

You mean healthier and more balanced people are more productive ?!

For a man-made concept that was applied to factory workers way back in the early 1900s, the 5 day work-week has remained incredibly tenacious in a work landscape that has nothing to do with factory work anymore.

And true to Parkinson’s law (which states that the work will expand to fill the time alloted to it), the 5 days have been filled with useless and/or endless meetings, an unmanageable inbox filled with as much office politics as useful info, and a hundred tweaks to that presentation deck just so the boss can look good to his own boss. And there we have ourselves and the world convinced that our busyness…