My 4-day workweek experience with full pay

I’ve found studies and experiments about people working fewer hours with the full pay are extremely interesting. After I had worked full-time and studied at the same time for the first half of semester I was tired and wanted a change. Started looking for job opportunities that would allow me to get a full pay with less working hours. The paycheck would have to cover my living without taking student loan aside. And for the next year I was indeed working 4-days a week and focusing solely on studies on Fridays.

Got introduced to the idea of 4-day workweek after talking to a familiar face in IT that had that kind of arrangement going. He totally loved it. There is also more than one study made about the 4-day week pointing positive impacts on employee mental health. Icelandic Government has probably made biggest national study on the matter. It was reported that productivity maintained or improved while mental and physical health of employees improved on the course of study. This led to 86% of Iceland’s workforce gaining right to shorter hours through union negotiations.

Link to the study: https://4dayweek.io/country/iceland.

How the week went down

The 4-day week itself was really nice – I’m certainly trying to get there again after graduation! I really liked focusing just studying on  Fridays. But. Cutting one day of the week can do only so much for distancing yourself from work culture when it’s unhealthy. Unfortunately that feels almost like a norm today on IT/ICT. I felt pressured to do more work on 4 weekdays that I would get the same amount of work done than other employees were able to perform in five.

At first I laughed it off and stuck with regular hours and felt great! But little by little I started to feel uncomfortable under the pressure. Eventually I felt like I can’t even take a decent break. From what I understood another employees were told to work harder by using me as an example. The whole work atmosphere was shitty and from my perspective that was the real issue – not that I worked 4 days a week.

So in a nutshell; my experience would’ve been better if I’d set up my boundaries stricter and stick to my guns. But of course when about an income it’s so much harder to do those things than in other areas of life. And I have to loosen the grip on my professional pride as well if that’s being questioned about not doing extra. I’ve given a lot of thought how to not make same mistakes again. That I would be able to live my best life after getting a new type of work settlement arranged in the future. So it was a learning experience too.

Takeaways

Having a good enough income with less work and stress is a goal I want to pursue in the future. Over extending “productivity window” doesn’t work for me. I estimated that my actual peak performance and most intense focus of the day lasts about 4 hours. That’s it. So all other hours have slower pace anyway or can be considered as fluff time.

Technology should free up time for new innovations or people enjoying themselves. Not to cause more mental health problems. I wanted to share my own experiences since I think it’s important to discuss about these options and how to make them more accessible possibility for more people. If employers aren’t warming up to the idea in the future maybe I’ll need to look into entrepreneurship or B2B options to make it happen. But I really wish work life would embrace the idea!

Have you worked less hours with the full pay? Feel free to leave a comment about it. Or leave a link If you have written more about it already on some platform.
I’d love to read about other people’s experiences!