The 40-hour workweek turns 97!

How often do I think about the Roman Empire? Not much, but I do think about Henry Ford around 40 times a week

I. A little bit of history... _{^{*If you want to skip the context, go to Section II}}

Enter Henry Ford: The name Henry Ford resonates with innovation and transformation. He revolutionized the auto industry with his assembly line techniques, but most fascinatingly (at least to me), Ford played a pivotal role in shaping the modern workweek.

Ford's transformation began in 1914 when he shocked everyone by reducing the workweek from six to five days, without a pay decrease. Then, in 1922, he introduced a formal 48-hour workweek, a significant reduction from 70-hour weeks in the early 1900s. Finally, on September 25th 1926, he pulled his boldest move and made the 40-hour workweek official.

Ford's thinking was that reducing employees' working time is a win-win: workers tend to be more productive if given an incentive, and the increase in leisure time leads to economic benefits (they will need to buy more cars). He was correct! Employee morale improved, productivity soared, and Ford's profits continued to rise. The success of the 40-hour workweek soon led almost every industry and country to adopt the same model.

Why are we still working the same number of hours? In 1930, John Maynard Keynes (famous economist) wrote an essay called "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". He envisioned a future where rapid technological progress lead to vastly improved living standards, and predicted that by the year 2030, the average person would work only 15 hours a week. Having just seen what Ford had pulled off, this prediction made sense; however, Keynes (as good economists do) missed out on the fact that humans are not rational beings.

There are several reasons why we seem to be stuck at 40 hours, the main one being that such a widespread adoption of this model now seems to be playing against its own evolution. For instance, imagine having an emergency and realizing your Doctor doesn't work on Fridays, or your kids’ Teacher not working on Mondays. It all can get really complicated, really fast.

There are several countries (Spain, Belgium, Japan, Iceland, California) leading experiments on the success of the 4-day workweek. These are shared in click-bait headlines, but the reality is way more complex than this. The fact is that these experiments fail to predict the long-lasting benefits of expanding this from small groups of people to the wider population.

Let's face reality: In the last 97 years, more economic prosperity and more productivity have created even more work, more things to desire, and has led to more working hours for knowledge workers (i.e. if you are reading this, you probably do work longer than 40 hours per week, right?).

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us the illusion that a big shift was coming, but slowly it is all going back to the way it used to be. The 5 day 40-hour workweek remains as strong as ever for corporations.

II. But shouldn't we do something? (Actionable proposal)

I hope if you read this far, you are convinced that the current work structure is outdated, and that probably you are not going to officially be getting “Fridays off” any time soon. So be a bit selfish and think about what you can do to change this for yourself.

Fake Deadlines: The power of giving yourself fewer time. "Parkinson's Law" states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. We experience this in our daily lives: Meetings scheduled for an hour, often take an hour; you pack your bags quicker the day before a trip; you work way faster as the deadline for a project is approaching.

Actually, there are several companies encouraging their employees to wrap up their "work" faster and have more time to dedicate to "out of the box" innovation; for instance, Google has a 20% Project Time, LinkedIn has 10% InDay projects, and Intel has Innovation Time Offs - ITOs.

I have done this myself! Inspired by this, from 2020 to 2022, on top of my responsibilities, I saved time during the week to create a program to teach others how to be more productive. As some of you know, this program reached tens of thousands of people around the world and will probably be one of my greatest professional accomplishments forever...and it was never my full-time job nor a task a manager told me to do. The secret is that if you work on something you are passionate about, you could even end up working more hours, but you won't even notice.

Proposal: Without making too much noise about it, just force yourself to finish your “work” in 4.5 days

Step 1: Plan your week (Basic guide here)

Step 2: When doing so, force yourself to fill your deliverables in 4.5 days instead of 5

• Actually, aim for 4 days because we all tend to overestimate what we can accomplish (See the Planning Fallacy)

• There are two options here: (A) You are actually good with prioritization and are planning to focus on your most impactful work, or (B) You are just cramming the same work and working a bit longer each day. It doesn’t matter; the important thing is that you leave half a day blocked for you.

Step 3: What can you do with the extra half a day? It depends on your own goals. Some ideas:

• You feel in control: Imitate Google and use the time to "Innovate". Work on a proposal for an idea you have but "haven't had the time to work on".

• You don't feel in control: Use these 4 hours to focus on your biggest work project. Yes, the one you end up pushing, the one you "don't have the time for".

• You feel like things are a bit "too much" right now: Use these 4 hours to plan ahead, to clear your head, to catch up with small things that are getting the best of you, to take care of yourself.

I don't think we will get to 15-hour workweeks by 2030, like Keynes predicted. Hope this article inspired you to go do something about the structure of your own workweek.

Henry Ford > Julius Caesar,

Jorge Luis Pando

PS: Keynes died at age 62 from a heart attack. His wife constantly complained he was working too hard (oh, the irony)