About this collection

What it is

One organisation of about ninety people moved to a four-day week over eleven weeks. As the transition ran, somebody wrote down each thing that stopped and the week it stopped: thirty-eight entries, each with a note of whether anybody had said anything about it at the time.

The list was then kept, and for the following seventy-eight weeks each entry was marked up with what had become of it. Fourteen were never asked for. Eleven came back without anyone deciding. Eight were asked back. Five became problems, at a median of thirty-one weeks.

Nothing here is drawn from outside those thirty-eight rows. There is no second source, no survey and no benchmark.

What it argues

That a shorter week is a subtraction, and that the difficult part is not whether output holds but how long it takes to learn which removal mattered. On this record the removals nobody discussed were the slow ones, and the median wait before a problem surfaced was longer than the pilot that would have reported on it.

What it does not do

It does not say whether anybody should work four days. That depends on things this record knows nothing about.

It does not claim the numbers travel. Five problems out of thirty-eight is a small number in one organisation, and anybody quoting it as a rate has taken it past what it can carry. What travels is the practice: write the list, record whether anybody said anything, and read it back in a year.

It does not identify any person, employer or workplace, and it will not.

It does not argue against shorter weeks. The largest figure on this site runs the other way: of the twenty-four removals that came back, the median return was under half the load the same thing had carried before, which means the reduction was larger than the headline count suggests.