Ask Lemmy

A few years ago I went back from 40 hours per week to 36 hours per week. In practice this means one five day week, and one four day week with Fridays off, giving me a long weekend. A few colleagues do this too, and some others opted for a 32 hour week, with four days each week.

It has been a pleasant experience for me, and I would preferably not go back to a 40 hour week.
I finally feel like I have time to enjoy my weekends again. Leaving me enough time to do chores, fulfill social obligations and engage in my hobbies.

It is also helpful that after taxes the wage difference between working a 40 hour week and a 36 hour week is not that significant in the Netherlands. So I would easily trade the wages for the healthier work-life balance.

I work in a billable hours type job, and thus took a pay cut when dropping to 90% but it gives me one full day off every two weeks, and it has been great. I have a day that is mine. I resolved not to do any recurring tasks on that day (no mowing the lawn or doing the groceries or stuff like that) so that it stays a day for me to do something interesting and new, or just hang around and decompress in a coffee shop somewhere. Very much reccomend.

I wish my job would do this but not only do they refuse, we don't even do the 7.5 x5 we do 8.75 x5 and 45min unpaid lunch so we're at exactly 40 hours...

I do a compressed schedule. The biggest benefit to me is that I commute less. The extra day off is nice, but I often find I don’t do much with it because I am so tired from work.

I'm working 36 hours in four 9-hour days.

I changed to part-time because I was exhausted and close to a burnout, since my brain stayed in work mode for most of Saturday too, and I was hoping to have two actual weekend days.

In the end, by increasing the time I'm not working, I actually managed to train my brain to not thinking about work outside of work. So not only I got the my 3 days weekends but I'm also disconnecting faster during work days.

My productivity also got objectively better, but that just makes me pissed off that I had to take a 10% cut to become a better worker.

i work in academia. i don't even do less than 40, but 4x9 and 1x4. in summer i do 4x10. before i started the job, i never would have imagined how much better life is having that extra day off, or even a half day on fridays. i love it so much, i probably wouldn't even start looking for another job if they cut my pay by $5K.

my previous position it was the standard 5x8, except we were required to take an unpaid hour for lunch, so it was really 5x9 (9am - 6pm, 5 days/week). i say fuck literally everything about that. they wouldn't ever even consider making the lunch hour optional, because they want you shackled to the desk an hour later every day.

I used to work a job with a 3-day work week, 12-hour shifts. 36 hours a week, company paid for 40. This was also physical labor, not an office job.

Four-day weekends were nice and all, but commuting during the week was brutal. After work, I'd have just enough time to drive home and go straight to bed, waking up just in time to go back. I honestly debated sleeping in my car sometimes, just so I could get more rest during the work week.

In my trucking career, one of my past jobs had me on a 4 days on/4 days off structure, which sounded nice on paper. But that company had a ton of behind-the-scenes problems that made things more stressful than they were worth. I would often have to work a fifth calendar day to end my rotation at home, and I never made anywhere near the money that company claimed I would.

I do 3x10 and it's awesome. I used to be on a 3 on, 4 off pattern which was ideal but I'm on 1 on, 2 off, 2 on, 2 off now. It's still good. Couldn't reccomend it enough.

you have a typo in “affected”

9-day-fortnight compressed.

I absolutely love the time-shifting so I have that unscheduled day. It's a day to do chores or appointments, and with stat-holidays it's easy to land a week off.

It's so awesome, I select jobs for that.