I often hear people making statements like the one in the title (I'd kill to...), but usually the first response that jumps into my head is "No, you wouldn't."
If you really wanted a four day work week, you would have one. You'd make it a priority and either negotiate it into your current job or go find an employer who was flexible enough to allow it.
The fact that you're working 5 days a week can be taken as a statement that you are in fact content to work 5 days per week.
I used to get this a lot when I'd come back from a long trip. "I wish I could just drop everything and go traveling for a whole year..." But you can. You just haven't. And if you thought about it, you'd probably realize that you really just prefer to lead the life you're leading.
The key is to understand yourself and what you really want. Then do that.
Somewhat related, I love this quote from Eliezer_Yudkowsky:
"Have you ever caught yourself saying something like, "I just don't understand how a PhD physicist can believe in astrology?" Well, if you literally don't understand, this indicates a problem with your model of human psychology. Perhaps you are indignant - you wish to express strong moral disapproval. But if you literally don't understand, then your indignation is stopping you from coming to terms with reality. It shouldn't be hard to imagine how a PhD physicist ends up believing in astrology. People compartmentalize, enough said."
I don't know about other countries, but where I live the default is working six days a week. Some lucky people work half time on Saturdays. I work five days a week. It's the first thing I tell a potential employer. I've tried to get a four day week, but it's just not happening. I can surely tell you that getting a four day week where I live is 99% impossible. And what gives that that 1% is in my industry?
I'd kill for a four day week, but it just isn't happening in my country. I'd rather have a job (and one I enjoy at that), than not having one. I wish I had a four day week, but I can't because then my family doesn't eat while I look for this utopian workplace (which may not exist) that caters to all my wants.
I indulged in hyperbole. I mean that I would really like a four day week. It would be good for my personal research.
If I have kids, I would still like the option to work a four day week, but for different reasons. By kids, I mean children, not baby goats. I used slang just there.
Just four days a week and a year. That is a far cry from "a pleasure cruise to the moon" and "peace for all mankind".
But there is a middle ground. You can certainly work towards things, but depending on your situation and available resources, you may not be able to achieve some of them in the desired time frames.
If a four-day week was important enough for you to literally kill for - and yeah, that's hyperbole - you could probably find a way of making it happen if it was more important to you than to everyone else.
Two years ago I switched to 30 hour week, and there is no way I'm going back. I'm happier, in better shape and get so much more done at home.
I do understand why people work like crazy, they have huge mortgages or other loans. I cut my hours before taking huge loan (I have smallish student loan to pay), so I just need to adjust my future house/apartment to my income. It's much more easier this way, than to first take huge loan and the trying to cut hours.
But for my friends who don't have that much debt, I always recommend them to work less. Here in Finland we have quite heavy progression in income tax. It makes the pay cut smaller, since your tax percentage goes down. And if you have small kids, kindergartner bills goes also down, since you can pick them up earlier.
It's amazing how big difference two hours a day can make. Nowadays I exercise at least three times a week (I lost 10 kilos this fall, yay!), I cook better and healthier food and do some programming as a hobby.
Before cutting my hours, I made more or less average pay, now my salary is pretty much the same as median salary.
And I don't think I get any less done at work than I used to. I'm quality assurance engineer and I don't believe that anyone can really be productive for 8 hours a day in non-trivial tasks.
I would love to do this. I'm on the no debt, small house end of things. However, most employers in US (at least in my experience in the midwest) are still in the factory mindset. Meaning they want you in your seat by start time and there until end time. Working from home or working less hours is still looked on with suspicion (but the work from home situation is starting to improve).
I just don't think many employers are enlightened enough to allow a 30 hour week for knowledge workers (in the US and at this point in time).
Totally agree with your lifestyle though. I would trade big house/car for more free time any day.
Also, high-tech industry is in a sad state in the Netherlands. Large IT projects fail at a remarkably high rate. Successful start-ups move out. Foreign tech corporations settle only for localization and catching a tax break. There is not much of an engineering culture. Salaries are generally low, venture capital non-existent. I moved abroad.
Ironically, Dutch engineering education is among the best of the world, but after college, there's nothing that keeps computer engineers like Dijkstra, van Renesse, Vogels, Kaashoek, Moolenaar and van Rossum at home.
I would say salaries are good, comparing salaries and cost of living (comparing to London or Paris for example).
I also heard contrary statements to yours regarding venture capital (may not be at the level of the US though).
And, there are a bunch of technology companies (TomTom, booking.com, Hyves...).
Companies seem to have a hard time hiring locals though, and there are quite a lot of foreigners working in IT. So that seems to corroborate your point about Dutch going abroad (or maybe simply not interested in software)
Salaries are low in the Netherlands for IT people. I'm a Windows admin and also moved and went from pretax 34K euros in Amsterdam to $110K in California in 2006.Then add on top of that a sales tax and an income tax that are each roughly 10% lower in the US. Even if you compensate for lower benefits, cost of living differences and a possible increase of my value due to additional skills learned, there is a massive difference. I practically went from rags to riches just by moving (and also went from about 8 weeks vacation a year to... nothing :).
