Transcript
Aidan McCullen The five-day workweek is a pillar of modern life, but it isn’t backed by science, ancient wisdom, or divine decree. It’s simply a relic of the industrial age and it’s time for an upgrade. What if we could accomplish more while working fewer days? A shortened workweek once seemed like a radical idea.
Today it’s embraced by innovative business leaders, forward-thinking politicians, and a new generation of workers demanding more meaningful work. In today’s book our guests are a pioneer of designing and leading four-day workweek pilots around the globe, and a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Fortune and Time Magazine, and they present a groundbreaking, data-driven exploration of why a four-day workweek is not merely possible — it’s necessary in an age of artificial intelligence.
It is a pleasure to welcome, before it’s even launched, the authors of Do More in Four; it offers a battle-tested blueprint for a smarter, more humane approach to work. And we’re joined by both authors. Joe O’Connor and Jared Lindzon, welcome to the show.
Joe O’Connor Pleasure to be here.
Jared Lindzon Thanks for having us.
Aidan McCullen Great to have you with us, guys. I have so many questions, but I thought first we’d start straight out and put out our stall. Why a four-day workweek? Maybe we’ll start first with you, Jared, and then come to you, Joe.
Jared Lindzon Why a four-day workweek? Well, I think maybe the best place to begin is by actually questioning why five days. Why is that the way that we’ve always done things, and is that still the best way to do things? Folks often think that there’s a good reason behind the five-day workweek — that it was created with a lot of thought and intention and optimised the ideal amount of rest and work time. But it’s very arbitrary, and we go into detail in the book about various labour-rights movements that ended up leading to a five-day workweek, not even all that long ago. It only became law in the United States about eighty years ago; it became standard a little before that. And once we start questioning the wisdom of the five-day workweek, it gives us permission to start considering whether or not that still suits our modern realities.
The reality for most organisations, most workers, is that there’s a lot of time spent at work, but there’s not a lot of time spent at work doing stuff that really matters for the business’s total output and outcomes in the long run. When you start to pare down all of the noise — all of the extra stuff, all the email writing and meeting attendance, and the stuff that takes up a lot of our time but doesn’t really move the needle — you realise that there is an opportunity to reduce the workweek without getting rid of the work that really matters. And if you want to inspire people to do the difficult work of assessing how they spend their time, incorporating new technologies, new systems, new processes, to really optimise every minute they’re on the clock, it takes a big incentive to inspire that kind of effort. And the four-day workweek is the perfect combination of providing that shared incentive and rewarding people for doing the work, a sort of galvanising force to ensure that the time that we’re spending at work is really time well spent and it’s not wasted, and therefore it gives us the freedom to do more in less time.
Joe O’Connor The big picture of why it’s time for a four-day workweek from a societal perspective, for me, is the fact that we have had decades now of incredible technological advancements and productivity gains — the types of advances that John Maynard Keynes, when he predicted in the 1920s that we’d all be working a fifteen-hour workweek by the end of the century, could scarcely have imagined. Richard Nixon, in the mid-fifties, talked about how we were on the cusp of a four-day workweek that would lead to a fuller and fairer family life for every American. We’ve had the kinds of progress that we could never even have imagined, and yet the gains of that progress have not necessarily been equitably shared and distributed with the workforce. I think this has led to a lot of the challenges that we have in our current moment when we think about division and economic inequality. And so, as we enter the age of artificial intelligence and everything that brings, I think it’s absolutely the right time to re-evaluate our relationship with work and what constitutes the modern workweek.
I think at an enterprise level, as Jared talked about, the nature of productivity has changed such that hours worked are actually not as direct a contributor to modern productivity as the motivation of the workforce, the energy and attention and focus of the workforce, the wellbeing and recovery of the workforce. And so all of these dimensions that are really critical to sustaining high performance in modern work can all be leveraged and optimised through something like a four-day workweek.
Aidan McCullen I wanted to build particularly on the artificial intelligence thing, because many people will see that as a replacement, but in a way what you guys talk about is an augmentation and actually doing away with some of those meaningless tasks — meetings, anybody? I think the unnecessary meeting aspect of work is one of the biggest killers of both productivity and morale in companies. But I’d love to hear from you what you think AI will bring to the table. Why will that reshuffle how we actually work?
