Why a Four Day Week is now possible

Systems organise the mind and activity. Ranging from mythology to mathematics, their importance adapts to the perpetual flux of circumstance and environment. Our modern ones in Britain, based on technical necessity and inhuman scale, are outdated. In no way do they provide us with the long-term perspective required to confidently engage with the future.

Unfortunately, furthermore, this is exacerbated by a distinct lack of leadership in the country. The current British system holds dear a 'growth' mindset and prioritises quantity over quality. Such thinking will only ever serve to limit ingenuity and contentment. A paralysis and indecisiveness haunts any proposal beyond what is perceived to be able to move the economy.

The 4 Day Week Foundation proposes a shift to rebalance our trajectory. Despite historically unprecedented changes to the system (even specifically in the last 15 years), nothing substantial has been formalised to update it. A four day or 32-hour week for British workers is both possible and necessary. Many will be suspicious or hostile to such talk, however, I’m yet to hear a convincing argument against this agenda.

The concept of leisure has developed alongside division of labour, specialisation, surplus production, law enforcement and border security. Before this, demands necessitated of people constant physical and mental impositions regarding safety, nourishment and shelter. In Britain, additionally, concepts like ‘work/life’, contracts of obligation and ‘worker’s rights’ have emerged as a result of many people (39%) now being employed by large companies (250+ staff).

In the present day, new technologies force us to update in real-time our understanding of labour and the conventions that surround it. The pace of life anywhere is set by the pace of technology that serves it. When this becomes unstable it has profound knock-on effects. For example, instantaneous communication tools like WhatsApp have become ubiquitous – clearly one cannot expect to be reached by an employer at any hour, yet, the fact it's possible means we’re forced to establish new etiquette.

If it’s human behaviour that must be modified to fit the needs of the system, we should not only expect collectively to be able to influence in a more considered manner which system is adopted, but also give ourselves time and space to adapt to such change organically. Things in reality no longer occur by gradual transitions - it causes friction and confusion.

Personally, I’d like to see working environments that facilitate an acceleration of British innovation and production. This will create value, purpose and real wealth. However, I’d also like to see simultaneously societal endeavour to melt our sense-awareness somewhat back to the passage of nature. To take practical hold of our interests but also learn to breathe again.

This article proposes six reasons why the four day working week is now possible. It’s followed by a second part that assesses ten reasons why it’s now necessary. It outlines the profound impact of technology on our lives and advocates a reprioritisation of quality over quantity. Hopefully this is done on behalf of British people not in a position to levy their interests and in aspiration towards a prosperous, future-oriented vision for the country.

1) Digitisation

One person with a computer has much power to do, coordinate or initiate. It’s in cyberspace that actors operate, value is created, information is consumed and business is streamlined. In communication, we talk or share with anyone in the world instantaneously. In money, foreign exchange moves trillions of units of value every day. The entire work week, in fact, is completed more or less in the time previously it took to contact someone or complete a financial transaction.

Despite Britain overseeing a deep shift in output from manufacturing, mining and agriculture towards service-based industries that now make up 84% of jobs, staff still have the same schedule as those enacted and formalised from the 1920s to 1940s. Information has become the transformative asset of our age alongside materials (e.g. steel, iron) and energy (e.g. steam, electricity) while data processing and storage, as well as algorithms, have made everything less labour intensive.

2) Environment

The past was dominated by overcoming or adapting to climatic impositions. These have largely been conquered. Even the most meteorologically extreme areas on earth are now hospitable owing to the localisation and control of the environment. Stabilising interior spaces has become elementary with the use of air conditioning and central heating.

Time spent hiding from the sun or collecting fire wood is, in 2024, spent focused on other things. Electronic activity is possible at any time of day and in places previously uninhabitable. This is perhaps part of a broader process of deterritorialisation that has derestricted how, what, when or why things are done and significantly reduces our constraints in production.

3) Travel

To sail a large ship in the 17th century from the Netherlands to the Spice Islands, one travelled from Texel along Europe, along Africa, around Africa until shortly before the coast of what is now Australia, then up between Sumatra and Java. 30,000km, almost literally the other side of the world. This represented eight months of sailing and many lost crew in what is now a routine fifteen hour flight to Jakarta.

This example is of course hyperbolic, however, it’d be inconceivable to these seafaring men that international trading arrangements are made presently with vast, rapid, backhauling tankers or planes with a few clicks of a button. All day every day, multiple trains from Bordeaux to Paris take little over two hours on machines with unprecedented power that carry hundreds of people able, moreover, to work on board. Industry, innovation and acceleration is only going to continue like this.

