All right, so anyways, we got good questions. Before we get into the questions, though, like I often like to do to start these episodes, I like to kick things off with what I call a deep dive where I take a query that's been on my mind for a long time and spend some time with it.

So the topic of the deep dive that I'm going to get into today is will four-day weeks solve burnout? Now, one of the motivations was, there's been a lot of articles about it. This is an article that's on the screen now for people who are watching. It's actually from February, but it's one of many articles like this that I've come across recently that are talking about the increased popularity for the last year or two in the idea of knowledge workers in particular doing four-day workweeks, so typically Monday through Thursday instead of Monday through Friday.

Now, it's not an idea that is brand new. In "Deep Work," which I published back in 2016, I talked about the four-day workweek experiments at Basecamp. They then were and continue to do today. A part of the year is four-day workweeks of the summer, and I got into some of those details in that book.

Alex Peng had a well-timed book out called "Shorter" that was all about this concept that came out, and this is where I say well-timed, March of 2020. So that book was right there for people during the pandemic-induced remote work where we began rethinking how we might structure our efforts.

That book was well-timed to be there. So this idea has been around. Last year or two, though, it's gotten a lot more attention. The pandemic pushed it to the forefront. So if we look at this particular sample article I have on the screen, this is from "Wired" from February written by Caitlin Harrigan, we see it talks about this concept.

It notes that several trials or trials have been launched in several countries in the past few months. So this is something that has been happening over the last year or two is countries, government funding studies from countries are looking into this, where they'll take a bunch of companies and temporarily move them to four-day weeks and then interview the employees afterwards about was this better, was this not?

So there's a lot of these investigations going on typically in Europe. Iceland was one of the first countries to do this. They actually had results back. Spoiler alert, people like the four-day work week there. In this particular "Wired" article, they went and talked to 15 workers at six tech companies that had already adopted a shortened work week and found that employees generally approved.

So that's the actual quote I have up here, but some saw it as a mixed blessing. All right, so here's the question. Is this highly visible intervention a good solution to the burnout that knowledge workers increasingly feel? My argument has been no. I do not think shifting to the four-day work week is going to be a long-term or sustainable solution to a lot of the actual valid concerns that people have about work, its role in their life, and the stress and burnout that it is creating.

I think by contrast, the issue might be the notion of a work week in general, not its length. So let's go back and think about where the concept of a standardized work week came from. In the US, it comes from the Fair Labor Standards Practice. In 1938, this is the Prussian-era legislation.

It established 40 hours as a standard work week for many industries. In other words, if you wanted to have an employee work longer than 40 hours, they would have to be paid overtime. This very much largely concerned manufacturing and industrial jobs, jobs where there was an hourly component to the work, jobs where the biggest knob you had to turn in terms of impacting the difficulty of the work was how many hours people were actually working.

This was the context for something like a standardized work week made sense. Knowledge workers have been relatively exempt from that law because it is a different type of situation. Knowledge work is way more autonomous. The number of hours you are working or expected to work don't necessarily mean a lot in a lot of knowledge work jobs.

It's very outcomes-based. You're given work, you're expected to accomplish the work. The work week is at best a loose framework for roughly speaking, when you might be expected to be available for meetings, when we might expect a response to emails, and when we might not. So, okay, we don't work on the weekends, then we can't schedule a meeting on the weekend.

We don't schedule meetings at 8 p.m. typically because we have this rough work week, but that's about it. There's no notion of, wait a second, I'm only supposed to work 32 hours and I'm just at the assembly line turning the crank until those 32 hours are up. So in knowledge work, the work week is, again, just a loose framework for setting certain expectations, not the core defining factor of the efforts that you actually are going to execute.

All right, so what should we do? If knowledge workers feel burnt out, what type of things are gonna make a difference? One of my big arguments is that more transparent and humane systems for work assignment, execution, and review is what is critical. Moving past the haphazardness with which we just toss work around in the knowledge work environment today, where anyone at any time can just say, hey, take a look at this, can you do this?

Do this meeting, take care of this problem. What are your thoughts on this? Just with an email or a conversation in the hallway or a Slack message, work can be dropped on anyone's plate by anyone at any time without anyone tracking how much are you doing? Does it make sense for you to do more?

Does it make sense what it is that you're working on? When are you gonna work on this? What do you need to actually get this done? We don't have any of those conversations. We plug people into the cybernetic hive mind of Slack and email and Zoom and say, get after it.

And we end up with these completely overloaded task lists and ambiguity and stress, and I could care less if you tell me that my work week is supposed to end on Thursday or not. I have all this stuff, I have to get it done. So we need more humane and transparent systems.

Here's how we keep track of what you're working on. We can see it. Here's how much we think you should have on your plate at any one time. You have too much, you get nothing more. Here is how we think you should actually execute the work. Well, this is what the mornings are for.