Joe O’Connor Most of the stories that we talk about in the book of how organisations have transitioned to a shorter workweek are all about how they found ways to do more in less time. Often technology was a big part of that story — automating certain tasks, streamlining administrative processes — but if we look at what’s coming down the road in terms of agent AI and digital labour and the workforce, that’s going to do much more than that. And it’s not going to be just about doing more in less time, but it actually can create the conditions for the human workforce to focus on doing fewer things and doing them better. I think AI is going to change our relationship to productivity in that a lot of the things that we currently associate with efficiency — task speed, task volume, process speed — these are the types of things that increasingly are going to be outsourced to machines, and what that’s going to mean is it’s going to shift human value creation over to the effectiveness components of productivity — creativity, making good judgements and decisions, connecting and building relationships. All of these are the types of very human skills and human traits that actually rely much more on all of those things we talked about — motivation, wellbeing and energy. And so I think that those organisations that are looking at AI as purely cost cutting — short-term, squeezing one to two per cent more efficiency out of the workforce — are really coming at this in a very short‑sighted way. And that’s where I think there is this clear relationship between artificial intelligence and the prospect of a four-day workweek.
Aidan McCullen Jared, did you want to come in?
Jared Lindzon Let me throw something at you as the storyteller of the bunch. I like to anchor everything in historical context, and what Joe was talking about — this transition in the skills that people need to thrive in this workforce — we talk about in the book. Historically, before the Industrial Revolution, the skills that we needed to survive and thrive were very much human skills, like persistence and creativity — the stuff that we would characterise as soft skills, being able to communicate and collaborate — and the way in which we worked was probably something we’d label as a little bit more human. Anyone who knows much about the Industrial Revolution knows that it was a race towards hyper‑productivity, that we were essentially — labour was turned into a very calculable thing, humans were turned into robots in a way, and we lost much of the humanity and the skills required to thrive. Pre‑industrial versus industrial were completely different, and in the industrial age it wasn’t about our most human traits; it was about our most robotic traits — efficiency, productivity, punctuality, obedience, loyalty. These were prized in an industrial world, and keep in mind that many of our rules and structures are adopted from the industrial era, but we’re now, thanks to AI, re‑entering a world past the industrial era where once again our most valued traits are those that are our most human. And so, we’ve built this structure of work to emphasise and maximise our most robotic traits, but the past of work and the future of work are aligned in that our ability to be effective workers is going to depend on our most human traits. And that means rest time and recovery actually have net‑output gains when it comes to doing those quintessentially human things. And so as AI transitions the value that individual workers bring from our most robotic traits to our most human traits, I think there is an opportunity to create structures that are more conducive to improving those most human traits, which again come back to rest and coming to work as our best selves.
Aidan McCullen I often think about that — you see in organisations, usually the tech companies, sleep pods or a gym, but what you don’t see is people using them. And I think about this: imagine you walk into your CEO’s office and they’re having a nap. The first thing you’re going to think is, “Well, it’s well for you,” but actually they should be. To your very point, they should be doing that to get the best out of their mind. But because of that stigma that comes with it, we don’t do those things all the time. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of resistance to those things. Joe, I know you work in the field, bringing that to life inside organisations — resistance to both the four-day workweek, resistance to the future of work, but also resistance to AI.
Joe O’Connor I think what you’re talking about is this kind of cultural hard‑wiring that we’ve had within organisations that conflates activity and presence and availability with performance and dedication and commitment. And we talk in the book in a few places about this challenge where, for example, some research from Harvard this year talks about the existence of what they call the detachment paradox, where managers believe that when people disconnect from work and detach from work and take time away from work, that’s good for their performance — but yet, on the other hand, when people do that, these managers punish them when it comes to job evaluations and promotions. And that’s not because these managers are inherently bad people, and it’s not because they’re trying to sabotage the performance of their company, but it’s because of this cultural and mindset hard‑wiring that exists in these organisations. And so because that’s so deeply ingrained, it takes a really big lever and a really big shift to try and overcome that, and that’s what the four-day workweek represents. It is not just magically and automatically improving productivity by virtue of reducing time at work; it’s about using this as a forcing function and as an incentive to redesign work practices and processes, adopt new technologies, and really to bring the workforce with you in that endeavour.
