My goal with this article is to share my experience of the #4DayWeek from its inception and I’ll keep updating on this topic. I hope that this article helps others to understand the four day work week.

Friday

It’s Friday. Today I woke up and instead of opening the company laptop I opened my laptop and started writing this. Starting today, the company I work for has implemented the four day work week. Every Friday is now for personal time.

How it started

During the pandemic companies looked for ways to help their employees avoid burnouts and try to keep them productive and focused. A forced remote work is not easy for those who didn’t expect or prepared for it. Companies for this reason responded in many different ways, some gave budgets to buy office supplies, tables, monitors, other companies gave more vacation days or even gave all employees a full week off. Among all these companies, one stood out to a colleague of mine, Feedzai.

Feedzai announced that it was going to implement the 4 week day, temporarily during the month of August. Why is this important? Well, this sparked a discussion on our Slack and part jokingly part seriously one person spoke directly with the CEO. After some weeks of researching and discussion, the company decided to go for it. We are now a 4 day work week company following others around the world.

What is the catch? There are many ways to accomplish the four day work week. I’ve read that some companies simply ask their employees to work more hours on other days.

My current status has no side effects, same contract, same hours per day but simply I work one less day a week.

A completely new day

This day feels like the third type of day of the week, not weekend or weekday.

I’ll be honest, I’m writing these words on my first free morning. This day indeed feels different, it’s not a weekend, others are still working and I can’t make normal weekend plans, but it isn’t a working day, (curious enough Slack is down today) there aren’t emails to answer or pull requests to review. Personally, I immediately started planning for my free day. I opened my time to others through an open calendar and planned to finally continue work on my side projects and give a bit more love to the communities I’m an organizer of.

In the end what I want to say is, I feel completely reinvigorated and ready for any new challenge personally or professionally.

To be continued

Stay tuned for:

  • Arguments on how to convince your company to join the #4DayWeek;
  • What is the impact on our company (spoiler alert, it got a lot of attention.);
  • Personally how I am doing and what I am doing with this extra day on my week;

Follow me on Twitter or if you wish to talk with me about this topic or anything else, feel free to schedule a 1 on 1 at https://cal.com/filipebarroso