Part-time life
Picture in your mind, the rolling green fields of Retie, Belgium, with the roar of the crowd from the finals of the 2023 International Tug of War competition about to kick off.
This is the big one, Saturday afternoon, the main event.
You see the teams line up on the field. Team 1 comes out first. Five large and strong athletes. Then Team 2 comes out, except they only have two team members.
They line up on the field, grab the rope, and of course, the team of five defeat the team of two. That is because five against two is not a balanced fight.
So, when someone talks about Work Life Balance in the standard 5-day work week, just picture that fated tug of war championship.
Now, while the 4/3 week is still not equally balanced, it’s a damn sight better than 5/2.
I’ve been working a 4-day week now for the last few years, and in my case, I work normal hour days and take a single day less pay. Some people spread that 5th days hours out over the whole week, working 10-hour days, but that’s not something I was interested in doing.
I also chose to have my Fridays off, which is objectively the best day to take off. Only one public holiday (Good Friday) is mandated to appear on my day, and if there is ever a public holiday on the weekend, it almost always gets shifted to the Monday, making even longer public holidays.
One of my brother’s also does 4-day weeks (Inspired by me, if I do say so myself), but he takes Wednesday off, which on first glances has some upsides, it breaks the week up into 2 2-day weeks, which is nice… but I can’t see myself relaxing on a Wednesday when I know that it’s basically a Sunday.
So, I work less hours, that means I’m less productive, right? I must be a burden on the business?
Except I can’t remember the last time I had to take time off, unless I was sick, or on holidays.
When was the last time you needed to take time off (Often not a full day) to do something midweek?
Doctors’ appointments
Tradies working at home
Waiting between 11am and 4pm for a telecom employee
Going to the bank
Shopping at that shop that always closes before you can get there
I’m able to schedule all my appointments for my day off.
It means that my work time, is my actual work time that I use to do my job.
Not to mention I also do all my boring chores like washing and cleaning on the Friday, leaving the whole weekend for relaxing weekend stuff, not annoying errands.
But it’s not just boring chores and errands, I’ve also taken up a number of additional hobbies and projects. I’m teaching myself how to weld and I’ve been able to engage in all the creative art projects I’ve got rattling around my brain. In fact, it was the work I was able to do on my Fridays that ended up in a gallery in China.
This is just my personal experience, which I know I’m lucky to have. I have a well-paying job, with very little overheads, and no dependants sucking up all my money, so I can afford to take the hit of losing a day of pay.
That’s a price I was willing to pay for more balance in my life.
There are plenty of reports out there on the benefits of the four-day work week if you want the stats, which are below. But this is mainly an opinion piece, more of a ‘gut’ piece.
I took the leap to part-time with the thought of giving it a go for six months and seeing if it worked for me. Could I survive on the less pay (Granted this was all before the damn interest rates went hiking), would my employer get annoyed with me, would it benefit my mental health in the ways that I hoped it would?
And yeh, it’s worked out really well for me, and short of another “once in a lifetime financial crisis, with failing banks and runaway interest rates” crisis, there’s no way I’m going back to full-time. And what’s the chances of that happening again right?
The facts:
In a recent trial* in the UK run by the 4 Day Week Global team (https://www.4dayweek.com/) they found:
92% of employers said they would continue to work a shorter workweek
30% made the change permanent
71% of the employees said they felt reduced levels of burnout
Staff turnover dropped 57%
Revenue INCREASED
15% of the employees said that no amount of money would get them to accept working a 5-day week now that they have lived the benefits of the 4-day week
* 61 companies, 2900 workers. Run from June to December 2022.
Unilever in New Zealand had an 18-month pilot program of the 4-day week, and now they are rolling it out to their Australian branch and continuing the pilot in NZ. They reported a 33% reduction in stress, and a 34% drop in absenteeism.
The Australian Public Service Commission expect 4-day weeks to come up in their next round of workplace bargaining.
We have been working the 5-day work week for almost 100 years, since Henry Ford implemented it, and it became widespread.
There’s not much else that has remained unchanged since 1926, so why this?
