Other shapes
Four shapes of a shorter week
A four-day week is one of several arrangements, and each one forces a different set of removals.
The Friday clean-down of the workshopThe removal a compressed week cannot make
week 9 · crept back after 22 weeks
A named person on the phone until sixThe removal staggered cover is designed to avoid
week 7 · crept back after 5 weeks
Visits to the two furthest sitesThe removal a nine-day fortnight makes instead
week 7 · asked back after 12 weeks
Crept back 2Asked back 1
Three removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Every one of them produced an event inside the 78 weeks watched. Of these, one was asked back and two crept back. Three removals that a different shape of week would have handled differently.
The Friday clean-down of the workshopThe removal a compressed week cannot make, because Friday still exists
week 9 · crept back after 22 weeks
A named person on the phone until sixThe removal staggered cover is designed to avoid
week 7 · crept back after 5 weeks
Visits to the two furthest sitesThe removal a nine-day fortnight makes instead, by keeping the long days for travel
week 7 · asked back after 12 weeks
Crept back 2Asked back 1
Three removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Every one of them produced an event inside the 78 weeks watched. Of these, one was asked back and two crept back. Three of the thirty-eight, chosen because each is handled differently by a different shape.
This record is of one arrangement: a four-day week at full pay, with the fifth day gone for everybody on the same day. It is the arrangement that gets written about, and it is one of at least four in common use.
The differences between them are usually described in terms of hours — how many, arranged how. That description misses the thing that determines whether any of them works, which is what each one forces an organisation to stop doing.
The four
The four-day week. Thirty-two hours or thereabouts, four days, same pay. The fifth day does not exist. This record.
Compressed hours. The same total hours in fewer, longer days. Four tens instead of five eights. Nothing is removed by arithmetic; the hours are all still there.
The nine-day fortnight. Nine working days in two weeks, with the tenth off, usually alternating across the team so that every day is covered by somebody.
Annualised hours. A yearly total rather than a weekly one, drawn down against demand. Busy weeks are long, quiet weeks are short, and the shortness is where the benefit is taken.
What each one does to the work
| shape | hours lost per person | days without cover | what has to stop |
|---|---|---|---|
| four-day week | about 8 a week | one, for everybody | a great deal |
| compressed hours | none | one, per person | very little |
| nine-day fortnight | about 4 a week | none, if staggered | a moderate amount |
| annualised hours | none overall | none | almost nothing |
The middle column is the one people look at. The right-hand column is the one that determines whether the arrangement survives contact with the organisation.
Compressed hours removes almost nothing
This is the arrangement most often confused with a four-day week and it is a different thing entirely.
The hours are unchanged. Nothing has to stop, because no work has been displaced — it has been rearranged into longer days. An organisation can adopt compressed hours without writing a list of removals at all, and most do.
That is its advantage and its limit. There is no subtraction, so there are no slow consequences of the kind this site is about, and equally there is no resizing of procedures, no forced examination and none of the savings that come from it. Compressed hours is a change to when people work. It is not a change to what the organisation does.
The costs it does have are real and are of a different kind — ten-hour days are not eight-hour days with two hours added, particularly for anybody with a fixed obligation at the end of the day — but they are not the costs this record is about.
The nine-day fortnight removes about half as much
Four hours a week rather than eight. Something has to stop, but roughly half as much, which means a shorter list and a smaller set of slow consequences.
It has a second property that matters more than the arithmetic: if the days off are staggered, every day of the fortnight is covered by somebody. The things on this record that could not stop — phone cover, deliveries, fixed returns — are not displaced at all.
The cost is that nobody is off at the same time, which removes the one genuine simplification of a whole-organisation four-day week, and means every procedure that depends on two particular people being available has to be rethought.
Annualised hours removes nothing and moves everything
The total is unchanged; the distribution follows demand.
Nothing has to stop, and that is the point of it. It is the arrangement for organisations whose work has a shape — seasonal, cyclical, event-driven — and the benefit is taken as predictable quiet periods rather than as a shorter week.
It also has the longest and least visible lag of any of the four, for a reason specific to it: a procedure that quietly stops happening during a busy period is not removed, it is deferred, and nobody writes down a deferral. On this record's evidence that is the worst possible position — a removal with no entry, no owner and no expectation that anybody will look.
Why this matters for reading the literature
Published accounts of "shorter working weeks" cover all four, usually without distinguishing them, and the four have almost nothing in common beyond the headline.
A positive result from compressed hours says nothing about a four-day week, because the thing that makes a four-day week risky — thirty-eight simultaneous removals — does not occur in compressed hours at all. A positive result from a nine-day fortnight is about half as much evidence as it looks.
The question to ask of any account is not how many hours. It is: what did you have to stop doing, and have you got the list?