I Tried The Four-Day Workweek For Three Years. Does It Work?

You can try it too, and find out for yourself…

If there is one thing I can be truly grateful for, it’s being in an industry where the concept of clocking in and out does not exist. It’s an absolute game-changer, but also an undeniable privilege. The tech industry is also one where success cannot really be measured in time. I could write absolutely nonsensical code for 8 hours a day and achieve nothing, and I could also spend two hours thinking about the problem, another hour to code the solution, and another to test it, and that still leaves me with four hours to spare. In tech, more often than not, success is measured in what has been delivered, and that’s a key point to remember throughout this article.

A bit of context

About seven years ago, I joined the centuries old Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as a software engineer. As part of the benefits, every employee had the right to what they call “Summer Hours”. This means that by just spending 40 minutes extra at work during the week, you can take half a day off every week, or an entire day off every two weeks. You were allowed up to 5 full days. I always opted to use that time on Fridays, and so did many of my colleagues, though I know a few who preferred Mondays or Wednesdays.

2020 however changed things, and I don’t think I have to explain how. With travel being essentially dead, I found myself with not just the Summer Hours, but also vacation days I didn’t know when to take or what to use for. But then I had a lightbulb moment! 💡What if I combined my Summer Hours with vacation days? Employing this strategy allowed me to have every single Friday off for three months in the summer with plenty days to spare. I did a verbatim repeat of it in 2021 as well.

In 2022 things changed again, but this time, it was a change induced by yours truly. I left Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and joined the famous Prezi. While Prezi does not have Summer Hours, it has something miles better — unlimited personal time off. OK, I know what you’re thinking, it’s not really unlimited, and I’ll actually end up working more than before. Erm, wrong!

To all the unlimited PTO skeptics — if you don’t feel the benefits of it, you’re doing it wrong!

Knowing how well it worked for me during 2020 and 2021, I went ahead and booked well in advance all the Fridays off, from June to August. My manager’s only remark was, “You really don’t like Fridays, huh?” 😆 It was certainly a novel idea even in Prezi, to spread part of one’s time off across the summer weeks, and plenty of my colleagues, even from other teams, were intrigued by it and looked at it as a personal trial of the four-day workweek, which I guess, it was.

What have I learnt in three years (summers)?

I wanted to share my findings for a long time, but it didn’t feel like just looking at 2020 or even 2021 was enough to have solid learnings from this. Then there was also the fact that in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Summer Hours time claim-back arrangement would have not accurately represented a four-day workweek. However, moving the strategy into 2022 at Prezi, now, at the other end of it, I feel like I know and understand plenty about the four-day workweek proposal many companies are trying across the world, to share some valid insight.

• Your colleagues don’t mind. It’s a common enough fear. Wondering what your team-mates will think of you taking a day off every week. Firstly, it’s none of their feckin’ beeswax when and why you take time off. Secondly, if it’s well-communicated and people expect you to be off those days, it quickly becomes part of their norm as well. It may even help with the team’s schedule. Knowing that one or two colleagues are always off that day will help them organise meetings around the other days, which inevitably leaves them with a lot more focus time on the day you’re off. It’s a win-win situation.
• You learn the value of time off. But you really learn it when you’re back on five days and realise just how much of your life is spent working and not living. During these Fridays off, I did sunrise hikes, I spent time writing countless articles, wrote the draft of a 400-page novel, spent time with myself, with friends, picked up projects and skills I never could before. It’s when you go back to five days of work, you realise how valuable that extra day off can be to your mental health.
• You start strategising your time. Efficient use of time is no bullshit. Heck, I wrote about it too. But it goes beyond that. Procrastination is a problem for most humans. Even those who claim they never do it, they still do to some extent and if you’d check every hour spent, you’d find “activities” that are time-wasters. I started putting my lunches and everything else I wanted to do during the workday into my calendar. That helped me cut down on staring at the walls, scratching my butt, getting lost in browser tabs or going to meetings that had nothing to do with me. If you can’t remember what you did that day at work, it’s highly likely you wasted most of the day.

• You finally learn to say no. You know how people like to ask for help? Yeah, nothing wrong with that, but people are also assholes, and they offload work onto you because they’re lazy and want to save some of their own time, or because they prefer spoon-fed solutions rather than figuring it out and learning from it. I used to help literally anyone who knocked on my door. Well, no more. I stopped saying yes to everything and everyone because I am not paid to do three people’s jobs, just one. Learning to say no builds character and can lead to a positive side effect of others finally learning how to do things on their own. And that “no” doesn’t always have to sound like a no, either. You can always tell them that you’ll book a slot later in the week for it, or send some documentation to get them going. Declining meetings is not an offence, inviting people for little or no reason is. Remember that.
• You work to live, not live to work. We say this a lot, but how many of us truly live it? Disturbingly few. The moment I had my extra day off every week, I realised how much more potential my life had. I feel like I am 20 again, like somehow I got back 16 years of my life. And while I know I didn’t, the almost absurd feeling that I did, gives me three times the energy I had before.
• Nothing falls apart just because you’re not there. I will admit in public, I can be a bit of a control-freak. I am working on it. Genuinely. I used to have mild panic-attacks when I started out taking the Fridays off, worried what’s going to happen with my open PR, will the team run into a situation where they really needed me, and I wasn’t there, or even something as basic as some members of the team feeling abandoned by my lack of presence. All sorts of crazy thoughts. In reality, though, nothing bad happened. My PRs were fine, the team kept delivering great work on parallel stories and projects, and nothing fell apart. Not once. No more panic attacks. ❤️
• Those against it just haven’t tried it. You read that right. I know there are plenty of skeptics out there, and some will claim that their work simply cannot be done in four days. I would argue for trying it anyway. As with everything, don’t knock it till you tried it.

Nothing is universally true, though…

My experiment worked out really well for me, but as with anything else in life, you have to account for diversity. We are not all the same. I am the type who simplifies and reduces anything and everything to spend the least amount of time on it while keeping quality at acceptable levels. Yes, acceptable, because I don’t believe in perfection. Perfection is the biggest time-waster. I guarantee half the things you’ve done in your life, you could have spent just half the time on, and it would have been perfectly fine. But this is me…

You, however, are a different person. I consider myself very good — and I have gotten genuine professional feedback on this — at organising my time, making more of four days than many of five. You, however, may not be very good at it. Maybe you need to learn, and perhaps you’re incapable of doing things in any other way than you already do, and that’s fine too.

The biggest learning from trialling a four day work-week is that making it mandatory, won’t work. It has to be left up to the individual.

I could see plenty of folks getting overly stressed by having only four days to complete their tasks. Some would misunderstand it and work twice as hard, burning themselves out in no-time. That helps no-one. If a five day work-week keeps you less stressed than a four day work-week, certainly go for the less stressful arrangement. I used to have a friend who was excellent at his job, but he was slow. There was nothing you could do. He was born a sloth, he’ll die a sloth. That was his pace.

My dad, on the other hand, he’d run laps around Speedy Gonzales. His boss had to tell him many times to slow the feck down, but he never had a slow dial. He was either on at full-speed or off. But he worked five days a week because he had no choice to work just four.

I see the next organic step in work-life balance as the dynamic workweek, where the employee decides what works best for them.

Note: obviously, this article only covers office-based jobs. I cannot have an informed enough opinion on anything else, but love to see a world where dynamic work-weeks are implemented across the board. Somehow…

Hi there! 👋

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Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility!