The short working week was supposed as the future. Instead we are enslaved by 24/7 working and the tyranny of technology
It's as if the planets are aligned ? a late Easter has coincided with the royal wedding and the May Day bank holiday to give us a rare run of days off. In case you hadn't noticed, the next three weeks comprise two or four days, with a three-day week sandwiched between. The canny among us will have recognised the multiplier effect ("Take 11 days of annual holiday allowance and get 23 days out of the office!") and got their holiday requests in early. What will the rest of us do with a series of four- and three-day weeks?
Oddly enough, the four-day week was once envisaged as the future. As Prime Minister in the 1950s, Winston Churchill saw a time when accelerating technological advancement would enable us to "give the working man what he's never had ? four days' work and then three days' fun". This did not seem as improbable then, as it sounds now. After all, the weekend was a comparatively recent and expanding invention. "What's a weekend?" asked the (fictional) Edwardian Dowager Countess of Grantham quite plausibly in Downton Abbey, set at a time when Saturday mornings were still worked.
Thirty years ago, as a schoolboy, I spent a summer working as a warehouseman in the London district of Moorgate. We had a practice of doing no work after tea-break on a Friday afternoon, sitting around playing word-games until it was time to clock off. "You'll see," the foreman said to me. "Soon, everyone will get Friday afternoons off."
Now the warehouse is a bank with a fleet of chauffeured Mercedes parked outside at all hours. I'm sometimes nostalgic about my conversation with the foreman, as I am about the horse-drawn cart that still delivered beer from the nearby Chiswell Street brewery. So where did it all go wrong? Not only has the concept of the three-day weekend evaporated, but, for many, the two-day weekend is in jeopardy. A survey of 4,000 workers conducted by Premier Inn last November found we don't unwind, on average, until 12.38 on Saturday night; by 3.55 on Sunday afternoon we are beginning to worry about work again and 53% of us are "too tired" to enjoy the weekend fully. Nearly half check our work emails over the weekend.
Most of my peers in corporate life are welded to their BlackBerrys all weekend, leaping upon each message as it arrives.
This crowding out of leisure time is due to something of a perfect storm: hurtling advances in communications technology colliding with changes in attitude to activity. Partly as a result of the available technology, we have stripped ourselves and our offices of many of the old indicators of hierarchy, such as PAs and corner offices. Instead, we have conflated activity with status, so that how busy we are has become an indicator of our importance.
Enabled by the technology, we are now able ? and often required ? to compete globally. The day might start with a 6am conference call with Singapore and end at 10pm with one with the west coast of the US. A new client in the Gulf might have us emailing all Sunday ? for them, a working day. Then there's the villain of the piece ? the technology itself.
My own research into the use of a BlackBerry, and other smartphones, took workers from all over the world in a variety of organisational sizes and contexts, and measured email behaviours. I compared those that used BlackBerry (or similar "smart" devices with "push" functionality) with those that checked email through other means (an older phone or a laptop). Those with BlackBerrys, or similar, had 13% higher email volumes but spent two and a half times as long as the second group checking their emails outside working hours.
It is as if simply owning a BlackBerry, or similar device, drives this compulsive checking behaviour. Of course, our brains are "wired" to seek out new information ? in our ancestral environment information about a food source or the presence of an enemy might have made the difference between life and death. Today, it is more likely to be a mundane email about somebody losing their keys in the office. Yet the vibrating device, with its flashing light, stimulates our brain's dopamine system in much the same way as the flashing lights of a fruit machine do to a gambling addict. The weary jokes about "CrackBerry" and email "addiction" have more than a grain of truth.
To feed our increasingly fervent need to remain attached to our inboxes, BMW and Research In Motion ? the manufacturers of BlackBerry ? have collaborated to enable you to "sync" your BlackBerry with your car. So that clever panel on the dashboard that helps you manage your in-car stereo and your satnav can now read each email to you as it arrives.