4) Automation

The development of robotics and machinery reaches an advanced stage. Meanwhile, the nature of business and efficiency predicates that eventually whatever can be automated, will be automated. Most tasks that are possible to be outsourced to machines have been or will be. We see this in supermarkets, airports, transportation, factories, macros, data processing, high-frequency trading, &c.

It’s not a dissimilar situation to how farm tools made more food for less work. If you’re wondering whether it’s possible to resist this or whether this is even desirable – that’s another question. There’s always somebody or some group somewhere who’ll use new technologies to their advantage until others are forced to follow suit and, subsequently, all have failed since the Luddites.

5) Life expectancy

Life has become a marathon and not a sprint - people’s behaviour reflects that. Sanitation and knowledge made us healthier, so we work longer. ‘Work/life’ in general can safely be considered to have transformed in the last thirty to fifty years. Even mortgage terms have crept up from twenty or twenty-five years to thirty or thirty-five years.

People used to finish school, enter work, get married, have children, leave work and die much younger than they do now. The value extracted from each person, if one can put it so crassly, is much higher and happens for much longer by virtue of the length of people’s lives. Re-skilling, sector switches and breaks are not unprecedented to sustain careers and one’s health.

6) Non-conformity

Previously tradition, alongside practical considerations like the environment and no internet, meant that people laboured only in their immediate surroundings. Not only were business owners constrained physically in their operations but there were more rigid socio-cultural conventions over how things were done that no longer exist.

The five day working week developed specifically for the purposes and capabilities of the 20th century. It’s no longer necessary. For better or worse, attitudes and the nature of work have ceased to conform to standardisation. Asynchronous practices and opportunities are already commonplace and acknowledge that optimal focus, productivity and the conditions catering for them are something very different now to what they used to be.

..so what?

As more and more companies adopt a four day week they prove again and again that it’s possible - when companies change, countries change and when countries change the world will change. Leading employees and job-seekers will facilitate this too as they seek four day week employers that prioritise a conducive environment for the best minds to flourish and that recognise these new realities, as opposed to those that don’t.

The point is this – the aforementioned changes have disrupted the social equilibrium. The nature of work has changed (digitisation & non-conformity), the ability to work has changed (environment & automation) and the time spent at work has changed (travel & life expectancy). Redressing this balance with a four day week will make people more productive, loyal and dedicated.

The advent of the computer and other catalytic tools mean coordinating the entire workings of a business online is possible with free capital movement, instantaneous communication, consistent and controllable physical conditions, rapid transit, longer lives and breakdowns of tradition. Given these things exist, people are more than capable of doing their work and improving output in adequate schedules of four days instead of five.

People actually do their jobs, whether in production or performing a service, at such a rapid rate compared to the past that now everything is expected of them all the time. Interconnected global systems allow no time for respite, reassessment or evaluation. It’s overwhelming, yet nothing reflects this and we base our lives on prior formalities that suggest these things haven’t happened.

The four day week will make modern life more liveable. If we’re going to take advantage of the opportunities that modernity brings, instead of feeling pressurised and subordinated by it, we need to be honest about what we want, what has happened and what is now possible. The beauty of the four day week is that it exists on both a philosophical as well as a practical level.

All it requires is a shift in mindset away from the status-quo. Many people are already beginning to appreciate these new ways of thinking. Once people exhaust their capacity to focus and be productive in a week doing modern labour, Friday becomes redundant or scaled back to such an extent as to be pointless. In the long-run, furthermore, this ‘lost’ day from an employer’s perspective will be earnt back many times over through reduced absenteeism, quality over quantity and general longevity.

Britain must provide a stable and considered platform for its people to look forwards and upwards. My position is one of accelerating innovation, production and technological activity to create value and new possibilities (e.g. space exploration & expansionism) while also spending significant amounts of time doing what we want to (including, for example, starting new businesses) in a slower, more natural and considered manner as humans.

Technology has become so pervasive in a way we’re not built to deal with biologically. While acknowledging fate in this regard, we shouldn’t retreat in horror at its inevitability but lurch forward in preparation. People need space to step away and reconnect with who they are. It’s our responsibility, subsequently, to ensure technology is a tool and not a master, to safeguard meaning and purpose and to educate ourselves and our offspring with values of harmony, rhythm and order whilst we coevolve with machines.

It’s perfectly reasonable to change something that’s outdated when it is. Living better is quite possible. The four day week represents a new national organising principle which manages, while output and standards remain the same, to renew focus, develop a new parallel three day weekend economy and put us in a position of preparedness, stability and control for the chaotic future that lies in wait.