CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Places That Figured Out How to Reverse the Surge in Speed and Exhaustion
Andrew Barnes never stopped. He was working in the City of London—Britain’s Wall Street—in the aftermath of the financial sector being deregulated in 1987. So companies could really let rip, and there was an explosion of financial swagger, with men in suits yelling at each other across the floor of the stock exchange as they traded billions. In this world, you were a wimp if you arrived later than 7:30 a.m., and you were a fool if you left before 7:30 p.m. So for half of the year, Andrew woke up in the dark and arrived home in the dark. He missed feeling the sun on his face.
In the City, everyone believed working better meant working more, until work consumed your whole life. He moved between various ball-breaking corporations. At one of them, all the new employees were called in on their first day to find that on the table in front of them there was a pre-typed resignation letter. They were ordered to sign it, and they were told: If you ever displease the boss, we’ll pull out this letter, and you will be out. Andrew slowly realized that he hated this exhausting existence. “If I look back, I sacrificed my twenties on the altar of ambition, and later in life, I probably sacrificed my family,” he told me. His wild overwork “cost me some relationships along the way,” and it was only many years later that “I’m now having to build relationships with my kids.”
Andrew left England for Australia and New Zealand, where over time he became really successful, rising to own a series of large businesses. When I went to see him, we met in his penthouse apartment looking out over the city of Auckland—but the memory of those sunless years in the City of London never left him.
One day, in 2018, he was on a plane when he happened to see a report in a business magazine about research into productivity at work. It contained some figures that intrigued him. The average British worker, the research had found, was only actually engaged with their job for less than three hours a day. This meant that most of the time people were at work, they were mentally checked out. They were in the office for a lot of hours, with their lives passing them by, but they weren’t getting much done.
Andrew kept thinking about this. The company he ran in New Zealand, named Perpetual Guardian, had over a dozen offices employing over 240 people, in a business that drew up wills and ran and managed trusts. He wondered if these poor productivity figures applied to his own staff. In this situation, everyone is losing out. The workers are bored and distracted and worried about other things, particularly the families they don’t get to see as much as they should. At the same time, the employer isn’t getting a workforce that’s focused on the task at hand. At the back of Andrew’s mind, there was a memory of the years he himself had worked in a dysfunctional way, and he felt his own focus and judgment had been thrown off.
So one day he asked himself: What if I changed my entire company so that from now on, every employee worked only four days a week, for the same wages? It would free up time for them to rest, have a proper social life, and be with their families—the things they are often trying to squeeze into the cracks of their work time. What if giving them all this meant that, in return, the workers were able to focus on their tasks for just forty-five minutes more a day? His back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested to him that, in this scenario, the company’s productivity would actually go up. Giving people more time to rest and enjoy life might mean they worked more productively when they were in the office.
To see if this could be right, he started to look back over the history of experiments in changing people’s work hours. For example, in Britain during the First World War, there had been a munitions factory that made people work seven days a week. When they cut back to six days, they found, the factory produced more overall. How far, Andrew wondered, could that principle be extended?
So he decided to try something bold. He arranged a conference call and told all his employees that starting soon, they were going to be paid the same wage they currently got for a five-day week, but they would only be asked to work four days. However, he told them, in return, you have to find ways to genuinely get the job done. My hunch is you’ll be more productive—but you have to show me I’m right. We’ll try this change for two months. If, in that period, we don’t see a fall in productivity, I will make the four-day week permanent.
“I was like—what? Am I hearing this right?” I was told by Amber Taare when I went to interview everyone at the offices Perpetual has in a town named Rotorua, which is well away from the corporate headquarters. The workers were excited but wary. How could a plan like this really succeed? Was there some catch they couldn’t see? Gemma Mills, who also works in the Rotorua offices, told me: “I didn’t have a lot of faith that it was going to work.” Andrew’s management team was also highly skeptical. “My head of HR literally fell over,” Andrew said. The managers felt sure that productivity would be dented, and the blame would come back to them.