Aidan McCullen That point about making work more human, and as a result more enjoyable, is a really important thing that you talk about in the book, because high‑quality talent inside organisations is actually quite a scarce thing. And when you have it all aligned and you have people engaged and working with their full discretionary effort, you just get way more done. And I’d love you to share some of the benefits of the four-day workweek — not only that will happen in the future, but what you’ve seen from clients and what you’ve seen historically.
Joe O’Connor I think the benefits of a shorter workweek can be categorised almost under three main headings. The first is organisations who are using this as a catalyst for productivity and for technological adoption — organisations that were otherwise struggling to transform, that were struggling to really mobilise the workforce around addressing some of these issues — using the four-day workweek as a shared reward, as an incentive to achieve those goals. The second is around wellbeing, and really seeing the four-day workweek as a strategic tool to provide people with greater rest and greater recovery, and to overcome issues with burnout. And we know, if you take the WHO definition of burnout, what it really means is people who feel cynical towards their work, who feel a lack of confidence in their own performance. And so therefore that’s something that isn’t just an individual wellness problem; that is very much a corporate productivity problem in its own right. And then the third one, and probably the biggest thing that has really driven the increase of adoption of this over the last number of years — and it relates to the tight labour market that you were talking about — is talent attraction and retention. According to Randstad, for the first time in the twenty‑five years that they have been studying the global workforce, this year was the first year that work–life balance was more important than pay. We’ve seen that across a number of different studies that we cover in the book. And so, in recognising that, organisations have seen the opportunity to actually use the four-day workweek as a competitive differentiator — to really develop this very unique value proposition, particularly for firms who maybe can’t compete in the top quartile of salary. And we tell some stories of organisations in the book who changed the rules of the game because they couldn’t play the game under, “We’re trying to hire product developers and engineers, but we’re competing with Meta and Google.” Doing something like a four-day workweek is a creative, alternative way to actually attract and retain that top calibre of talent.
Aidan McCullen But it’s important to say that you don’t recommend it as a perk; it’s more of a new model of actually working as well. Jared, you write the historical part of this; you’ve been writing about the future of work for over a decade. Maybe from your perspective, what have you seen — the shifts you’ve seen — to Joe’s point about it’s not these big companies; actually it’s other companies that can use it as a competitive differentiator to get that talent on board.
Jared Lindzon Yeah, absolutely. And as Joe mentioned, we talked to a few for this book that said that previously they would offer remote work before any of the large tech companies that they’re competing with were offering remote work, and that was how they attracted talent away from folks who they could never compete with on salary — that’s just a non‑starter for them. And then, all of a sudden, remote work became somewhat standardised — there’s been a pullback lately — but that was no longer a competitive differentiator. And so they began to explore the four-day workweek as the next big thing that they could offer that their competitors weren’t.
