We should be looking forward to a 90-hour work schedule—per month

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Is Thursday becoming the new Friday in Britain? Under Keir Starmer’s Labour government, UK workers can request a four-day compressed week. More than 90% of participating businesses in the UK decided to stick with a four-day workweek after a successful trial in 2022; some even made the change permanent.

Since 2021, the government of Japan, a hard-working nation, has supported a shorter workweek. At least 54 “deaths from overwork," including heart attacks, occur in Japan annually. According to Dutch author and journalist Rutger Bregman’s 2016 article in The Guardian, titled ‘The solution to (nearly) everything: working less,’ cutting back on work hours will improve worker safety and address environmental issues, stress, inequality, happiness and unemployment.

For example, over the course of two years, Portugal gradually lowered its workweek from 44 to 40 hours, which had positive benefits, particularly for women and employees who had a lot of family responsibilities. Therefore, if someone believes that the amount of work done is just proportionate to the number of hours worked, they should revisit the well-known Parkinson’s Law, which was illustrated in a hilarious essay published in The Economist in 1955 by Cyril Northcote Parkinson. It claims that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.

Parkinson tells the story of a lady whose only daily chore is to mail a postcard, which would take three minutes for a busy person to do. But the woman takes an hour to find the card, another half hour to locate her glasses, 90 minutes to write it, 20 minutes to decide whether to take an umbrella on her stroll to the mailbox, and so on, until her day is full. Before the Industrial