Sure, salaries are much higher in US, even more so in California. :-)
But, by european standards, it's pretty good. London and Paris are more expensive cities and salaries are lower (except maybe in finance).
I went from 31K in Toulouse (France) to 45K in Amsterdam 3 months later :-) Not really rags to riches but still a very nice increase, even adjusting to the higher cost of living.
I work between 25 and 30 hours a week. I don't earn a great income, especially compared to figures mentioned here, but it's enough to pay the bills and I'd rather spend more time at home than at work.
It works because we have a very modest house with an equally modest mortgage. We own the car, my wife runs a very tight budget and we don't have many other outgoings. Our largest expense (greater than the mortgage payments) are school fees; we send our 4 kids to a Montessori school but we're happy to pay the money because we can afford it (just) and it's something we both strongly believe in
The downside to the extra time I have, is that I haven't exactly used it wisely - in fact I've mostly squandered it, which makes me sad looking back at the year gone by.
The downside to the extra time I have, is that I haven't exactly used it wisely - in fact I've mostly squandered it, which makes me sad looking back at the year gone by.
I have been thinking about this myself, and I realized something: This squandering that I am doing... I WANT to squander. I want that playtime or whatever. It was what I enjoy at that time. Is it truly time wasted?
I did a PhD, a postdoc, and I worked from home for a little while. Home time mostly seems unproductive. I find it useful not to regret and just to try and do a little bit more each day.
"...if we insisted on full-time surgeons we would have a personnel problem: Three in four of our junior doctors are female."
We have had "part time doctors" in the US for a while, not to mention a movement toward "girl specialties" (read: gyno/derm/few others). It's a significant contributor to our rising medical costs.
Supply of medical services = (# of doctors) x (average hours worked). The # of doctors is basically fixed (all medical school slots are filled, and there is no movement to build more), which means part time doctors reduce the supply of medical services. Net result: rising prices (note: not the only cause of this), fewer people being treated.
Hopefully things work out better for the dutch than for us.
I think China has a very forward thinking idea on this: if training slots are limited by government fiat, raise standards for women relative to men (since society will get fewer hours of output from a given woman, she will need a higher productivity to compensate).
We have had "part time doctors" in the US for a while, not to mention a movement toward "girl specialties" (read: gyno/derm/few others). It's a significant contributor to our rising medical costs.
Actually, an increase in the number of doctors (or, presumably doctor-hours) seems to lead to an increase in medical care costs. Adding more doctors increases the amount of medical service provided rather than providing the same amount of service at a reduced cost.
Could you provide a source? It sounds interesting, if true.
Such a result has interesting implications. Since we know the demand for medicine is not perfectly inelastic (various experiments with copays prove this), it would suggest that some external force (insurance companies?) is keeping prices down and the constraining factor is supply.
Interesting, but hardly conclusive. Two problems with the conclusion you are trying to make:
Cheaper health care != less money spent on health care. Consumers might purchase more health care even as prices come down (resulting in more money spent).
This data doesn't show the direction of causality. It could just as easily reflect doctors chasing money as it could reflect prices increasing as a result of doctors becoming available.
(Similarly, states with more illegal immigrants tend to spend more money on farm labor. Do illegal immigrants raise the prices of farm labor?)
The two towns are a framing device for the article and provide a rhetorical starting point for an investigation of various issues and trends with health care in America.
I'm pretty sure that you could skim the article and find some numbers if you wanted to.
This seems to be a basic personal economics issue - would you rather work 40+ hours a week at a job that paid X, or 20-30 hours at a job that paid X*2?
That's the rationalization a lot of professionals are making.
Similarly, if you're offering a rare/unique service that is in high demand, and that only you personally can provide, and you start to become overworked, do you raise rates? If you want time off, would it not make sense to raise rates until you have a better work/non-work time balance?
Everything you say is true for a free market in goods/services. In that case, rising prices would induce more people to become doctors, thereby increasing the supply.
Unfortunately, there is no free market in medical training - supply is artificially capped. A huge number of qualified people who want to become a doctor are turned away from medical school, and the government artificially restricts the number of medical schools (at the behest of the AMA) [1].
[1] Some numbers. I'll assume the average black medical student is qualified (but the 49'th percentile is unqualified), giving me cutoff of MCAT VR 8.3 for a "qualified doctor". This cutoff is chosen so I can call people who disagree with me a racist. Some gaussian-fu suggests we could train at least 10-15k more doctors per year.
The best job I ever had (schedule-wise) was when I worked 30 hours/week at home.
My normal day would be: get up at six and start work answering emails. Around eight I'd rustle up a quick breakfast and eat it at my desk while I started making the calls I needed to make. Done at noon.
If the 6 AM start time seems horrible, consider this: my commute from bed to desk was less than 30 seconds and being done before noon was a powerful motivator.
However a large portion of my job was traveling to different meetings throughout the state. Depending on the location, these trips could take three to five hours. So, if I had two meetings a week, I'd cut back my "office time" the day before or the day after.
Regardless of how much travel I did, I was done for the week when I hit 30 hours. I was done before Friday 90% of the time.
