Four-day workweeks are nigh, followed by zero-day workweeks

6 June 2024

There has been talk of the four-day workweek for as long as I can remember. We were told about it when I started school. Yet it’s to fully, properly, officially, arrive. The work week is still, for the most part, in many places, five days: Monday to Friday.

We don’t live in an age where Monday to Thursday is the norm. Or, as I’d prefer it, if four day weeks becomes a thing: Tuesday to Friday.

The sooner Monday absorbed into a three-day weekend, the better. No more Mondayitis hey? Still, a four-day work week is stepping closer. A number of companies and government organisations are embracing it, as Andrew Keshner writes for Marketwatch.

For the record, I will however strive to continue posting to disassociated at least five-days per week*.

But what of the zero-day workweek… utopia, we also heard about at school? When computers were meant to be doing everything, so people didn’t have to lift a finger. If AI is all it is cracked up to be, the zero-day workweek may likewise be nigh. But, as Joanna Maciejewska says, we’re not presently training AI correctly to bring that about:

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

We need to be training AI to do the grunt work, not the creative stuff. It’s very simple really. If we’re no longer going to the workplace (and presumably living in a universal basic income world), we’re going to need something to do with the time we’ll have in all those seven-day weekends, fifty-two weeks of the year. You’re already looking at what I’ll be doing when the zero-day workweek arrives.

But what about you? What will you do when the work-free utopia of the future materialises?

* excluding (possibly) holidays, etc.