It might feel as if email and BlackBerry have crept into our lives gradually, but, in the context of 5,000-year history of written communication, their arrival has been sudden and disruptive. Whether you were dictating a contract to be inscribed on a clay tablet in Babylon in 3000BC or hand writing an internal memo to be typed up by a secretary in the 1980s, the complexity of sending formal written communication meant you were selective in its use. Now that the barriers have been removed, so have the filters that weeded out messages that were either too urgent, or too trivial, to be committed to writing.
As a result, a large proportion of the messages we send and receive are unproductive ? it is easier to send, forward or "reply all" than it is to think for a moment if there might be a better way. Research by the University of Toronto suggests that 12% of the average company's payroll is soaked up by the unproductive use of work email.
While the way we work in the 21st century may be long on hours, but short on productivity, there are other ways in which the culture of frenetic activity actually works against us. We are not, after all, production workers like Churchill's "working man" of the 1950s. A far higher proportion of us ? men and women ? work with our brains doing tasks of cognitive complexity. Our job titles include words such as analysis, knowledge and intelligence; almost all of us are required to do some level of deep thinking.
And yet the unintended result of our busy way of working, straddling evenings and weekends, is that we have crowded out deep thinking. If, even in our time in the car, we are in thrall to the inbox, there is a risk that we simply do not give ourselves the space for problem-solving, reflection and creativity. How often have we stumbled upon the answer to a problem when doing something else altogether such as showering, gardening or taking a walk?
There have been a number of recent advances in the understanding of the way or brain works ? or doesn't work. Most of the cognitively complex work we are required to do is highly dependent on the brain's pre-frontal cortex, and neuroscientists, such as Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas, have observed that too much dopamine ? perhaps the result of over-stimulation from our flashing BlackBerrys ? can cause the functioning of the cortex to falter, leaving us frazzled, forgetful and finding it difficult to focus.
Is it any wonder that attention deficit disorder specialists are observing that we can invoke the symptoms of this malaise simply by the way we work? Worse still, for those in senior positions, the frenetic way we work can affect our leadership capabilities. As we fire from the hip as each email arrives, we risk losing the art of delegation ? thereby taking yet more work on our own shoulders ? but also start to slip on many of the other pre-frontal cortex functions such as the treatment of people. We lose our sense of decency and courtesy as our 24/7 way of working leads to irascibility.
It has long been recognised among occupational psychologists and physicians that proper rest and recovery is important, not just for long-term health and happiness but also for resilience at work, productivity and performance. The sad truth is, most of us are simply too busy to wake up to the facts.
So while we are further than ever from enjoying a four-day week as a permanent fixture in the calendar, the period about to unfurl before us offers us an opportunity to feel what it might be like. So treat this bounty of bank holidays as a chance to unplug from work and allow time for recovery, reflection and deep thinking. Who knows ? we may end up reclaiming the two-day weekend.
Ian Price is managing director of Grimsdyke Consulting, and author of The Activity Illusion: Why we Live to Work in the 21st Century and How to Work to Live Instead. To order a copy for �13.99 (including UK mainland p&p) visit guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846
A short history of shorter working
c.890 King Alfred the Great reputedly proclaims: "Eight hours' work, eight hours' sleep, eight hours' play, make a just and healthy day."
1496 Henry VII orders a 14-hour work day for field labourers from March to September (5am-dusk in winter).
1815 Foundation of the Ten Hours Movement, which aims to restrict hours for industrial workers.
1847 Women and children granted 10-hour working day, with a max of 60 hours a week, incorporating a shorter working day on Saturdays.
c.1900 Concept of two-day weekend forms in US as labour movements try to help Jewish workers taking Saturday instead of Sunday as the sabbath.
1926 US car manufacturer Henry Ford (pictured left) shuts down factories on both Saturday and Sunday while paying staff the same rate as before. "The country is ready for the five-day week," he announces.
1953 Winston Churchill foresees end of the Cold War heralding increased production and more leisure time for workers. "A four-day week, then three days' fun," he predicts.
1974 Government introduces three-day week to conserve electricity, in short supply due to miners strikes.
2008 Onset of credit crunch forces many UK manufacturing firms to restrict workers to four-day weeks.
2010 The New Economic Foundation claims a 21-hour working week would reduce power consumption and increase productivity.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/apr/16/four-day-working-week
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