Our relationship with the calendar
The origins of our calendar system date back to the early civilizations of Sumer and Mesopotamia who designed the first calendars to track the movement of the Sun and the Moon. By understanding the cycles that govern these important celestial bodies, early civilizations were able to plant crops during the right seasons and perform yearly religious ceremonies in honor of their gods.
Since then, our calendar has evolved to include 12 months in a year and 7 days in a week. It takes approximately 365 days for the Earth to orbit the Sun, which created our year, and during that time the moon transitions through roughly 12-13 phases, giving us our months. The logic of the 7-day week however has less to do with natural rhythms and more to do with cultural phenomena.
The origin of the “week”
While the other units of measurement involved in the calendar system (month, year, day) are mostly rooted in astronomy, the week comes from the ancient Babylonians and their reverence for the number 7. Before the invention of telescopes, the ancient Babylonians could only identify 7 celestial bodies with the naked eye (the Sun, the Moon, and five other planets) and therefore considered the number 7 to be sacred and important. This did not extend to other cultures however, for example the the ancient Egyptians had a 10-day week and the Romans landed on 8.
Henry Ford and the modern workweek
The next significant chapter in our relationship with the calendar system was the creation of the “weekend”. While Sunday has long been considered a day of rest in many religions, it was very uncommon for businesses to provide a full 48-hour break. This didn’t come around until the mid-1920s when Henry Ford (the usual suspect) figured that by giving his workers a break from work and allowing them to rest, they would be more productive.
More insidiously, he figured that by having more time off, they could be more active consumers in the marketplace and ultimately, buy more cars. He, therefore, formalized the weekend, and given his success, other industrialists followed suit.
The psychological impact of weekly cycles
As mentioned earlier, cycles are fundamental to the nature of the calendar system and at their core, cycles are made up of restarts and repetitions. The most common symbol used to represent a cycle is a series of arrows forming a circle where the item in question travels across each stage of the cycle and returns to its starting point ad infinitum.
Consider the water cycle, in which water precipitates, becomes groundwater, finds its way to the sea, evaporates, and then once again precipitates, starting the entire process over again. The labels we use to represent a calendar week also behave cyclically. The week starts on Monday, ends on Sunday, repeats indefinitely, and if you’re like most people Monday represents the beginning of the cycle while Sunday represents the end.
For most people, the labels for each respective day act as a landmark or trigger for certain behaviors or routines. Grocery shopping is on Monday, the gym is on Tuesday, date night is Friday, and so on. Having a predictable system for planning your responsibilities and obligations that is in sync with that of the rest of society is an incredible tool and is no doubt core to our success as a species.
That being said, the cadence of this cycle has major implications for the organizations and individuals involved in it, and it is important to ask whether the cadence set by ancient civilizations and factory tycoons is still beneficial in our modern knowledge economy.
The knowledge economy and deep work
The knowledge economy as defined by Wikipedia is “an economic system in which the production of goods and services is based principally on knowledge-intensive activities” and the “key element of value is the greater dependence on human capital and intellectual property”. We are living in a world where robots will run factories and real value will come from the ability of the human mind to innovate and create.
Given this reality, it is crucial that companies and societies design themselves around fostering an ability for their human capital to flourish and the science is clear on the conditions for success in this regard; deep work. In his seminal book, Deep Work, Cal Newport makes it clear that in order for individuals to succeed in this new knowledge economy, it needs to master the art of deep work. As he clearly states “to produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction”.
In another vein of the book, Cal Newport equates achieving states of deep work akin to achieving states of deep sleep in that in order to achieve this depth, one must travel through each lighter layer successively until one reaches this deep zone. Also like sleep, if one is interrupted, such as being woken up by a honking car horn, one must restart the process of passing through these lighter layers before returning to a state of depth.
This idea of achieving depth over time by applying consistent focus to an issue or a topic is at the core of my argument against the 4-day workweek. By removing an additional day during the week, we take an already highly fragmented cycle (the 5-day workweek) and make it worse. Instead of having five days to hammer out a project or dive into a new area, we now have four. Thursday now becomes Friday and now people start the process of mentally checking out for the weekend after fewer days of focus.