He gave the company a month to prepare, in which everyone had to think about how they could work better, and he called in a team of academic researchers to measure the real outcomes. Niggling drains on productivity that had been dragging on for years were identified and finally dealt with. One person, for example, had a job where she had to enter data, and it was wasting an hour of her day to have to enter it twice because two different systems weren’t talking to each other. Now she went to IT and insisted they sort it out. There were hundreds of changes like this happening across the company. In another office, the staff bought a little pot of flags, and everyone agreed that if you didn’t want to be interrupted, you would put a flag on your desk, to show you were focusing.
“It took a while to get your head around the concept, because it’s so challenging,” I was told by Russell Bridge, another Perpetual Guardian employee. “If you’ve worked on an eight-to-five model for so long, it’s so ingrained and entrenched.” But the change happened. With a whole extra day to themselves, people spent this time in different ways. Amber took her three-year-old daughter out of daycare for one day a week, and played with her more. Gemma said, “It just gives you that extra day to recuperate,” and as a result, “I just felt genuinely better overall.” Russell started to do DIY repairs around his home, and spent “quality time with the family.” He told me it helped him to realize that “the way humans are designed is to have downtime and [then] you will be more productive.” He found that when he came back to work, he was “fresher.”
Almost everyone I spoke to who went through this experiment stressed that they noticed one change above all the others. As Gemma put it to me: “I was less likely to be distracted.” Why? She said that, for her, it was about decompression. “I think your brain doesn’t necessarily switch off as easily if you’re going, going, going. You don’t take that time to switch off and relax…. Your brain becomes accustomed to thinking constantly.” But she found that with “that extra day to relax,” she could start to wind down—and so when she came back to work, her mind was clearer.
Of course, the workers had a vested reason to believe this—they wanted to keep the extra time off. What mattered more was more objective measurements. What did the academics who studied the changes find? All signs of distraction, they found, were radically down. For example, the time people spent on social media at work—which was measured by monitoring their computers—fell by 35 percent. At the same time, levels of engagement, teamwork, and stimulation at work—some of which were measured by observing the workers, and some by how the workers described themselves—went up by between 30 and 40 percent. Stress levels were down by 15 percent. People told me they slept more, rested more, read more, relaxed more. Andrew’s management team—who had initially been highly skeptical—reached a surprising conclusion: they conceded that the company was achieving as much in four days as they had before in five. The changes have now been made permanent.
Dr. Helen Delaney, who studied these changes as part of her work in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Auckland, told me with a laugh: “It wasn’t a monstrous failure—I think we can say that. The work got done, clients were happy, staff were happy.” When she interviewed them in depth, she found that “overwhelmingly, employees really liked their four-day workweek…. They loved it. Who wouldn’t?” Helen found this extra time gave them two things. Firstly, it “allowed them to nurture relationships with other people that are lost in the frenzy of modern living.” One senior manager told her he had struggled to connect with his son, but now that he had started spending a lot of his freed-up time with him, he “realized actually I like being with my son, and he quite likes me, and this is a nice time to be together.” Secondly, “they also talked a lot about having what they called ‘me time.’ ” They told her, “With no one around me, no kids, no partner, no one—I got to be myself.”
Something similar has been tried in many other places, and even though the experiments are quite different, they keep finding similar outcomes. In 1920s Britain, W. G. Kellogg—the manufacturer of cereals—cut his staff from an eight-hour day to a six-hour day, and workplace accidents (a good measure of attention) fell by 41 percent. In 2019 in Japan, Microsoft moved to a four-day week, and they reported a 40 percent improvement in productivity. In Gothenberg in Sweden around the same time, a care home for elderly people went from an eight-hour day to a six-hour day with no loss of pay, and as a result, their workers slept more, experienced less stress, and took less time off sick. In the same city, Toyota cut two hours per day off the workweek, and it turned out their mechanics produced 114 percent of what they had before, and profits went up by 25 percent.
All this suggests that when people work less, their focus significantly improves. Andrew told me we have to take on the logic that more work is always better work. “There’s a time for work, and there’s a time for not having work,” he said, but today, for most people, “the problem is that we don’t have time. Time, and reflection, and a bit of rest to help us make better decisions. So, just by creating that opportunity, the quality of what I do, of what the staff does, improves.” Andrew followed his own advice. Now he takes every weekend off—something he had never done before in his life—and goes away to his home on a nearby island without any devices connected to the internet. Gemma, one of the workers who told me that she had been wary at the start, said to me gently: “You know, there’s so much more than working until twelve o’clock at night…. You’ve got to have a life outside of it.”
