Four Day Work Week

Four Day Work Week

I love 3 day weekends, hey who doesn’t, but when you think about it what I really love is the 4 day work week. The knowledge that coming into the office and that tomorrow it is already Wed. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a 4 day work week every week. Well it is actually quite possible. No no, I’m not talking about working 4 - 10Hr days. That is even worse. I am talking about juggling a few things and making the work week, work for you.

OK, First a little math
How much does your employer expect you to work:
40 hrs/week * 50 weeks/year (-xmas and holidays) = 2000 hrs / year

Now what if hypothetically there were only 6 days in a week. We will get rid of Mondays, you are welcome Garfield.
Well first of all instead of 52 weeks there would be 365.25 / 6 = 60.88 lets call it 61
Now we will give you your holidays back making it 59.
2000 hrs/year / 59 weeks/year = 33.89 hours/week

Wait for it…

So if we take our 33.89 hour work week and distribute it over our 4 day work week we get
8.47 hours per day for 4 days per week
Now that I can defiantly live with (I am often here that long anyway)

So now instead of working 5 out of 7 days of the week you worked 4 out of 6. As an added bonus no one will ever say “Sounds like someone’s got a case of the Mondays” again.

Ok so we are agreed, but wait now that we have settled all of that we can use this opportunity to clean up the calendar a little. Give February back the days that were stolen from it by the Roman Emperors (I’m looking at you July and August), and all of the months can have 30 or 31 days.


Now that we have fixed the calendar, it is time to fix this Daylight Savings Time mess.

I have yet to meet anyone who was overly excited about DST, and almost everyone’s opinions range from mild annoyance to utter disdain And what does it really accomplish anyway. We shift everyone’s schedules twice a year and now suddenly it is pitch black at 4:30 pm in the sinter and stays light till 9 in the summer. There has to be a better way

First to dispense with a myth, farmers hate DST, because any livestock they have is unaware of the change and does not really want to change their eating schedule, so if anything they just ignore DST and keep on the same schedule.

Second, I don’t really have any problems with getting more daylight in the evening as much as I don’t like changing all of the clocks in our house twice a year, as well as adjusting everyone’s sleep schedules.

Maybe we should all just pick a time and stick with it. For that matter does it really even matter what time you get up in the morning. Maybe a more suitable solution would be to shift our schedules to the daylight and not our clocks. It doesn’t really matter is the sun comes up at 4:40 or 6:30 if you are going into work at 11. So we should set the local schedules to what best fits the area.

This raises an interesting point, since we could change our schedules to our daylight hours, why do we really need time zones at all. Aren’t they really just another confusing layer of complication on top of everything else we are dealing with?

“Oh your meeting was at 2pm EST you are an hour later”
“Your flight from NY to LA will last 45 min but the one coming back will be 8 hours”
“Damn I set 30 rock to tape at 8EST not 7CST”

What if we were all on the same time, some standard time that is already programmed into all of our computers, maybe GMT. Now all of those useless flight calculations would be unnecessary. 5pm in Chicago would be 5pm in NY and 5pm in Tokyo. We would not have to have multiple clocks with different time zones there would be 1 time zone to rule them all. Our schedules would shift , but after the initial weirdness of the sun coming up at 11pm there would be no more changes…

Until, we finally switch to the metric system in 2047.