The 40 Hour Workweek Meets the 40 Day Year

I think it’s time to abolish the 40-hour workweek, or at least make it less predominant in our lives. But if we did, what would happen? Many countries are seriously considering getting rid of the whole clock change thing – you know where every year we move the clocks forward and backward for reasons that people do not fully understand or agree with. So why not redefine the work week too?

The past few years have shown us that people are able to work in more fluid and flexible ways, thanks mostly to technology that allows us to meet from anywhere, and do some, if not all of our work from anywhere and any-when. So let’s look at where the 40-hour workweek came from in the first place, and why now it truly is an anachronism.

It started out as an actual improvement. In the mid-1800s, efforts were being made to reduce the workweek from 100 hours in some cases, down to 40 hours, something that employers refused to listen to, and which resulted in massive strikes. One of the largest demonstrations, called the Haymarket Affair, happened in Chicago in 1867. ?Actions such as these eventually led to a legal definition of a work week as being 40 hours as of May 1, 1886, which is why that date is still celebrated as a workers’ day. Other companies eventually came on board with this, including many in the rail industry, and significantly, Ford Motor Company in 1926. In fact, Henry Ford was one of the first business tycoons to recognize that quality improved and the number of injuries decreased when working hours were confined to a more practical number, which turned out to be 40.

The 40-hour workweek and the nuclear family

One of the concepts that often goes overlooked when contemplating the 40-hour workweek in the context of the 21st century, is that in addition to defining it as an ideal for productivity and safety, it was designed with the so-called nuclear family in mind – that early 20th century notion of a married couple with two kids, pursuing the American dream of a house, a car, a good education for the children and a pension. It relied on the fact that one half of this parental arrangement would stay home to care for the kids, cook the meals, and do all of that domestic stuff. That’s a really important point to remember. The 40 hour workweek was essentially based on a division of labor between two people – one at the workplace and the other at home.

Think about how this applies today. For couples who enter into a marriage or any form of life commitment today, the likelihood is that both partners want to continue with their careers, and rightfully so. But in so doing, assuming they both take “full time” 40-hour workweek jobs, the costs involved in making that money easily creep up to match or even exceed what is being brought home after taxes: the cost of the commute, for example – the cost of owning a car, the cost of caring for the kids at daycare, the cost of owning a home close enough to be commutable – these are the costs of the money being made, and it is no wonder that couples still feel it to be an enormous struggle, even when things work as they should.

These types of situations become even more dangerous for single parents, and overall, full time work becomes less of a ladder toward success as it does a temporary day-by-day Aspirin to keep despair at bay.?But that’s the foundation upon which the 40-hour workweek was built. In some countries, the concept of a multi-generational mortgage is now a thing, where banks, realizing that many of their customers cannot hope of getting a mortgage and paying it off in 40 years, must now subject their offspring to its obligation.

The 40-hour workweek was a stable model built for a relatively stable and slowly changing society. The "one-at-work and one-at-home" nuclear family arrangement was idealized, but not available for all families back in the 1950s and is ridiculously anachronistic and inappropriate today.

Everything changed once internet-connected computers became home appliances, although the idea of working from home made only a small dent on the overall working culture, and the definition of working hours still remained a 40-hour workweek concept. That is until the Covid outbreak showed just how many people could get their work done from somewhere other than a central office.?

Managerial pushback

Of course, the ideas of working from home and working according to something other than a 40-hour workweek model does not sit well with many organizations that count on such stability as a foundational element of their existence. And if I – or anyone – were able to show that the 40-hour workweek was in fact a solid and productive way to generate revenue in a knowledge worker-based organization, then such pushback would have merit. But I have been working with organizations, onsite, for more than 20 years, and frankly a 40-hour workweek, five days of 9-to-5, is not a great way to get anything done. To me it’s like having a wheelbarrow with no wheel. You load it up and push it back and forth for 40 hours, and you think you got a lot done. There is no thought given to improving the process by adding a wheel – companies just slog on forward.

What happens during a typical 40-hour workweek? Well, far less than 40 hours of work. For a start, there is interruption, from email and other messages, as well as from the scheduling and conduct of meetings – whether in person or online. There are also interruptions from other people, often from managers, that not only take time, but also derail a person’s train of thought.

Let’s look at this last one for a moment. A great misconception in the minds of managers and those who work for them is that when a person is interrupted by a conversation or a message, they can simply get back to what they were doing without missing a beat. But it doesn’t happen that way. It takes a few minutes for someone to get back to the level of concentration they were at prior to the interruption, and the more interruptions that occur, the more delay that occurs overall. The human brain cannot simply snap back into full concentration mode like the way you would flip channels on a TV. It must instead gather that concentration back piece by piece.

For more background on why and how this happens, you can check out my podcast episode entitled Are You Conscious, but the essence of it is that an interruption triggers a miniature version of the fight-or-flight response, which shifts vital resources away from the brain and other places, in preparation for an emergency. Yes, that sounds awfully dramatic, but that’s central to the problem. We, as a species, have conveniently forgotten that we still run on an architecture in which large predators were the primary concern. The fact that we still react the same way to smaller threats like interruptions is an inconvenient truth, but it’s a truth all the same.

The 40-hour workweek is based largely on the value of face-time – employees being visible in front of their managers and managers being visible in front of their employees. This does not define productivity; it replaces it as the standard of an idealized workplace.

Cool-Time Day

It is this type of dysfunction that I observed over and over again as I worked with people in offices who were struggling to balance their time and tasks. They thought it was the work they were having problems with, when in most cases, it was other humans who were the cause of all of their time management problems.

