The Workload Fairy Tale
Original excerpt
Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day workweek.
Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials which unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is about 1% of Iceland’s total working population. These subjects were drawn from multiple different types of workplaces, including, notably, offices and social service providers. Not everyone dropped an entire workday, but most participants reduced their schedule from forty hours to at most thirty-six hours a week of work.
The UK followed…
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This article by Cal Newport is part of the Cal Newport reading list on Burn 451, covering deep work · slow productivity.
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