The New Yorker:

There seems to be an intrinsic mismatch between American hustle culture and a call to work less. But we need fewer things to do. Starting now.

By Cal Newport

In early December, the Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed the Thirty-Two-Hour Workweek Act. This bill, introduced by a California Democrat, Mark Takano, amends the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act to reduce the federally recognized standard workweek from forty hours to thirty-two. The direct beneficiaries of this change would be hourly wage workers, who could potentially earn more overtime pay. But salaried knowledge workers would also be affected by the cultural shift that Takano’s bill would initiate. If a four-day workweek were made the federal standard, working less would no longer be a disruptive experiment undertaken by a few startups. Instead, it would be an option that employers would have to justify not offering—a justification that might become harder to sustain as more studies indicate the potential benefits of fewer workdays. Recent research out of Iceland, for example, had more than twenty-five hundred participants, many of them in desk jobs, try a four-day workweek. The data reveal that these workers felt more energized and less stressed, owing, in part, to increased amounts of time for socializing and hobbies, and more flexibility in tackling domestic chores. Takano signalled that he had the interests of the Zoom class in mind when he discussed the proposed legislation. “After a nearly two-year-long pandemic that forced millions of people to explore remote work options,” he wrote, “it’s safe to say that we can’t—and shouldn’t—simply go back to normal, because normal wasn’t working.”

For knowledge workers, the biggest sign that the status quo is broken is the rise in self-reported burnout. This past summer, McKinsey and Lean In collaborated on a survey of more than sixty-five thousand North American employees, primarily from knowledge-sector jobs. They found a significant increase in those describing themselves as feeling burnt out “often” or “almost always,” an increase that was particularly sharp for women. A recent Gallup poll shows that American workers are now among some of the most stressed in the world. Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief workplace scientist, pointed out how these stress measures rose alongside metrics that show an increase in employee efforts. “The intersection of work and life needs some work,” he said.

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