What I’ve seen over the course of my career is that, for a long time, we were talking about a pretty small group of companies that were competing with each other for the same talent and trying to outdo one another for those people. Now, the world we exist in today is that tech talent is needed in just about every corner of the economy. And so you’ve got companies well outside of Silicon Valley, in industries that would never have had to consider global competitive salaries before, that are trying to attract and retain the same talent that Google and Meta are — despite being in completely different sectors. And so that globalisation and expansion of the competition in the talent marketplace is requiring folks that can’t compete on salary — which is the vast majority of those competing with Silicon Valley — to find other ways to compete more effectively. And so that’s one of the advantages. We also find a huge amount of interest and uptake in industries and in roles that are particularly prone to burnout. One of the companies that we profile in the book is a family‑law firm. And the legal industry, and particularly the family‑law side of the legal industry, faces some of the highest burnout rates and has some of the most demanding work cultures. And when you combine the two — medicine’s another good example — there are industries that are willing to do anything to attract and retain talent except give them a little bit more of a reasonable lifestyle. Once you shift the conversation from short‑term productivity to long‑term sustainability, the four-day workweek becomes an investment — paying a little bit of time now to keep this person in the workforce and productive for longer. And when we’re talking about scarce talent in fields like technology, but also in fields as far as medicine and law, the opportunity to reduce burnout and attrition and absenteeism alone pays for any potential time loss, which again we can make up for by improving our processes. And then the last one that I’ll mention — Joe touched on this as well — study after study is showing that the average worker is afraid of AI. They are not just failing to embrace it wholeheartedly with open arms; they’re actively sabotaging the organisation’s strategies for adopting AI because there is genuine fear about what it means, the implications for their job — whether or not it’ll exist, what the responsibilities will be. And this fear of AI — a lot of individuals are seeing it as an adversary, not as a partner. And in order to shift that conversation, it takes organisations sharing in the rewards that AI promises, either through compensation or through the time that they’re going to get back. That is a powerful opportunity to change the conversation and to change the perspective from AI resistance to embracing AI, which could be the competitive differentiator for organisations of all shapes and sizes in the coming years.
Aidan McCullen In the book you talk about an organisation or an individual advocating for a four-day workweek and how they can do that without — I mean, let’s be honest — people assuming they’re trying to be lazy and get an extra day off. But many people will actually see the huge benefits of this and see, “Actually I’m way more effective if I do a four-day workweek.” So I’d love you to share that for people who are of that mind — they want to bring it to the organisation — and then we’ll move on to how to integrate it into an organisation.
Joe O’Connor The first thing that I always recommend is how you start this conversation. As an individual employee, you need to start it from the perspective of viewing this not as a concession, not just a giveaway or a perk as you described earlier, but as a partnership with the organisation to actually achieve — whether it’s the organisation struggling with retention or there are certain productivity or technological‑adoption challenges — really framing this in the context that your leadership care about, and being prepared to embrace the conditionality of this. This is something that needs to work both for you as a worker and for the business. Therefore, if you’re running a pilot or trying this out, it needs to be explicitly linked to business metrics and what success looks like from the organisation’s perspective — what’s going to make this sustainable. Doing your preparation and being ready to have the conversation on those terms will immediately open up a dialogue that feels much less adversarial and much more like a win–win for the business and the workforce.
Jared Lindzon This is very easily dismissed as trying to get more time off, and management might not be totally open to that, but when you frame it as a shared opportunity to achieve business objectives more effectively, you can open that dialogue a lot more effectively. We offer case studies, and we hope they’re helpful for organisations to find others that look like them and look like the problems they’re trying to solve — offering specific examples and a lot of data to show how the challenges the business is facing can be helped through the adoption of a four-day workweek. We also strongly recommend not going for the whole big enchilada right off the bat. If you say, “Hey, move the whole company to a four-day schedule and we’ll figure out how to make it work,” it’s a non‑starter. If you say, “Maybe in a few months we can experiment with a half‑day Friday for a small corner of the organisation, and if they meet certain metrics over a month‑long or two‑month‑long trial, we expand it out to more units of the business,” that’s smarter. Once we’ve got a four‑and‑a‑half‑day workweek moving smoothly, we can investigate whether there are opportunities to reduce further time without compromising outcomes. So: start small, approach the conversation with your employer’s perspective in mind, identify the challenges they’re trying to solve and frame this as a solution to those challenges. Use the examples we provide to show how it’s an effective solution to the main challenges we discussed — namely AI and technological adoption, productivity, addressing burnout and absenteeism, and recruitment and retention. If your organisation’s struggling with those — and most are — framing this as a proven solution is the way to start. And again: start small, and go in with their perspective in mind.
Aidan McCullen Let’s move then to the organisation — adoption of this — and then maybe we’ll finish with you as an individual and how you can integrate it for yourself so you’re actually being the most effective you could be.
