Flexing a 4-day week to work the right way

IN THE 70s, it seems, there was a wrong time to buy a clock in the Soviet Union.

So says a delightful letter found in a recent copy of The Economist, written by a reader who had worked in the Soviet Union in 1976. He recalled the one time that his chess timing-clock, bought from a store in Moscow, had stopped. And when he told of this issue to his local colleagues, they responded by asking which day of the week it had been manufactured.

As it turns out, factory goods then were labelled with the date that they had been assembled. Discerning shoppers would look at the tickets attached to the products, and select only the goods made on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

The reason? Workers were more likely to be hungover on Mondays, and less likely to be motivated on Fridays, just a day before the weekend.

Decades on, a quick Google search suggests that some Mondays have redeemed themselves as the "catch up on work" day, or the day where strategising for the week ahead yields the most fruitful gains. This makes sense for knowledge work that requires brainstorming and ideation.

Friday, however, still hangs on to its reputation for the weak-willed day before the weekend.

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Just as well, then, that in all of June and July, I have set on a four-day work week, with every Friday off.

I had meant to make the best out of what is looking like another year without travel, as Covid-19 continues to barrel its way through the community here and around the world.

Relentless remote work has been punishing for the mind and spirit.

A closer look at headline productivity numbers also suggest the sobering reality of work-from-home (WFH) practices: we are less productive at home, on a per-hour basis.

Take a recent paper from Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, which looked at personnel and analytics data from more than 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian information technology services company. The unidentified firm moved all employees to WFH in March 2020, in response to the pandemic.

The researchers looked at data for the 17 months before and during WFH, and found that total hours worked rose by about 30 per cent. That included an 18 per cent increase in the hours after normal business hours that were worked.

Since average output did not significantly change, productivity in fact fell by about 20 per cent. A deeper dive found that during WFH, employees spent more time engaged in too many meetings, especially video conferences. More time was also spent on coordinating activities.

That meant employees kept getting interrupted from their work, and could not focus. That has also signalled some loss of control.

YMMV

Back to my four-day week experiment. Seven weeks in, does it, well, work?

Your mileage may vary, so for context, the job has a daily deadline, and the days can be unpredictable. Amid that is a daily thrum of tasks to be crossed off the to-do list: editing, brainstorming, assigning.

Communications from messaging platforms have also wildly increased; small but niggling tasks that have to be cleared roughly within the hour have also jumped.

The pressure is high - and it swings between chronic and acute - though I suspect this is not unique to newsrooms, especially today.

Gallup's latest State of the Global Workplace report showed that employees' daily stress hit a record high in 2020, with 43 per cent of staff experiencing "a lot" of stress in a day.

I've found that setting expectations is key to a proper four-day week. Having out-of-office alerts pop up on my chat function and emails creates boundaries. It allows me to reclaim my right to stop being contactable.

Taking time out from a communications overload is a clear benefit. Regularly taking the same day off also reinforces that message to colleagues and contacts.

To keep Fridays free from work, I've found that I usually end work later on a Thursday, and sometimes, on a Wednesday too. But I try to keep that to no longer than an hour past my time.

That also means if Mondays and Tuesdays are lighter days, I log off ahead of time. (Sadly, the latter doesn't happen often.)

Rest without guilt

Still, it's not unusual. Wired reported that at UK design agency BrightCarbon, the firm allows their staff to choose their weekly hours.

That means some may work longer hours to cut their week to four days. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are the most popular days to take off.

That flexibility makes sense. There have been times when I end up brainstorming with my colleagues on a Friday on unplanned news developments. In those instances, what would have worked better would be to return to work, and take another day off in return.

I resisted doing so to keep to an eight-week trial, but can now say flexibility trumps rigidity in those instances. I wasn't rested on those Fridays, so I ended up resenting the day instead. This can bleed into the weekend, which makes it even less worthwhile.

UK design consultancy Arup also allows staff to choose their weekly hours. There, 82 per cent of staff in Liverpool flexed their hours; a third chose to work on the weekend at least once in three months.

Most of the weekend work was limited to finishing projects that had a deadline, and allowing employees to take Mondays or Tuesday off made room for "rest without guilt".

Nine in ten staff found that they were more productive, and had better work-life balance.

Revenge bedtime procrastination

I've found too that discipline is important when it comes to sleep and plans for my Fridays off. I can't be lazy about resting.

For me, I am often tempted to stay up later as a bout of revenge bedtime procrastination. But that often disrupts what could have been more time for the long weekend.

A rough routine helps: sleeping and waking up at specific times, scheduling exercise, and a hobby. For example, my reading app is set to alert me to the latest available copy of The Economist, which I borrow to read over the weekend as a way to form a habit.

For all the pains of the new realities of work, it isn't to say that working in the office would have conversely sorted out the problems.

Organisations - even so-vaunted tech companies - are not structured to allocate problem-solving tasks without having more human bodies gather in a centralised location, snack bar notwithstanding.

And a global pandemic means that unless communities hit herd immunity, safe-distancing measures continue. Work huddles are on temporary pause.

So as organisations figure out hybrid models and flexi-work, staff working with clear deadlines may find more relief in choosing which day the work week starts for them.

Clockmakers from the Soviet Union may have had to run down the hours and minutes. Workers today now ask how they can wrest freedom to regain some control of their time.