Journal tags: weekends

Toward the end of 2021, I wrote about working a four-day week. It really suited me. So much so that I’ve gone one further. For the past year or so I’ve been working a three-day week.

I work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. From Friday to Monday, my days are my own.

This really changes the dynamic of the week. It no longer feels like an extended weekend. What I mean is that usually we think about the working week as the default and the weekend as the exception. That’s been flipped on its head for me. The three days I spend working feel like the exception.

Once again, this decision meant earning less money. But I’ve decided that I value time more than money. I know that’s a privileged position to be in. Many people have to expend all their time in order to make just enough money.

I’ve made some choices along the way that certainly help. I don’t have children. I don’t have a car. I live in a modest flat and I’ve paid off the mortgage. I live in a country where healthcare is free.

So I don’t have too many expenses. My biggest expenses are travel-related; getting to the States to see family, or travelling to Irish music festivals wherever they may be.

But still, working a three-day week means I can make enough to cover my expenses and still put some money aside for the future.

Now, this wouldn’t work for everyone. My work tends to be the kind that doesn’t require much direct collaboration (which is also why I mostly work from home). I imagine it could get frustrating being on a team of people working different numbers of days.

I’m also really lucky to have the choice to do this. I know that many workplaces wouldn’t allow this kind of lifestyle. Clearleft is different.

In my last conference talk, I touched on this:

I think you could you could divide management into two categories like you can do with programming languages. There is a very imperative school of management where it’s all about measurements, it’s all about those performance reports, it’s all about metrics, time tracking. Maybe they install software on your machine to track how long you’ve been working. It’s all about measuring those outputs.

That’s one approach to management. Then there’s a more declarative approach, where you just care about the work getting done and you don’t care how people do it. So if they want to work from home, let them work from home. If they want to work strange hours, let them work strange hours. What do you care as long as the work gets done? This is more about giving people autonomy and trust.

I’m very happy that Clearleft takes the declarative approach.

And I can reiterate what I said when I stopped working on Fridays:

I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollary to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.

Now that I don’t work on Mondays, bank holiday weekends don’t mean much to me anymore. Or to put it another way, every weekend is like a bank holiday weekend. If I want to travel somewhere on a Friday and come back on a Monday, I don’t need to book any time off. That’s really nice.

I’ve got four days in a row to do with as I wish. I had to fight the urge to immediately launch into some new project or side-hustle to fill the time. I’m savouring it instead.

I’ve got time to take care of The Session. I’ve got time to read. I’ve got time to cook. I’ve got time to spend learning Irish. Mostly I’ve got time to just be.

I work a four-day week now.

It started with the first lockdown. Actually, for a while there, I was working just two days a week while we took a “wait and see” attitude at Clearleft to see how The Situation was going to affect work. We weathered that storm, but rather than going back to a full five-day week I decided to try switching to four days instead.

This meant taking a pay cut. Time is literally money when it comes to work. But I decided it was worth it. That’s a privileged position to be in, I know. I managed to pay off the mortgage on our home last year so that reduced some financial pressure. But I also turned fifty, which made me think that I should really be padding some kind of theoretical nest egg. Still, the opportunity to reduce working hours looked good to me.

The ideal situation would be to have everyone switch to a four-day week without any reduction in pay. Some companies have done that but it wasn’t an option for Clearleft, alas.

I’m not the only one working a four-day week at Clearleft. A few people were doing it even before The Situation. We all take Friday as our non-work day, which makes for a nice long three-day weekend.

What’s really nice is that Friday has been declared a “no meeting” day for everyone at Clearleft. That means that those of us working a four-day week know we’re not missing out on anything and it’s pretty nice for people working a five-day week to have a day free of appointments. We have our end-of-week all-hands wind-down on Thursday afternoons.

I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollary to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.

At one time, a six-day work week was the norm. It may well be that a four-day work week becomes the default over time. That could dovetail nicely with increasing automation.

I’ve got to say, I’m really, really liking this. It’s quite nice that when Wednesday rolls around, I can say “it’s almost the weekend!”

A three-day weekend feels normal to me now. I could imagine tilting the balance even more over time. Maybe every few years I could reduce the working by a day or half a day. So instead of going from a full-on five-day working week straight into retirement, it would be more of a gentle ratcheting down over the years.