When conversations about the four-day week really started to take off, we rejoiced. A three-day weekend, we thought. A whole extra day to do whatever we want. 

Then UK trials happened (and they went well). Today, the four-day working week seems like a viable possibility rather than a ridiculous dream.

The excitement around the four-day working week is valid. It’s fantastic we’re finally starting to reassess the typical nine to five, to discuss what work should actually look like, and to redress the balance of work and life. But are we getting so swept up in the idea of a four-day working week as a magic bullet to all our work culture wrongs that we’re overlooking other potential solutions? 

Some experts believe so. While they’re all for the option of a four-day week, they don’t view it as a one-size-fits-all solution. And they propose that in fact, reducing the hours we work, rather than the days, might be a better solution – especially for women. 

What does a reduced-hour week actually mean, if not Fridays off, you may ask? That’s up to you. It’s about reducing the number of hours we work per week, rather than rigidly having an extra day off. That might mean working 9am to 2pm each day, rather than 9 to 5. Maybe you have mornings off. Or perhaps you have a half day on Mondays (which would fit in quite nicely with bare minimum Mondays, right?) and Fridays.

The key to this is genuine flexibility: a full rework of our working hours to better suit our personal lives, and a chucking out of the idea that we have to stick to a traditional nine to five, five days a week, to get our work done. 

“The five-day week, eight-hour day rigid way of working was developed in the industrial revolution,” notes Anna Whitehouse, founder of Mother Pukka. “That many companies have shaken free and trialled a four-day week is brilliant. A four-day week brings the perfect cocktail of flexible working to many people, but it’s not for everyone. Flexible working comes in all shapes and sizes; there’s no one perfect type of flex for everyone, as the essence is about working around individual needs. So while it’s a brilliant step forwards and we should applaud it, we need to be careful that we don’t embrace any one type of flexible working and think that we have ticked the flexible working box for all.”

There are a bunch of benefits to the reduced-hour week over the four-day week. One is that the approach could allow us to better align with our sleep chronotypes and our body’s natural fluctuations in energy. Think about it: if you’re not a morning person, the enforced morning-to-evening work day means you’re not working at your best for a significant portion of your time. What if you could just work afternoons instead? Or, on the flip side, think of all the times you’ve hit an afternoon slump and felt like you’re not really getting anything done: what if after lunch, you were done for the day and could go do whatever you want, knowing that you’ve already smashed your to-do list during your peak hours in the morning?

Plus, if you finish each day in the afternoon, you’d get more opportunities to spend time outside, in natural light. That poses benefits for our mood, our sleep and our general wellbeing.

Evidence points to reducing our hours making us more productive, too. Research has found that productivity changes fairly drastically throughout the day, with most people at their most productive in the first few hours of their workday, then tailing off. One experiment found that workers are most productive in the first five hours of their shift. Working less can, as strange as it might seem, make us achieve more – the same study found that at 35 hours a week, workers began to show a decrease in what they achieved. 

Reduced-hour weeks could let us reclaim significant chunks of our days to use for side projects, exercise, rest, fun or whatever else we fancy. For many of us, the evenings post-work speedily get sapped up by commuting, life admin and making dinner, causing us to try to power through Monday to Friday in desperate anticipation of the weekend. Just adding another day to the weekend doesn’t necessarily fix that problem – we’re just as limited in our day-to-day and just as stressed out. Reducing our hours, however, could give us more of an everyday boost, with more frequent opportunities to recharge away from work rather than just waiting until the week is finally done. 

Time inequality, a major issue for women, could also be in part remedied by the reduced-hour week. At the moment, the majority of unpaid domestic work – that’s cooking, cleaning and house admin – is done by women. In 2021, over a quarter of women reported spending more than 10 hours a week doing unpaid indoor housework, compared to just 8% of men. This means that for working women, each day is followed by the ‘second shift’, meaning that the bulk of our time is spent working, whether that’s in paid employment or doing household tasks. Clawing back even a portion of that labour time could give women access to the rest they deserve. 

Another big benefit is that this style of flexible working could far better suit parents – and considering women continue to take the bulk of the childcare load, this is vital. The typical working day means there’s a significant gap between the time a child’s school day ends and when a working parent is able to collect them. That leaves them with limited options: either pay through the nose for childcare, rely on generous family members or ask to leave work early… which often draws harsh judgment. It will come as little surprise to anyone attempting the working parent juggle that a recent survey found that 67% of women felt childcare duties had cost them progress at work – including pay rises, promotions or career development. 

Whitehouse says: “The problem with the 9-5 working day is that it doesn’t add up next to school and nursery hours. I had to leave my job because they wouldn’t allow me to start 15 minutes earlier and leave 15 minutes later: ‘We’d open the floodgates if we said yes to you,’ they said.”

Allowing the option of reduced-hour working, such as afternoons off, would enable parents to manage both childcare and working. And normalising this as something that everyone can use and benefit from could reduce the judgment working parents face. 

Alix Walker, editor of Stylist magazine, works 9am to 2pm each day. “I basically work school hours,” she shares. “I work this way because it works with my children. It means I can have what feels like a really nice balance between my family life and my professional life.

“After I had my fourth child, I asked for hours that would work around my children. I’m incredibly lucky to have a really supportive manager who knows that my experience (I’ve worked at Stylist since it launched almost 14 years ago) and abilities mean I can do my job in reduced hours. I’ve gained her trust through many years of working together, which helps.”

The trust Walker mentions is vital. Before we can implement either the four-day week or a reduced-hour week, bosses must truly believe that our work output can remain the same… or even improve. Because yes, reduced-hour week proponents emphasise that workers’ pay shouldn’t be cut to match their hours. This isn’t a simple swap to part-time employment and thus part-time wages, but a total readjustment of the hours a full-time job actually requires. 