Later, at Stanford University, I discussed these questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer, who is a professor of organizational behavior there. He said the reason it works is blindingly obvious. Ask any sports fan, he said. “If I want to win a football game, [or] if I want to win a baseball game, do I really want my team to be exhausted?” He let this question hang in the air. Why, he asked, would the rest of us be any different?
One day I went for a walk along the shore in Auckland, thinking about what I had seen—and it struck me that this was the first place I had been to that had directly challenged the logic of our ever-accelerating society. We live in a culture that gets us to walk faster, talk faster, work longer, and we are taught to think that is where productivity and success come from. But here was a group of people saying: No. We are going to slow down and create more space for rest and attention.
At the moment, this sane decision looks like an impossible luxury to the majority of us. Most people can’t slow down, because they fear that if they do, they’ll lose their jobs or their status. Today, only 56 percent of Americans take even one week of vacation a year. This is why telling people what they need to do to improve their attention—do one thing at a time, sleep more, read more books, let your mind wander—can so easily curdle into cruel optimism. The way our society works at the moment means they can’t do those things. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Our society can change. As I reflected on this, I felt a little uneasy, because there are a few reasons why telling you the story of what happened in New Zealand in this way could leave you with a misleading impression. I like Andrew Barnes a lot—he’s an unusually enlightened and decent employer—but I don’t want you to imagine you too can wait for your boss to have an epiphany and hand you a four-day week. If we want this change to happen, you will very likely have to take a different route.
Think about the weekend, which for more than a hundred years gave most workers a guaranteed slice of rest and reflection. How did that come to pass? In the eighteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution surged, many workers found themselves forced by their employers to work for ten hours a day, six days a week. It was breaking them, physically and mentally. So they began to band together and demanded time to live. The first strike demanding shorter working hours took place in Philadelphia in 1791. The police beat the workers to a pulp, and afterward, many of them were fired. But the workers didn’t give up. They fought harder. By 1835 they were organizing a general strike for an eight-hour day. Only decades of campaigns like this finally yielded an eight-hour day and a weekend for almost everyone.
With a few honorable exceptions like Andrew, the owners of corporations will not voluntarily take less of your time, any more than Facebook will. They have to be compelled to do it. The introduction of the weekend was the biggest challenge to the speeding-up of society that has ever happened. Only a comparable fight will deliver a four-day week.
This insight is connected to another big obstacle to achieving this goal. A four-day week can be applied to salaried workers—but increasingly, many people are being forced into the “gig economy,” where they scramble to do several jobs without any contracts or fixed work hours at all. This is happening as a result of a very specific change: in countries like the U.S. and Britain, governments broke up and largely destroyed labor unions. They made it harder and harder for workers to band together and demand things like contracts and fixed work hours. The only long-term solution to this is to steadily rebuild unions—so people have the power to demand these basic rights. This has already begun. For example, all over the U.S., workers in fast-food restaurants are unionizing and demanding a $15 minimum wage per hour, with incredible success. They have secured wage raises for over 22 million workers and have pulled off the difficult job of winning majority support both in states that voted for Donald Trump and in states that voted for Joe Biden.
But I think we won’t only have to take on employers—we’ll also have to fight something inside ourselves. When I spent time with the workers at Perpetual Guardian, I found what they said persuasive—but in my gut, I kept pushing back, looking for flaws in what they were telling me. At first I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized that I often only feel I have worked enough if, at the end of the day, I am bone-tired and wrung out. The team who designed the original Macintosh computer wore T-shirts boasting WORKING 90 HOURS A WEEK AND LOVING IT! This could be the insane slogan for our professional class. Many of us have built our identities around working to the point of exhaustion. We call this success. In a culture built on ever-increasing speed, slowing down is hard, and most of us will feel guilty about doing it. That’s one reason why it’s important we all do it together—as a societal, structural change.
