I love work. Some people don’t and can’t wait for the weekend, but I think I got lucky, partly through pure chance, and somewhat through multiple choices per year. In 2008 I opted for the four-day work week at my first job. I had only worked there for a year, and this “4-day workweek” you hear of now did not really exist back then. I mean, someone must have done it before me, but in the media/workplace etc I don’t think anyone was doing this. Pioneering. I don’t want to harp on about this too much but I think I saw something before most, and it’s key to remember this for later, when I talk about holidays, retirement and more.
It’s now 2024 – 16 years later – and work as we know it is changing fundamentally. As per usual it starts with the rich countries, but I think also with ones in economic or societal pressure. If in Japan work drives you to commit suicide, or to not have children, and that ruins the economy (when enough people do it, which is very much the case), and if your economy is ruined, society falls apart. I don’t just mean people can’t be rich and have fancy iPhones, and watch TV, I mean more like: there aren’t enough children at a school, so teachers are let go. There isn’t enough tax on income earners and 30% of your population supports 70% of it. There aren’t enough young people to do manual labour type jobs. Etc etc.
So, one way to help everyone is to take your 40 hours, over 5 days, and divide that up differently. Work for six days a week at 5 hours a day. Work for 4 days, at 9 hours a day. Work for 4 days, for six hours. Who knows – each culture and industry demands different things. I know a platinum mine I visited has to run 24/7/365 as it costs them around half a billion rand to stop and restart the whole mining operation. So they pay their Christmas workers extra, very easy maths. What if your entire society is struggling under teh burden of 40 hour weeks and raising children and pressure to pay off a home loan and and and. I am sure a country like Norway, or Australia can easily adjust things, but for us in RSA, it’s very tricky as we have so many problems. If income tax wasn’t 40%, but 20%, and medical aid was halved, or the equivalent of the NHS existed here and worked, or so many other things were fixed, we’d be in a whole different scenario. But, for the sake of idealism and adding words to a page, I’m just going to throw out some ideas of the business and life I am building, and what would be perfect for me.
Here is my multi-step plan for optimised living.
- Work five days a week, for six hours on each day. I’ve tried the three day weekend, it doesn’t quite work for me, and I prefer extra time each day, rather than working full days for four. I think a huge benefit is the extra time per day allows you to have more family time, more exercise time, more leisure time, time for cooking and cleaning and DIY etc. You can’t cram that all into a Friday, especially when someone tempts you with a weekend away and you throw the whole Friday out.
- Work on a cycle of six week sprints. Follow my usual routine of six weeks, then at the end of it, take a 3 day weekend. So your seventh week is a shorter week. This is when you get away, or literally turn your wifi off, and recharge at home or in your suburb, detoxing from the monotony of work rhythms.
- Get rid of so many of our public holidays. To the chagrin of most religions, just pick two slots in the year and give the whole country incentive to holiday simultaneously. For example, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29th December are all off, and then either go for Easter (and make some religious groups happy, and irritate the rest) or pick a more neutral time like May (weather is best in May worldwide, it’s the perfect month!) and give everyone a five day holiday. And then vitally: scrap the rest! People can obviously still celebrate women’s day, freedom day, dog day, flat white and pancake day and all the rest regardless, they must just do that, and then still go to work.
- With the extra days, make it that South Africa has 6-8 public holidays, and then everyone gets 20 days leave minimum. People need rest, without it, we die. Quite literally.
- Sabbaticals. I have often thought of retiring at 60 and then eeking out life till you die, which you don’t know the day and month of, unless you choose the path of euthanasia – coming to a country near you soon, seriously, it’s going to go viral, and worldwide. Then, I have thought of working till I die and just going more slowly about it, and the only issue with this is perhaps at 68 no one wants to work with you, or you are too slow, or your hands give you trouble (if in a trade, for instance). There are also these folk who do the “FIRE” thing – financial independence, retire early – and my only issue with that, is if you do that for, say your 30’s, then some of the best years of your life are gone while you ate cat food and just worked solidly. Without going into every single possibility, the one I have landed on is whatI just did earlier this year: six months off every 6.5 years. So perhaps working the whole of 2025 till the end of 2030, and then in 2031, taking half the year off – a solid six months in a row. I did it this past November 2023 to May 2024. However, as I owned my own business, I had to work about two hours a day for five of those months, with one month being entirely off. The next time I do this, I want to do it entirely off, and if it ends my business, so be it, I will start a new one, or get a job upon my return. This is very tricky to pull off, and the ideal scenario is getting a job with a company who does this in the first place. My wife was in a company that did this, but it was every five years you get three months off. Wonderful! I hope she works for them again once our kids are older and she can.