Tags: weekend

Toward the end of 2021, I wrote about working a four-day week. It really suited me. So much so that I’ve gone one further. For the past year or so I’ve been working a three-day week.

I work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. From Friday to Monday, my days are my own.

This really changes the dynamic of the week. It no longer feels like an extended weekend. What I mean is that usually we think about the working week as the default and the weekend as the exception. That’s been flipped on its head for me. The three days I spend working feel like the exception.

Once again, this decision meant earning less money. But I’ve decided that I value time more than money. I know that’s a privileged position to be in. Many people have to expend all their time in order to make just enough money.

I’ve made some choices along the way that certainly help. I don’t have children. I don’t have a car. I live in a modest flat and I’ve paid off the mortgage. I live in a country where healthcare is free.

So I don’t have too many expenses. My biggest expenses are travel-related; getting to the States to see family, or travelling to Irish music festivals wherever they may be.

But still, working a three-day week means I can make enough to cover my expenses and still put some money aside for the future.

Now, this wouldn’t work for everyone. My work tends to be the kind that doesn’t require much direct collaboration (which is also why I mostly work from home). I imagine it could get frustrating being on a team of people working different numbers of days.

I’m also really lucky to have the choice to do this. I know that many workplaces wouldn’t allow this kind of lifestyle. Clearleft is different.

In my last conference talk, I touched on this:

I think you could you could divide management into two categories like you can do with programming languages. There is a very imperative school of management where it’s all about measurements, it’s all about those performance reports, it’s all about metrics, time tracking. Maybe they install software on your machine to track how long you’ve been working. It’s all about measuring those outputs.

That’s one approach to management. Then there’s a more declarative approach, where you just care about the work getting done and you don’t care how people do it. So if they want to work from home, let them work from home. If they want to work strange hours, let them work strange hours. What do you care as long as the work gets done? This is more about giving people autonomy and trust.

I’m very happy that Clearleft takes the declarative approach.

And I can reiterate what I said when I stopped working on Fridays:

I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollary to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.

Now that I don’t work on Mondays, bank holiday weekends don’t mean much to me anymore. Or to put it another way, every weekend is like a bank holiday weekend. If I want to travel somewhere on a Friday and come back on a Monday, I don’t need to book any time off. That’s really nice.

I’ve got four days in a row to do with as I wish. I had to fight the urge to immediately launch into some new project or side-hustle to fill the time. I’m savouring it instead.

I’ve got time to take care of The Session. I’ve got time to read. I’ve got time to cook. I’ve got time to spend learning Irish. Mostly I’ve got time to just be.

IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024 · Paul Robert Lloyd

This is going to be a fun weekend!

Not got a personal website? Bring your laptop or mobile device, and we’ll help you get setup so that you can publish somewhere you control and can make your own.

Seasoned web developer? Learn about the different open web services, software and technologies that can help empower yourself and others to own their content and online identity.

Grab your spot now!

I’m taking a nice long weekend break after dConstruct on Friday (I will of course have more to say on that—I’m collecting my thoughts still—but it was a wonderful day).

On Saturday I did absolutely nothing. It was just as well really, considering that I may have over-indulged in the pub on Friday evening after dConstruct was done. So a day of lounging around idly playing mandolin was just the ticket.

Yesterday, Sunday, I had one of those perfect leisurely days.

It began with a good bout of lazing about in the morning. Then, as lunchtime approached, Jessica and I went to a nearby pub for a Sunday Roast. In this case it was the Dover Castle. It turned out to be an excellent choice—top notch roasts!

While we were enjoying our lunch, Jessica spotted a poster on the wall for Bark In The Park, a local fun day of dog-centred activities. We were sure it had already happened earlier in Summer, but the poster said it was rescheduled to …yesterday!

So after lunch we went to the park and spent the next few hours in the sunshine, petting very good dogs and enjoying the spectacle of such catgories as “fancy dress”, “best rescue”, and “sausage catching.” We left shortly before the announcement of “best in show”—my money was on Mayhem—so I could nip home, grab my mandolin, and head to The Bugle pub for the weekly 4pm Irish music session.

After two hours of jigs’n’reels, I headed home. The weather was still lovely. The forecast was for cloudy weather, but it was unexpectedly sunny. So I fired up the outdoor grill.