When Covid-19 spread across the world, lots of people thought—amid all the tragedy and horror—that there might at least be one good outcome. Many people (not all) were freed from the daily commute and from the pressure to be seen at their desks all the time. So it was assumed that there might be a little space created for more rest. But work hours actually went up during Covid—in the first month and a half of lockdown alone, the average U.S. worker clocked in three extra hours a day. In France, Spain, and Britain, people worked two hours more a day on average. It’s not totally clear why. Some people think it’s because Zoom meetings take so damn long; others reckon it’s because, given all the economic insecurity, people were even more keen to show they were working so they didn’t get laid off.
What this shows is that no big outside force is going to come along and free us from the ratchet to work more and more hours—not even a global pandemic. We will only get it through a collective struggle to change the rules.
But Covid also showed us something else that is relevant to a four-day week. It demonstrated that businesses can change their working practices radically, in a very short period of time, and continue to function well. When I caught up with him on Zoom in early 2021, Andrew Barnes said to me: “If a chief executive of a British bank had said, ‘We could run a 60,000-person bank from home’ a year and a half ago, you’d have said: ‘No chance.’ Right?” And yet it happened, pretty seamlessly. “So…surely you can run a business in four days, not five?” Andrew told me other managers used to say to him that a four-day week couldn’t possibly work because they wouldn’t be able to trust their staff if they couldn’t see them. Andrew called them back and said they should think again now: “They all work from home. Amazingly, the work got done.”
The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable—until it changes, and then we realize it didn’t have to be like that in the first place.
Ten thousand miles away, in Paris, workers had come up with a parallel proposal to help slow their lives down. Before the rise of smartphones, it was unusual for a boss to contact her worker once she had left the office and gone home. As a kid, plenty of my friends had parents with demanding jobs—but I almost never saw them get phoned by their employer once they got home. This was rare in the 1980s: when work was over, it was over. The only people who lived on permanent call were doctors, presidents, and prime ministers.
But since our work lives came to be dominated by email, there’s a growing expectation that workers will respond at any time, day or night. One study found that a third of French professionals felt they could never unplug, for fear of missing out on an email they were expected to reply to. Another study found that just the expectation that you should be on call causes workers anxiety, even if they don’t actually get contacted on any given night. In effect, the idea of work hours has disappeared, and we are all on call all the time. By 2015, French doctors explained they were seeing an explosion in patients suffering from “le burnout,” and voters started to demand action—so the French government commissioned Bruno Mettling, the head of the telecom company Orange, to study the evidence and figure out a solution. He concluded that this constantly-on-call way of working was disastrous for people’s health and their ability to do their jobs. He proposed a significant reform: everyone should have a “right to disconnect.”
This right is simple. It says that you are entitled to clearly defined work hours—and you are entitled, when those work hours are over, to unplug and not to have to look at email, or to have any other work contact. So in 2016, the French government passed this into law. Now any company with more than fifty people has to formally negotiate with its workers to agree on the hours in which they can be contacted—and all other hours are out of bounds. (Smaller companies can draw up their own charters but don’t have to formally consult their workers.) Since then, several companies have faced penalties for trying to force people to respond to email out of hours. For example, the pest-control company Rentokil had to pay a local branch manager €60,000 (around $70,000 in the U.S.) in compensation after it had complained he didn’t respond to off-hour emails.
In practice, when I went to Paris and spoke to my friends who work for companies there, they said change is happening too slowly on this—the law is not being enforced by a tough regulator, so most French people haven’t yet experienced a big shift. But it’s a first step in the direction we all need to travel.
Sitting in a café in Paris, I thought about what I had seen. There’s no point giving people sweet self-help lectures about the benefits of unplugging unless you give them a legal right to do it. In fact, lecturing about the benefits of unwinding to people whose bosses don’t allow them to unwind becomes a kind of maddening taunt—it’s like lecturing famine victims on how they’d feel better if they had dinner at the Ritz. If you have an independent fortune and you don’t need to work, then you can probably make these changes now. But for the rest of us, we need to be part of a collective struggle in order to reclaim the time and space that has been taken from us—so we can finally rest, and sleep, and restore our attention.