The argument for the 4-day workweek
The 4-day workweek has been touted as the next big frontier in productivity and workplace management. Studies have been conducted across countries and companies, and these studies’ results have been overwhelmingly positive. People who work four days a week report feeling more rested and balanced and have lower rates of burnout. This should come as no surprise. Giving people 48 hours (our current weekend) to recover after 5 days on the job (our current week) is another example of fragmentation and its harmful effects. For people to fully mentally “clock out” of work, they need time to unwind, and within 48 hours, by the time they relax, they are starting to think about the coming Monday and feeling the Sunday scaries.
Adding an additional day to the weekend seems like a logical conclusion here. Instead of 48 hours, let’s give them 72 hours to unplug. I believe this proposal lacks creativity, and worse, provides the illusion of a solution to a much deeper problem that requires much greater ingenuity. Why are we constrained to making a 7-day cycle system work for the knowledge economy?
Benefits of the 10 day work week
Imagine instead that we disconnect ourselves from our traditional, celestial notions of the week and decide that a modern “work cycle” should last 15 days or roughly two weeks. For the sake of jargon, we will refer to them as “tweeks” from now on.
In my proposed tweek, people would have 10 days of work followed by 5 days of rest. These elongated phases of “on” and “off” time would allow people to settle more deeply into their focus or relaxation. Instead of picking up a project on Tuesday after settling back into work on Monday and discussing your abbreviated weekend with coworkers, and then subsequently pausing that project on Thursday afternoon, momentum is built over the course of 8-10 solid days of focus. Further, instead of trying to cram a trip to Vermont into a 2-day window and being exhausted by the time you get home, you have 5 days to catch up on personal matters, have dinner with friends, get out of the city, etc…
My strong belief is that this would allow people to experience the best of both work and leisure.
The argument against the 10-day workweek
One of the main arguments against the 10-day workweek is that it will inevitably lead to burnout. If 5 days on is proving to be too much, then surely 10 days would kill us. I think this argument is only true if companies continue to hang onto outdated habits, practices, and expectations around employee performance and utilization. If companies continue to expect people in the knowledge economy to spend 8 hours a day being “productive”, then 80 hours straight (8 hours x 10 days) will certainly kill us.
On the other hand, if companies allow employees the freedom to self-regulate and focus more on the outcomes of their work, then I believe people will learn to find a new groove during a 10-day cycle that allows them to be sustainable.
Why does burnout occur in our current workplace?
My belief is that it all comes back to these small windows we are forced to operate in. We sprint hard, rest fast, and sprint hard again week in and week out. Imagine instead a steady jog, with a nice break?
The other main argument against the 10-day workweek comes down to something known as the network effect. The network effect is defined as:
“the phenomenon by with the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products”
This term comes from economics and is largely applied to the technology sector, however, it basically means that the only real value we continue to retain from our 7-day weeks is that everyone else is synced up. We know that our friends and neighbors are off on Saturday so we can make plans. Until a 15-day cycle becomes the norm, people would have a hard time coordinating schedules with the people in their lives.
This is a valid point though a bit frustrating.
We are limited to following a practice that is demonstrably bad for us simply because “everyone else is doing it”. Though, this isn’t really true. If you have any friends working in healthcare, you know that they follow highly irregular cycles and still find ways to have fun and sync up with the people that matter in their lives.
Final Thoughts
Though I understand the futility of my efforts to restructure our relationship with the Gregorian calendar, I think it is an important time to call out the shortcomings of even the 4-day workweek. Once we make this cultural shift and adopt this new practice, we may be satisfied with the idea that we’ve found a long-term solution to our problems and leave it at that. We may not revisit the idea again for a long-time due to the pernicious effect of thinking we’ve solved it and therefore taking a moment to reflect on where this all stems from seems appropriate.