We grilled: one aubergine, halved and scored; one yellow courgette, halved; one green courgette, halved; half a hispe cabbage, quartered. Once they were nicely charred outside and soft within, we ate them with a drizzle of tahini sauce, accompanied by a green salad.

By that time the sun had gone down and it was time for a nice evening spent watching the latest episode of The Rings Of Power and drinking a nice cup of tea.

Like I said, a perfect leisurely day.

I work a four-day week now.

It started with the first lockdown. Actually, for a while there, I was working just two days a week while we took a “wait and see” attitude at Clearleft to see how The Situation was going to affect work. We weathered that storm, but rather than going back to a full five-day week I decided to try switching to four days instead.

This meant taking a pay cut. Time is literally money when it comes to work. But I decided it was worth it. That’s a privileged position to be in, I know. I managed to pay off the mortgage on our home last year so that reduced some financial pressure. But I also turned fifty, which made me think that I should really be padding some kind of theoretical nest egg. Still, the opportunity to reduce working hours looked good to me.

The ideal situation would be to have everyone switch to a four-day week without any reduction in pay. Some companies have done that but it wasn’t an option for Clearleft, alas.

I’m not the only one working a four-day week at Clearleft. A few people were doing it even before The Situation. We all take Friday as our non-work day, which makes for a nice long three-day weekend.

What’s really nice is that Friday has been declared a “no meeting” day for everyone at Clearleft. That means that those of us working a four-day week know we’re not missing out on anything and it’s pretty nice for people working a five-day week to have a day free of appointments. We have our end-of-week all-hands wind-down on Thursday afternoons.

I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollary to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.

At one time, a six-day work week was the norm. It may well be that a four-day work week becomes the default over time. That could dovetail nicely with increasing automation.

I’ve got to say, I’m really, really liking this. It’s quite nice that when Wednesday rolls around, I can say “it’s almost the weekend!”

A three-day weekend feels normal to me now. I could imagine tilting the balance even more over time. Maybe every few years I could reduce the working by a day or half a day. So instead of going from a full-on five-day working week straight into retirement, it would be more of a gentle ratcheting down over the years.

Your weekends are valuable. Spend them wisely. I have some suggestion on how you might spend next weekend, October 19th and 20th, depending on where you are in the world.

If you’re in the bay area, or anywhere near San Francisco, I highly recommend that you go to Science Hack Day—two days of science, hacking, and fun. This will be the last one in San Francisco so don’t miss your chance.

If you’re in the south of England, or anywhere near Brighton, come along to Indie Web Camp. Saturday will feature discussions on owning your data. Sunday will be a day of doing. I’ve written about previous Indie Web Camps before, and I really can’t recommend it highly enough!

Do me a favour and register for a spot—it’s free—so I’ve got some idea of numbers. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Responsive Day Out was immensely rewarding but also immensely tiring. So today I’ve been taking it nice and easy, coming down from yesterday’s high.

What’s really nice is that quite a few of the speakers and attendees are still around in Brighton today, also taking it easy and wandering around town. I met up with a bunch of people for breakfast and then spent the day with Emil ostensibly looking for the right kind of herrings to celebrate midsummer. But actually it was just a excuse to go from coffee shop to bar, enjoying a nice lazy Saturday in Brighton.

It was a busy week with lots of commuting up and down to London, so I’ve been looking forward to a weekend of unwinding.

Jessica and I like to spend our Saturday afternoons doing our shopping for the weekend, planning out some nice leisurely meals. Today we went down to the Open Market, a recently-renovated collection of stalls under one roof selling local produce and goods. The market is also home to an excellent Greek café, where we had lunch.

I guess it’s part of the gentrification of the London Road area. If this is gentrification, bring it on.

Semantic Camp is taking place in London this weekend. Well, I say camp but that isn’t totally accurate… (yes, that was an attempt at humour).

I’m hoping to make it up for the second day of the event. If nothing else, I really want to see Jon’s sequel to his Specificity Snap game: Semantopoly. Alas, I shan’t be able to make it along on Saturday though. Instead, I’ll be enjoying afternoon tea with a dollop of burlesque.