The Four Day Work Week: How It’s Going So Far

Cleaning the apartment. Swimming in a quarry. Watching television. Making appointments and taking deliveries. Day trips and short vacations. Powering down the Sunday scaries.

In January of this year, Swash Labs moved to a four day, 32 hour work week with staggered schedules so the shop would be open Monday through Friday. In an effort to understand how they feel about it, I asked my colleagues at Swash Labs to share some stories and experiences with me by way of an anonymous survey. What has it been like for you to work and live within this system for the last seven months? What's good about it? What's not so great?

The Good Stuff

What everyone seemed most interested in sharing fell into two categories. The first category — and the one with the most effusive and detailed responses — is the list you see up top there: what staff members are doing with the extra time they have each week, and more than that, how it feels to have the time to do those things. 

The second category, in which the responses were shorter but no less important, is the work that's been required to settle in and make the four day work week sustainable.

As for what we've been doing with the extra time afforded by our new schedule, my list looked very similar to everyone else's. It is amazing to have three days off instead of two, and it also makes everything feel quite a bit closer to what we imagine a normal, healthy work week should be. 

"Every weekend feels like a mini vacation," responded one staffer. "I'm always shocked and relieved that after 2 day's rest, I still have a bonus day off. Every. Week." From another colleague: "It's been easier to plan small vacations and days off / unplugged / out of the house. That flex day is still valuable as heck in my life."  Another writes, "I like everything about it. I feel like I've worked through the challenges of getting [all of my work] done in four days, and I'm not sure the internal pressure to get it done is that much different than when there were five days."

The Challenges

On that note, it is important to say that I also asked about the cons and potential downsides. The primary challenge, while consistent from our first feedback survey at three months, seems to have gotten a bit easier to deal with over time: the middle three days of the week, when everyone is at work, can feel a little intense. "Tuesdays get packed with meetings," writes one respondent. Another offers: "Scheduling internal meetings can still feel a little crunchy, but that feeling seems to have dissipated for me since our first survey." A third says, "Weeks race by and I'm still not used to / able to anticipate the truncated work week perfectly. Work bleeds into the next week more often."

This last bit feels like the ongoing challenge for us will be to keep an eye on efficiency, especially when it comes to meetings, but I view this as exactly the sort of challenge we should be thinking about in our effort to redesign some entrenched thinking about corporate culture. "This meeting could have been an email" is a funny meme-joke but it is also now a vital consideration when we, as a team, think about the best uses of our time. Meetings should be shorter, the personnel in them should be invited with thoughtful intentionality, and, yes, there are absolutely some meetings we've fallen into the habit of setting that could be eliminated. This is good work for us to do, and the right place for my head to be at when it comes to not only making the best use of everyone's time, but being respectful of it as well.

The Unintended Bonus

One unexpected benefit is a sort of byproduct of both introducing the four day work week and, in our initial structure for it, restricting meetings to the three days in the middle of the week: the focus day. Our informal internal agreement upon introducing the four day work week was to keep meetings off the calendar on Mondays and Fridays. Our schedules are staggered across the shop, which means that half of us have Monday off and half of us have Friday off. We knew this would make meetings important — and prolific, while we work on the meeting / time efficiency stuff above — on the days we were all working, and we wanted to make sure that there was at least one day not interrupted at all by meetings for each staff member. 

That appears to have been the right idea. "Tuesday through Thursday are still pretty much packed with meetings, so I feel like I don't get enough done on those days, but having Fridays open makes it easy for me to catch up on things," writes one respondent. "I think it's made us more efficient with our weekly meetings and has given everybody the space to have one day of their week to focus on their work rather than popping in and out of meetings all day," writes another. 

As we work to make meetings better and more efficient, both on an individual meeting-by-meeting level and on a more meta-operating-philosophy level, we may open up Mondays and Fridays to the occasional meeting where it makes sense. As one Swasher put it, if it meant having a less meetings-intense Tuesday, "I would not balk at having a meeting on Monday."

The Takeaway

Overall, I like how this is going, full stop. Overwhelmingly, Swash staff rated their satisfaction with the new schedule and their ease of adjustment to it quite highly, with cons or negative aspects to it few and far between, with adjustments over time easing those along the way. 

I also like how we seem to collectively feel about the whole thing. As one respondent wrote: "I believe in the idea of establishing this across all industries and walks of life, so it has to start with those of us who can lead the way. Adults deserve enough time and autonomy to tackle life's challenges and pursue other forms of enrichment. Or, as another colleague stated even more simply: "More rest. Less stress. No more Sunday scaries."

Seven months in, the four day work week has been an extremely positive experience for us as an organization, and we are thriving as a business. We still have work to do in a few areas, but it is work focused on improving the working lives of everyone at Swash Labs, so it is work worth doing.