What stopped
What a shorter week actually removes
Four days hold fewer hours than five, and the hours that go take work with them. The thirty-eight things that stopped here, and what sort of thing they were.
The monthly slide deck nobody presented
week 1 · still not missed
Printed copies of the weekly rota
week 0 · asked back after 1 week
The daily stand-up
week 0 · crept back after 3 weeks
Reading supplier contracts before renewalTwo renewals went through on terms nobody had read
week 2 · surfaced after 22 weeks
Not missed 1Crept back 1Asked back 1Surfaced 1
Four removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. One of them has not been asked for in the 78 weeks since. Of the rest, one was asked back, one crept back and one surfaced as a problem. One removal of each of the four kinds, from the thirty-eight counted here.
The thirty-eight, in order
Every removal written down during one eleven-week transition to a four-day week, with the week it stopped and what became of it.
Nobody stopped doing the work
The shorter week did not remove any of the organisation's actual output.
What a procedure is actually doing now
Most of what a shorter week removes was introduced for a reason that no longer applies, by somebody who has left.
The four kinds of thing that stopped
Error-catching, knowledge-carrying, attention-keeping and occasion-marking.
Why eleven weeks matters
The transition compressed thirty-eight removals into a single quarter.
The removals nobody proposed
Seven things on the list of thirty-eight were never decided by anybody.
Who decides what goes
On this record the removals proposed by the people who did the work were safer than the ones proposed from above, and the reason is not that they were wiser.
The things that cannot stop
A shorter week does not reduce what has to be covered. Where cover is fixed the hours come from somewhere else, and here they came from four people.
What the list cost to keep
The record this site is built on took about three hours to produce over eighteen months.