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It's time to implement a 4-day workweek
In May, Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate, floated the idea of implementing a four-day workweek to better accommodate working Americans in a time of uncertainty, saying a shorter workweek could have mental-health benefits for employees.
There's not one overarching definition of a four-day workweek. "There are different models for the shortened week, some of which envision the same output condensed into fewer hours while others simply imagine longer hours spread over fewer days," a Washington Post report said.
Some involve a three-day weekend, while others mean a day off midweek.
[...] "It would help get us off of this hamster wheel that we're on right now, where we're all sort of racing against the clock in service of this giant capital-efficiency machine," Yang said. "And the race is driving us all crazy."
In a Harris poll conducted in late May, 82% of employed US respondents said they would prefer to have a shorter workweek, even if it meant longer workdays.
The idea of a shorter workweek has become so popular in Finland that Prime Minister Sanna Marin has called for employers to allow employees to work only six hours a day, four days a week. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proposed the policy as part of a coronavirus economic recovery effort.
Andrew Barnes, the CEO of Perpetual Guardian, introduced a four-day workweek at his company in New Zealand in 2018.
Barnes, a cofounder of the nonprofit platform 4 Day Week Global and the author of "The 4 Day Week," said he found that "stress levels drop, creativity goes up, team cohesion goes up" under such a policy.[...] Microsoft experimented with a four-day workweek last year at a subsidiary in Japan as part of its "Work-Life Choice Challenge." The subsidiary closed every Friday in August and said it saw productivity jump by 40% compared with the previous year.
I'm somehow attracted to the idea, be it only for the reason the weekends are the most productive time for me, with no meeting interruptions (large grin)
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday August 12 2020, @10:07PM (1 child)
Because farmers still use wooden plows dragged by oxen, and millions of blacksmiths spend their days hand forging iron structural parts. Tractors and harvesters and pesticides and chemical fertilizers, blast furnaces and laser cutters are mere figments of the imagination.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:23PM
If a farmer drives their modern tractor for 20 hours, they get approximately half as much done as if they had driven that same tractor 40 hours (provided, of course, that there's enough land being cultivated to have 40 hours worth of tractor-driving to do). Ditto for modern industrial equipment: If you have a guy running the robots for 20 hours, he's getting approximately half as much done as a guy running the robots for 40 hours.
That formula stops being true when you're talking about things like marketing artwork, because your artists will get burnt out.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.