Joe O’Connor One of the critical things to recognise from an organisational standpoint is that this is not just a personal productivity initiative. This can connect as an incentive to drive individuals to adopt new productivity practices and tools, creating more focus and less distraction in the workday. However, at its heart, this is very much a collective endeavour. If you compare a four-day workweek pilot or implementation effort within an organisation to giving people an annual pay rise or offering personal flexibility or remote options — those are framed at the individual level. A four-day workweek works particularly well when there’s a collective effort, both within teams and within the organisation as a whole, to address how we meet, how we collaborate, how we make decisions. These are things no one individual can solve alone. With the shared reward of a four-day workweek, it offers the opportunity to think differently about how the business operates as a whole. So: approach this collectively; attack the low‑hanging fruit that we know exists — meeting bloat, distraction in the workday, outdated processes — and use this as a frame for people collectively to solve those problems.
Aidan McCullen We’ve talked about personal advocacy and about the organisation, but what if your organisation does not want to do it and you can’t hide from that? You’re a believer in this — what can you do?
Jared Lindzon It’s extremely helpful when this is a shared effort. It becomes much easier to find efficiencies and improve processes when the organisation is really invested in the idea. However, there’s a lot of strategy and advice that we offer for the individual who’s just looking to find more hours in their day. This might be for folks who are hopeful that a four-day workweek might be in their future; it might be for folks who are working a few too many Saturdays and evenings and are trying to get back to a more manageable grasp on work.
It starts with auditing how you spend your time at work and being honest with yourself — maybe even putting pen to paper and tracking how that time is spent. Look for room for efficiency. We talk about the importance of having a very clear to‑do list and a clear priority list, and giving each hour of the day a mission — starting the day with an understanding of what is absolutely critical, what success will be today — then working within that framework to ensure the top priorities are addressed first. Often we start our day with an hour of emailing and a two‑hour meeting, and then it’s lunchtime before we’ve actually done any of the meaningful work that will really move the needle.
We also talk about some seemingly obvious opportunities to increase productivity that are worthy of a reminder: minimising distractions; making peace with imperfection — a big one. Too often folks get hung up on trying to make things one hundred per cent when eighty per cent will do — giving gold‑level effort to bronze‑level priorities. Lots of little additions to our schedule end up taking big bites out of time that could be better spent elsewhere, professionally or personally.
Finally, there’s a lot of science and research about how to make the most out of your day based on when our brains are at their best for certain tasks. Our circadian rhythms really dictate when is the best time of the day to do certain things — when we’re going to be most creative, most analytical — and doing a little work up front to understand how your brain works best, what those fluctuations are, and trying to optimise your schedule accordingly, to the best that you can as an individual, are some of the ways you can really get more out of the hours you work and hopefully get your time back — even if your organisation hasn’t agreed to move to a four-day workweek.
Aidan McCullen It’s a brilliant book and it’s out on 13 January 2026 in the UK. I don’t know whether that’s the case in the US, but certainly in the UK. Guys, for people who want to find you, where’s the best place? I know, Jared, you write for a lot of top organisations, but where can people find you to reach out? And Joe, we’ll come to you as well.
Jared Lindzon The best place to find both of us is domoreinfour.com. We’ve got a website for the book where you can find more information and reach out to us individually. I also have my website, jaredlindzon.com, where I post all of my research and articles about the four-day workweek and all things future of work.
Aidan McCullen And Joe, where’s the best place for people to find you?
Joe O’Connor I run a future‑of‑work consulting, advising and research firm called Worktime Revolution. You can find us at worktimerevolution.com. You can also find me and Worktime Revolution on LinkedIn, and I have a Substack that people can subscribe to.
Aidan McCullen I will link to all those locations as well. Authors of Do More in Four: why it’s time for a shorter workweek — Joe O’Connor and Jared Lindzon — thank you for joining us.
Jared Lindzon Thank you for having us.
Joe O’Connor Thanks.
In this episode of The Inside Learning Podcast, brought to you by the Learnovate Centre, we explore the concept of a four-day workweek with experts Joe O’Connor and Jared Lindzon. They discuss the historical roots of the five-day workweek, the productivity and well-being benefits of a shorter workweek, and how AI could reshape our approach to work.