The path to this seems to be raising awareness of the genuine benefits of reducing our hours – not just for ourselves, but for businesses (and – not to sound dramatic – perhaps even the world). 

“Data shows a reduced week for the same pay makes absolute sense for workers, for business and for the environment,” Hilary Cottam, author of Radical Help, explains. “We know that the stress of long hours (we work some of the longest hours in Europe) is making us ill and current studies such as the one with UK businesses just completed, plus historical data, shows that workers who work less hours are more productive, take less sick pay and are happier. They also make better environmental choices for a range of reasons: we are less time-poor, we travel less, etc.”

Because of the increased awareness of the four-day work week and the recent successful trials of this way of working, that might currently be an easier sell than the reduced-hour week. That’s what we need to change. Increasing everyone’s awareness of the reduced-hour week and its benefits could make it much easier for anyone to access it. 

Annie Auerbach, author of Flex, notes that we need to redirect the focus from the four-day week to the more open proposition of truly flexible working. That way, we’ll be able to choose the means of working that work best for us, rather than being forced into a box that we don’t quite fit in. 

“In my book I very deliberately chose the term FLEX to describe a new way of working – autonomy over where, when and how we work,” she tells us. “It can encompass everything from reduced hours to job shares, phased retirement to working the same number of hours but adjusting the routine of your day to chime with the school run, your caring responsibilities or your circadian rhythms. 

“In this era of permacrisis and uncertainty of where the next wave of change will come from, a more adaptable way of thinking about work is vital.”

We know that the four-day working week is a viable option and that it will benefit us. In the UK trials of the four-day week, not only was productivity maintained, but stress levels dropped, sick days weren’t taken as frequently, and workers were happier in their roles. It’s no wonder that 92% of the businesses that took part in the trial plan to continue on with three days off, four days on. 

It might seem like the next step, then, is getting more businesses on board with the four-day week and start rolling it out more widely. That’s certainly one step we should be taking, but there’s another that needs to come alongside it: expanding our definitions of flexible working to be truly flexible – including the option of reduced-hour weeks. 

“The four-day working week trial has been a great success, but we need to recognise that one person’s flexible working needs aren’t the same as another’s,” Whitehouse says. “A reduced-hour working week can be essential for parents – often mothers – who need to work around school hours, and it can be the make or break for whether they can work at all. For women experiencing menopause, however, working from home might be essential. For someone with mental health issues, they might need hybrid working flexibility. It’s about flexing around people’s preferences and needs.”

This requires a culture shift; one that means accessing flexible working doesn’t rely on making a formal request and justifying the change, but is instead the norm.  

“True flexible working negates the need for a flexible working request,” Whitehouse says. “The pandemic proved that we could keep the wheels spinning even when we’re not all strapped to MDF desks under flickering office lighting day in, day out. We need to listen to the data and start to see the benefits of flexible working are good for business and people. 

“The best asset of any organisation is its people, and flexible working drives inclusivity in spades; recognising the value that it drives to the business bottom line, too, means that it is win-win, but businesses need to recognise this and breathe flexible working into their culture from the top down.”

The shift needs to be internal, too. Reducing our hours isn’t as simple as just clocking off a few hours earlier – do this and you’re likely to fall behind, then feel immense stress while trying to catch up. Instead, you might need to reassess which parts of your work are actually important and essential and which bits can be dropped (farewell, pointless meetings). We have to be realistic and honest about what we can actually achieve in reduced hours and recognise that to do this, our efficiency needs to be in tip-top shape. 

Walker notes that her way of working requires operating with absolute precision. Because her working hours are limited, every moment needs to count. “I am incredibly strict with my time,” she says. “There is a lot of juggling. Your boundaries have to be super clear, you need to constantly reassess whether your role is possible within those hours and you need to be very good at delegating and have a team you really trust around you.”

When we normalise reduced-hour weeks, we don’t just see benefits for parents or night owls or those for whom reduced-hour weeks work best, but for everyone, because we start to normalise making work work for us.

The research points to us being in desperate need of this change. Overwork is a major cause of illness, with one in four of all sick days taken as a direct result of workload. That’s a matter that’s all the more pressing among women – reported levels of workplace stress are a third higher for women compared to men, and a feeling of time pressure is more strongly associated with poor mental health in women. Having so much of our time consumed by work is literally making us sick.

Reducing our hours but maintaining our pay, could help to heal us. One study looked at the effects of a 30-hour working week, spread across five six-hour days, on the health and wellbeing of workers. Researchers found that sleep quality, stress, mental fatigue, and even heart and respiratory symptoms, improved significantly.

Why? Because the reduced-hour week does more than simply changing what time you head home for the day: it redresses the balance when it comes to what our time is actually for – and how we want our lives to look.

“Care is the big example of how our working hours aren’t working for us,” Cottam says. “But we also want ‘more life’ – time to read, help with the homework, garden, play, be outside, etc.

“WHO and Public Health England have great data on how work is harming us on a human and environmental level. In the UK we see those over 50 leaving the labour market at an alarming rate – they have had enough – and the biggest numbers of those out of work are young, under 24 – people are voting with their feet where they can and choosing not to accept work on current conditions, which include long hours and low pay.

“From a business perspective it’s a critical issue. Firms that are more flexible find it easier to hire (scarce) talent; they have less (expensive) churn and much more productive work places.

“We want work with purpose and respect. We need decent pay and to be free from surveillance. We want time – to play, to care, to be.”

Images: Getty