The Workload Fairy Tale

Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day workweek.

Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials which unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is about 1% of Iceland’s total working population. These subjects were drawn from multiple different types of workplaces, including, notably, offices and social service providers. Not everyone dropped an entire workday, but most participants reduced their schedule from forty hours to at most thirty-six hours a week of work.

The UK followed suit with a six-month trial, including over sixty companies and nearly 3,000 employees, concluding in 2023. A year later, forty-five firms in Germany participated in a similar half-year experiment with a reduced workweek. And these are far from the only such experiments being conducted. (According to a 2024 ​KPMG survey​, close to a third of large US companies are also, at the very least, considering the idea.)

Let’s put aside for the moment whether or not a shortened week is a good idea (more on this later). I want to first focus on a consistent finding in these studies that points toward a critical lesson about how to make work deeper and more sustainable.

Every study I’ve read (so far) claims that reducing the workweek does not lead to substantial productivity decreases.

From the Icelandic study​: “Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces.”

​From the UK study​: “Across a wide variety of sectors, wellbeing has improved dramatically for staff; and business productivity has either been maintained or improved in nearly every case.”

​From the German study​: “Employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week, and, in some cases, were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health…and showed less stress and burnout symptoms, as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily stress minutes.”

Step back and consider these observations for a moment. They’re astounding results! How is it possible that working notably fewer hours doesn’t reduce the overall value that you produce?

A big part of the answer, I’m convinced, is a key idea from my book, ​Slow Productivity​: workload management.

Most knowledge workers are granted substantial autonomy to control their workload. It’s technically up to them when to say “yes” and when to say “no” to requests, and there’s no direct supervision of their current load of tasks and projects, nor is there any guidance about what this load should ideally be.

Many workers deal with the complexity of this reality by telling themselves what I sometimes call the workload fairy tale, which is the idea that their current commitments and obligations represent the exact amount of work they need to be doing to succeed in their position.

The results of the 4-day work week experiment, however, undermine this belief. The key work – the efforts that really matter – turned out to require less than forty hours a week of effort, so even with a reduced schedule, the participants could still fit it all in. Contrary to the workload fairytale, much of our weekly work might be, from a strict value production perspective, optional.

So why is everyone always so busy? Because in modern knowledge work we associate activity with usefulness (a concept I call “pseudo-productivity” in ​my book​), so we keep saying “yes,” or inventing frenetic digital chores, until we’ve filled in every last minute of our workweek with action. We don’t realize we’re doing this, but instead grasp onto the workload fairy tale’s insistence that our full schedule represents exactly what we need to be doing, and any less would be an abdication of our professional duties.

The results from the 4-day work week not only push back against this fairy tale, but also provide us with a hint about how we could make work better. If we treated workload management seriously, and were transparent about how much each person is doing, and what load is optimal for their position; if we were willing to experiment with different possible configurations of these loads, and strategies for keeping them sustainable, we might move closer to a productive knowledge sector (in a traditional economic sense) free of the exhausting busy freneticism that describes our current moment. A world of work with breathing room and margin, where key stuff gets the attention it deserves, but not every day is reduced to a jittery jumble.

All of this brings me back to whether or not a 4-day workweek is a good idea. I have nothing against it in the abstract, but it also seems to be addressing a symptom instead of the underlying problem. If we truly solve some of the underlying workload issues, switching from five to four days might no longer feel like such a relief to so many.

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For more on my thoughts on technology and work more generally, check out my recent books on the topic: Slow Productivity, A World Without Email, and Deep Work.