Working 9 to 3: Has Time Come For The Full-Time Work Week?

“No man ever said on his death bed: 'I wish I had spent more time in the office'.” Whenever I come home late from work, my partner reminds me of this age-old phrase his dad always uses. It was that saying I was reminded of when reading this article, ‘Work less, play more’.

It is less of a fairy tale than it sounds, with a Swedish trial of shorter working days nearing its end in February 2016. For the past two years, care workers at a retirement home in Gothenburg have gone from working eight-hour days to six hours per day – for the same pay. Preliminary results show improved health of the workers and a 10% reduction in sick leave.

Longer working hours have been linked to heart disease and stroke in a medical study published in the Lancet. Meanwhile, the Mental Health Foundation, which considers work demands the biggest challenge to mental health in the UK, advises working "smart, not long."

In this article, the 40-hour work week gets a radical rethink. It is easy to see why the idea is popular: who wouldn’t like some more free time? But the article goes beyond the ‘3-day weekend’ ideal. It makes us re-assess not just our office hours but the whole way in which we see work, and what it's for - beyond simply putting food on the table.

It features Tom Hodgkinson, who heads a company helping people lead more fulfilled lives. He says: “On an individual level, and as a society, we need to reduce the time spent doing unpleasant work under coercion, and increase the time doing voluntary, fun work, or to put it another way: playing.”

The piece offers plenty more convincing arguments for working less, including ones concerned with the sustainability of our planet. As Sarah Lyall, researcher in the Social Policy team at the New Economics Foundation, explains: “Moving to shorter hours would challenge the prevailing assumption that the main purpose of life is to work more to earn more to buy more.”