The Astounding Result Of A Shorter Work Week Experiment | Cal Newport

One of the biggest beliefs about our current high-tech, always-on, very busy age is that the key to succeeding professionally is to work more. You want to get ahead, put in more hours. You want your company to overcome its competitors, increase the weekends you're there, increase the evenings that you're there. But is this actually true? Well, last spring... In an episode of my podcast, I took a look at a collection of really interesting studies that were done in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic that looked at experiments with shortening the work week, working less, and trying to see what the impact was on lots of different factors. There was a really astounding result that emerged from this research that I think completely changes the way we think about the relationship between busyness and actually producing things that matters. So the clip you're about to see is from that episode where I go in specifically and I walk through those studies and I point out that result and I try to give you a whole new way of thinking about what really matters for doing work that is going to make a difference. I think you're going to like this clip. Check it out. Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector, a growing interest in the viability. of a four-day work week. Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials that unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is actually about 1% of Iceland's total working population. The UK followed suit. They had a six-month trial that included over 60 companies and close to 3,000 total employees. This concluded in 2023. A year later, 45 firms in Germany participated in a similar half-year experiment with a reduced workweek, and these are far from the only such experiments being conducted. According to a 2024 KPMG survey, close to a third of large U.S. companies are at the very least considering the idea of experimenting with four-day workweeks, at least for some employees. All right, so the reason I'm bringing these up is not to directly assess. whether a four-day workweek is a good idea, though I will return to that at the end of the discussion here. But instead, because as I'll show, these studies, if you look deeper, have an important data point in them that I think points to a really important conclusion, an idea that is critical if we want to understand knowledge work in our current moment. It's an idea that I call the workload fairy tale. All right, so let's get to this hidden point that shows up in every one of these studies. I'm going to switch over now to some of these studies. Let's see. These are probably in what the browser, Jesse? Yeah. All right. Let's start with a claim from the Iceland study. For those who are watching, I have a summary of the Iceland study up here. Here's a key claim from the beginning of this article. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces. So of the 1% of population of Iceland who participated in this, they did not see a decrease in productivity. All right, let's look at what happened in the UK. Here is a summary of the UK study. This is coming from The Guardian. This has a similar quote. Across a wide variety of sectors, well-being has improved dramatically for staff and business productivity has either been maintained or improved in nearly every case. Remember, these are experiments in which they are taking five to eight hours out of the work week, keeping the salary the same, making no other... changes. The German study, let me load up a summary here from a German newspaper. They report something similar. I'm reading now. Employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week and in some cases were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health and showed low stress and burnout symptoms as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily stress minutes. Step back. All right, let's step back and consider this for a moment. These are astonishing findings. How is it possible that with changing nothing else, just telling people you now have to work notably less hours per week, that the overall value of what they are producing, their overall productivity, didn't go down? A big part of this answer, I'm convinced, is an idea that's pretty important from my book, Slow Productivity. overlooked importance of workload management. Here's the normal setup. Most knowledge workers have a surprising amount of autonomy over their workload, especially as compared to a service worker or someone in an industrial context. If I'm a service worker, here's what you need to do. Clock in and do this. It's very prescribed. If you're the barista at Starbucks, it's very clear. what their responsibilities are. If I work on an assembly line, it's very clear what I am doing. I don't have a lot of say in what I want to or not work on. In knowledge work, this is different. You have freedom to say yes or no. There's a sort of unstructured way that commitments come to you. Some stuff maybe you can't say no to, but ultimately you are the source of triage. of incoming potential commitments there's also no transparency or direct supervision of your workload you grab the average knowledge work manager and take one of their charges and say what are they working on right now they don't know they can't say here's the six things that this person is working on there's no transparency in this what you're working on is up to you to keep track of in fact most workers themselves don't even know at any one moment the full slate of their commitments they sort of get prodded into action with like email or slack prompts or meeting invites that oh i need to start doing something on this there's no direct supervision or transparency of workload as well now most knowledge workers in this i gotta say like pretty unusual situation for the economic the world of economics this unusual situation of workload autonomy tell themselves what i call the workload fairy tale And the workload fairytale claims that the amount of work that you're doing right now is the exact right amount needed to be successful in your position. That somehow it is all just worked out that like whatever it is you're doing, this is what you need to be doing. It's the exact right amount. Not more, but if you do less, it's going to be a big problem. The results of these four-day workweek studies undermine this claim. productivity did not generally go down for these research subjects, even after the amount of time they had to work was substantially reduced. And if we think about why this is, the answers are actually not that surprising, especially if you've read slow productivity or listened to the show before. The key work in most jobs, the efforts that actually drive those pure economic productivity measures, dollars produced per worker hours employed, the key work in most jobs, requires much less than a 40-hour workweek to complete. Just go back. If you do something like time block planning, go back and highlight with a highlighter every time block from the last week in which you were working on something that directly produced value for your organization. You're not going to have full columns marked with highlighter. You're going to say, you know what? There was like 15 hours this week. Maybe there was 10 hours this week where I was actually directly doing the things that create value. This course is very different than the service sector, the industrial sector where outside of breaks and lunch, like everything you're doing is directly producing value. So everything else you're doing is either more option, it's more optional. Like you're doing it for social reasons or it's make work or it's non-promotable activities or it's just an embrace of pseudo productivity. I want to show some activities. I'm going to kind of bounce around the emails and make some unnecessary meetings. Now, look, not all of this is bad, but there's no reason to fill. you know every available minute of your day with this optional work the stuff that really matters doesn't actually need that much time this is what's being revealed by these four day workweek studies the workload fairy tale is in fact a fairy tale you're actually probably doing a lot more extra stuff than you really need to to do your job well so if we return to the original question here hey but what about this four day workweek is it itself a good idea i have nothing against it But it seems to me that if we solve the underlying workload problem, if we get rid of the workload fairy tale and have more control over how much work should we be doing and what are the key factors and how much of the optional work should I be doing on my plate, a lot of the issues with burnout that drive ideas like the four-day workweek are actually going to go away. A four-day workweek itself is not going to have a problem that it is solving. So once we recognize there's only so much we're doing that really matters, we should be able to have a lot more variation and flexibility when we think about what work could be. Different types of schedules, different number of hours, less intensity, more breaks, or hey, maybe more key work and you produce more value, but less make work. There's a lot of options on the table here, but these studies, I think, point to this really key thing. Most of what you're doing in your job is probably not actually that directly useful. That's taking place in less of your total time than you think, which means you should feel some cover to actually slow down and take a breath. Interesting four day work week. You know what type of work week Cal network runs? Two? 14 minutes. He gets after it. Deep work, deep laser focus, 14 minutes. And you know what? He gets a round of applause for it. Cal network is so impressive that when he attends the theater, when the show is over, the actors applaud him. Get some Cal network. That's kind of, that's a catchphrase. Get some. yeah get some cal network so there we go interesting research i think this we kind of slept on this this four-day workweek stuff because a lot of it kind of was coming in the immediate post-pandemic times enough other stuff on our on our minds but i think it's like a scandalous result that they said hey stop working a week and nothing really changed with productivity the message that we should get out of that is like oh my god what are we doing during this time then like clearly we have a lot of make work and non-promotable activities going on like we should be able to be better we don't think enough about workloads Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.

Cal Newport explains the astounding result of a shorter work week experiment in this clip from an earlier Deep Questions podcast episode in the spring of 2025.

Buy Cal Newport's latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow 

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0:00 A shorter work week experiment
2:38 The workload fairytale
4:50 Workload management
8:10 Filling your time with optional work

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About Cal Newport:
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal's particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.

Cal is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He's also the creator of The Time-Block Planner.

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