So I wrote my book, Cool-Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time (which is now in its third edition for the 2020s) and I half jokingly proposed that February 9 be declared Cool Time Day. It was designed in just the same way that Black Friday was originally intended to delineate the moment on the calendar in which retail stores were no longer working at a financial loss (in the red) but were finally turning a profit, an accounting term called in the black. The colors being used to reflect the two different inks that accountants used – and some bookkeeping apps still use to highlights and losses.

A similar calendar event happens with Tax Freedom Day, which sadly gets later every year, which is supposed to represent the time that you have made enough money to pay your taxes and are now working for yourself. There is an interesting subtext here, almost a sly nod to the entire futility of the 40-hour workweek built right in to that celebration.

Anyway, that’s what Cool-Time Day is supposed to be: it is intended to symbolize the true number of hours of productive work available to us within the course of a year, and that number is 40. Forty days of true productivity a year. That’s it. And since February 9th is the 40th day of every year it makes sense to assign it right there.

How do I get to this surprising and seemingly unrealistic number? By taking all the elements that go into a typical 40-hour workweek that 20th century work was defined by, most often at an onsite, multi-person office. Of course these numbers don’t apply so much to people who are now blending work and life more flexibly, but that’s the point. It doesn’t make sense to define work around a fixed number of hours unless you work shift work. Here’s why:

• Start with 365-days in a year.
• Subtract 104 days for weekends. You’re left with 261.
• Subtract 9 days for the average number of personal holidays and sick days, that gives you 252.
• Then subtract 10 public holidays, almost one per month, now you have 242.

That still seems like a good number of days per year to get things done. But remember, work at work isn’t just work. There’s a lot of human physiology involved. Consider the “weekend effect,” the 42 Mondays and 42 Fridays per year in which 20 percent of productivity is lost through anticipating the weekend – Friday afternoons is a terrible time to have a focused meeting, am I right? Similarly getting back up to speed on a Monday morning. Just because an ambitious boss calls a meeting for 9:00 a.m. on a Monday doesn’t mean people will be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for it.

• So 20 percent of these 42 Fridays and 42 Mondays is equivalent to 17 more days lost. Now we’re down to 225.

Remember those 10 public holidays? Well, they tend to carry the Friday effect across the entire week. “Long weekend coming up!” It impacts travel plans, meeting plans and overall focus.

• That’s 10 afternoons before each long weekend and 10 mornings after the long weekend in which people are working to 50 percent capacity.
• Add another 5 days lost to the list. That’s 220. Add to this the Christmas/Holiday Season effect, which does this whole thing over at least four days, if not the entire month of December.

The rest of my calculation comes from the fact that only 25 percent of any day is given over to “real work,” with the rest being set aside for meetings, Zoom calls, and so on, so 25 percent of 216 equals 54, and then finally, factor in sleep deprivation, a very real issue that grows over the course of the workweek. This decline in performance means people are lucky if they work to 75 percent of their true capacity. So 54 days times 75 percent equals 40 due to sleep-debt, headaches, and overall brain fog.

So that’s how I come down to the conclusion that in a 40-hour workweek-based year, we only get 40 days’ worth of work done. per year.

OK, you say, that’s like the expression, "lies, damned lies and statistics." Anything can be construed through subjectively chosen numbers. But you should ask yourself, how many of these things happen even though we don’t think they do? How many meetings start late? How many times do you have to say, “lets see, where was I?” after an interruption? How often do we do runs to the coffee shop, or end up chatting in the kitchenette? I’m not saying these things are bad; I’m simply saying they happen, and that’s what’s so wrong about expecting a 40-hour workweek, especially in the "before times" – before Covid.

More importantly it serves to underline just how precious true productivity is, and how hard it is to see this when we’re in the thick of it.

My point here is that the 40-hour workweek never worked for anyone whose work involved production of what I will call materials of the mind, sometimes called knowledge work. People who work in factories in shifts on assembly lines have work that is better suited to a 40-hour workweek construct, but as I mentioned at the start of this episode, they also fought for unionization to protect workers from, among other things the unreasonable and unsafe practices of being “on” for all of the hours of a shift. After much struggle , they got their downtime recognized and mandated.

Now, as we enter a world in which working from home and flexible hours are really becoming part of the fabric of the economy, it’s time to say goodbye to a system of work based on a number of hours and focus more on output. That’s not to say it will be easy, but, hey, freelancers, including myself, have been doing this for years.

This will require some substantial retooling of corporate HR and payroll procedures, but I think it is the future. Bright and motivated people have already started looking around and many have already left their frustrating payrolled jobs for the freedom of freelancing. This includes people who have either retired from or got rightsized out of a job, only to be hired back as a consultant.

Hopefully as the 21st century shakes off the long shadow of the industrial revolution and its 40-hour workweek mantle, a new model for working will re-emerge in which working conditions and even the prices of houses and groceries are driven not by an arbitrary and clearly inefficient model of the 40-hour workweek but of something more direct, tangible and realistic. Every century and every decade eventually uncovers its own identity that differentiates it from the ones previous. I think the death of the 40-hour workweek will belong to the 21st century and its more versatile replacement will find its footing in the 2020s.

This article is based on the transcript of my CoolTimeLife podcast episode entitled The 40 Hour Workweek meets the 40 Day Year. You can listen to it here or on your podcast platform of choice.

If you have a comment about this podcast you can drop me a line through the contact form at steveprentice.com, where you can also find my social media links. A full listing of past episodes is available at steveprentice.com/podcast. I update the episodes regularly so that the concepts do not get dated. So check them out and download whatever feels good.