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Unless you work a soul-sucking job where you’re forced to work this Monday, most of us have the luxury of taking a three-day weekend for Labor Day. Few and far between, three-day weekends are small diamonds in the rough that allow us to take a staycation without having to take any personal time off. In theory, they also allow you to recharge the batteries and attack the coming short week with vigor unknown to mankind. But, they usually just turn into a bunch of binge-drinking and texting your friends Monday night, “Man, at least we only have a four-day week ahead of us.”
Outside of getting to spend another night at the lake house and contracting the rare case of Monday Scaries, turns out that three-day weekends could actually be way more valuable than any of us imagined. They could even save the world. No, seriously.
You know all that stuff about carbon footprints and whatever? It’s actually a real concern and not just a left-wing agenda. And Alex Williams, a lecturer in Sociology at City University London, has been studying the benefits of a four-day workweek on our environment. He claims that taking an extra day off will not only reduce pollution for commuting, but it’ll also knock down our electricity costs because we’re not all sitting under dreaded LED lights for forty hours a week.
Per The Daily Mail:
If Americans simply followed European levels of working hours, for example, they would see an estimated 20 per cent reduction in energy use – and hence in carbon emissions.
With a four-day week, huge amounts of commuting to and from work could be avoided, as well as the energy outputs from running workplaces.
And this has actually been proven to work in the states. In 2007, Utah extended their Monday through Thursday hours and eliminated Fridays for state employees which ended up saving them $1.8 million in energy bills. Less air conditioning, less lighting, less server and computer usage, less time warming up the Keurig, less time gchatting with your friends. It all makes too much fucking sense. Besides, pretty much all of us mail it in on Friday anyway, so we might as well just save all that work for Monday and be open about it rather than pretending to get anything done.
Less days in the office leads to less energy expended which leads to more beers ingested which leads to happiness for everyone. Get out there. Spread the word. Shout it from the rooftops. We deserve 52 consecutive three-day weekends, guys. If that’s not a world-saving initiative that you can’t get behind, then we’re all doomed. .
[via Daily Mail]
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Will
Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.
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My company gives half day Fridays, and while I don’t want to complain about it AT ALL, because it is awesome, I question why we even have to drive all the way to the office for a few hours of “work.”
I used to have that, don’t anymore. I think I still suffer from clinical depression every Friday afternoon.
It’s so nice I think if I ever move jobs it’s absolutely something to negotiate for.
You know how many rounds of golf I’ve missed out on the past three years!?!??
My half day Friday’s go from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Next Friday is going to be the worst Friday.
This is actually part of our platform here on the Shibby/Madoff 2016 campaign.
Will, you’re a blogger.
And you’re a glass of a delicious cocktail with a lime garnish.
This is a movement I can get behind.
Think when the gen Y’ers and Baby Boomers start leaving upper management this could maybe be a feasible thing, at least for my company. I still dont know why i cant remote in from home the last business week at the end of each month when i literally sit in front of my machine with a already completed excel schedule open on one screen and email open on the other so i look busy when i have nothing to do til start of the month.
That’s a good point about work schedules being generational. I had never thought about it, but I can definitely see our generation allowing work schedules to be more fluid when we become higher ups in the company.
Well if you think about it, it’s not like the current 8 hour/5 day work week is law – it was made up like 100 years ago as a best practice of productivity for the time. Now that the dynamics of productivity are changing, its only a matter of time before workplace schedules follow suit
I recently changed to a 4-10 schedule. Best decision ever.
I work four 10-hour days Monday through Thursday with Fridays off, and one thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t really ever fall into a “Friday mentality” of just mailing it in at the end of the week on Thursday. Sure, the last hour or so on Thursday can be a blowoff at times, but for the most part I stay focused because it still never truly feels like the weekend until I’m actually out of there, as opposed to Fridays where the mindset is “Well it might as well be the weekend.” That’s why I don’t take Mondays off– even though I’m working the same amount of hours, going in on Friday would be a black hole of productivity. It’s a mentality that’s been hardwired into me since the early day of grade school, I guess.
I hope that made sense. And there’s all the other benefits of having at least a three day weekend every weekend too.
Will, I will willfully hire an autonomous robot with advanced software systems to take my job so that I have have a 7 day weekend. Bring on the Matrix, I’m ready to use all my free time to forage for food and hang out all day. Just think, it’s like a giant scavenger hunt and when you find something, you. Get to live another day to play. I learned about this in my dreams and you can’t lie in dreams unless you put the work American in front of it but that’s beside the point.
I can’t type. I’m mailing it in for the day to reflect and regret my past life decisions.
That’s my everyday….i hope i get reincarnated as a dog into an upper middle class WASP family cause this being a human sucks.
Will deFries for president?
We all like Will, but he would not be a good President. Can’t have a self-described beta male as the most powerful person on the planet.
I work in Texas government and I’m pretty sure if we tried to do what Utah did, people would riot outside our building. Probably would say we’re wasting tax dollars and get paid too much to only work 4 days a week hah
from texas can confirm that riots would insue especially in north texas.