These days are all just concentration. Meetings can only happen at these places. Transparency, so we can see the system and see the workloads. And humanity, which I mean, you are trying to align these systems to the way that the human brain actually functions. That's the reform we need. Ours is a knob that's relevant for the factory.

Task assignment systems. That is the relevant knob for knowledge work. And there's all sorts of ideas here. Like poll systems is something I've advocated for. They do this in software, we could do this other places. Let me work on one thing at a time. When I'm done, I'll pull in a new thing.

And you know what, my team or my boss or my supervisor can be involved in deciding on what that next thing should be, but I do one thing at a time. You cannot just throw things on my plate and have me organize it. I work on one thing at a time.

We need a systemic collection mechanism for actually keeping track of all the things the company needs to do. Shouldn't it just be in my inbox? Shouldn't it just be on my task list? Protocols and processes that everyone agrees on, that's blessed by the head of the company, the head of your team.

Protocols and processes for how regular ongoing work happens. This is the process we meet at these days. There's office hours you come into for short questions. Here's what email can and can't be used for. Again, just rock and rolling. Here's the tools, here's your handle, here's your address, go for it, doesn't work.

Protocols and processes. In general, trading accountability for this accessibility that we've come to expect is what we would also wanna get out of this. So forget this, like let's just make everyone accessible and we'll sort of figure things out and make accountability be the new buzzword. We agreed what you're gonna do, did you do it?

How well did you do it? What hours you did it, what days you did it, I don't care. That's not my business. That is something we could be moving towards. I think that's more natural for the type of work that we're doing in the knowledge sector. Let me throw out one more radical idea here.

I don't think talking about the nature of the work week is that important, but I am kind of interested in talking about the nature of the work year. And I'm gonna get into this a little bit later in the show, but we assume that the ideal work year for a knowledge worker is you work all year, with the exception of maybe a vacation week here or vacation week there.

I think we need way more variety there. I mean, imagine a world in which there were alternatives. My engagement with this company is six months a year. My engagement for this company is, it's eight months and four months off. My engagement is 11 months and I take one full month off.

I mean, imagine if you had these different options and you had salaries adjusted and matching these different configurations, giving people way more flexibility in how they actually structure their lives. This could be a big thing. And I've asked this question before, and I think the answer is interesting. How many people today, if you said, would you be willing to take 10/12 of your current salary if you didn't have to work in the summer?

A lot of people say, of course. I will go from whatever, 150,000 to 125,000, 130,000, however the math works out there. I guess it's 120,000 there. If I also don't have to work in July and August. Like that type of flexibility, we don't think about it, but it's another way to think about burnout, especially with jobs where when you're doing the work, it's incredibly intense.

I mean, if I'm McKinsey or WilmerHale law firm, and like our whole model is bringing in incredibly smart people to work on these engagements that are incredibly demanding. We're trying to monetize their brains. You're probably gonna have a lot more sustainability if you had these different options. Yeah, here's someone who's gonna come work for eight months and then take four where they're not working, and recharging and doing other sorts of things.

You're gonna probably keep that employee around for a lot longer than saying, look, we're doing a hundred hour weeks until your ears bleed. So I'll throw that out there too. All right, so I think those are the type of solutions that matter for knowledge work burnout. So why is there so much energy behind the four jobs for day work week?

Let's go back to that Wired article, and I think we can see some clues. All right, so quoting an employee from one of the companies that this reporter talked to, said this strategy shows that the company really does care. The reporter goes on to say this arrangement is a boon for businesses because you curry goodwill without raising pay, without decreasing workload.

So this is what I think is going on with this. It's signaling, right? Oh, we care about our employees. We're doing radical things. This sounds radical. We're dropping a whole day off the work week. Even if what it really means is you do the same amount of work, you just maybe aren't allowed to schedule meetings on one day, but you have to do more work on the other day, and they feel more packed.

You end up in the same place, right? It doesn't really change much. Like, look, we have no systematic way of tracking what you're supposed to be working on, what's a reasonable workload. That's not gonna change. Your workload's not gonna change. We don't have a system where we can turn that down by 20%.

So yeah, we'll tell you you get Fridays off. Same stuff gets done. We look like we are being progressive, and I think they've done a pretty good job of selling this. They give a lot of more reform-minded commentators or journalists, especially on Twitter, who are like, "This seems big.

"I like the idea of making a big change." They feel like it's sticking it to the companies, and that feels good, but it's not really. The whole thing, I think, is a PR exercise. We need real solutions, and real solutions requires us to get to the very nature of how work actually happens in knowledge work.

I don't care how many hours you tell me my work week is. I don't install tires on an assembly line. What I do is way more annoying and frustrating and vague and ambiguous. So you can keep your four-day work week, and let's talk about how you actually assign tasks, how much I should be working on, what are our protocols, what are our systems?

So let's see. There you go. So we'll see. If you're interested, this is the type of thing I get into in my most recent book, "A World Without Email." So if you wanna deep dive on some of those issues, I'm pulling from a lot of those thoughts. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)