For about four months of that time, my fiancee (who also worked from home) was living with me. We would often go have lunch together or see a matinee.
I don't know, I'm italian and people here don't know English, yes a few do, but it's still the exception. I've also just lived 6 months in Madrid and it's even worse. I know that countries in the north of Europe are better in this sense but I see Greece to be more like Italy and Spain education than say, Netherlands education.
Yep, most people here don't speak English to any passable level. Even if they did, though, it's a bit hard for everyone to up and move out. Many people do, but that's not a viable way of solving the problem for an entire country.
I was working for a company that has every second Friday off, which was pretty good. However the work wasn't. So I started looking around, but was not finding any work I was interested in doing. Eventually an old client called (I'm a contract software dev) and asked if I'd be interested in coming back. I wasn't really excited about going back there, but I knew it would be better than where I currently was. So I figured I'd just throw out a question:
"Can I work 3 days a week?"
They accepted a week later, and I spent the entire summer working 3 days at this company, while spending more time with my wife and newborn son.
Sometime in September/October, I received another email from another old client who was desperate for developers. I told him that I could only spare 2 days a week, not expecting him to accept this. Only he did. Shit, now I have to work 5 days again! But this job is only a 15min commute, and I can work from home 1 of these days.
I guess the point of this story is that sometimes you will get what you ask for, especially if you have a good reputation. All you have to do is... ask for it.
I work a four day week, 10 hours a day (which I am thinking is different from the article's example) and love it. However, I've seen a dozen plus others try it and all switch back so it obviously isn't for everyone.
Years ago, I had a job where I had a four day week. (Actually four days a week every week, and an extra half day one week in three.) The trouble was, the extra couple of hours per day wore me down; after four days on, I needed an extra day just to get over the cumulative fatigue before I could enjoy the weekend.
The best single thing you can do to reduce working fatigue is to minimize your commuting time. If you commute an hour each way to work, then over a five day week, you've racked up an extra 10 hours -- not to mention the extra expense, and the aggravation periodically inflicted by traffic jams or public transport problems -- and the worst part of it is that it's mostly dead time. (I'll make an exception for commuting to work on foot or by bicycle, as part of an exercise regime.)
I'm in the same situation. I'd kill for a four-day week. My commute is approximately 2 hours door-to-door each way, assuming that the mass transit system doesn't suffer any delays.
Actually, I wonder at which point you guys notice that your productivity drops. Very often my productivity drops noticeably after 7 hours, already, but it can come back in the evening.
Also, it often drops after lunch, but this also depends on when we have lunch. It's significantly worse if we have lunch around 12:00 than around 13:30-14:00. Our research group loves to go at 11:30 (!!!) which destroys the whole day for me, so a few of us have just stopped eating together with them.
I telecommute as well and basically have the first six hours of everyday by myself, so I feel very productive during that time. After lunch it drops some, but luckily that is also when meetings are so I feel it doesn't matter as much. If I still have time left and don't feel very productive (which happens maybe one day a week, sometimes more though) I usually have some work that doesn't require much mental effort (like administrative or light maintenance) and work on that. If I couldn't define my schedule like this it would probably be harder.
"Seventy-five percent of Dutch women now work part time, compared to 41 percent in other European Union countries and 23 percent in the United States"
"Twenty-three percent of Dutch men have reduced hours, compared to 10 percent across the European Union and in the United States; another nine percent work a full week in four days."
And if you love doing something, you'll certainly love it more if you do it 24/7! The world isn't this black and white.
Some people are sprinters, and some are marathon runners, and even more people are some combination of the two at different points in their lives. Sure, some jobs require people who can sprint for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, with litte vacation, but many people don't want to live that way...
If you hate your job, you won't love it by reducing the hours, but it might make it more bearable. If you like/love your job, but it's pushing you a bit too hard, you may find it even more rewarding if you reduce your hours.
There are many things I love doing one day a week, but would tire of doing five days a week. It's not much of a stretch to imagine activities that would experience this knee at about four days a week.
While you may not begin to like something disgusting just by cutting back the time spent on doing it, you may begin to like something you already liked more if you reduce your workload.
I work a 4 day week on my day job and am switching to half-time in 2011. Funny thing is: I'd say I work something closer to 60 hours a week with the side-projects. I found it easier to adjust to the new standard of living by slowly weaning off the teat: first 80%, then 60%, then ...
I switch to working 3 days a week at my regular gig from Jan 1. Looking forward to trying out stuff I've wanted to for a while and spending more time with the family. Mostly excited about cutting back on the "waste" generated in "going" to work.
If you really wanted a four day work week, you would have one. You'd make it a priority and either negotiate it into your current job or go find an employer who was flexible enough to allow it.
The fact that you're working 5 days a week can be taken as a statement that you are in fact content to work 5 days per week.
I used to get this a lot when I'd come back from a long trip. "I wish I could just drop everything and go traveling for a whole year..." But you can. You just haven't. And if you thought about it, you'd probably realize that you really just prefer to lead the life you're leading.
The key is to understand yourself and what you really want. Then do that.