Most people cannot afford the good idea

The five hour working day is a genuinely good idea that almost nobody is in a position to take.

The version that gets written up goes like this. You concentrate better in a short day so you get the same work done in less time so you trade some of your pay for some of your life and everybody wins. The person writing it up is usually right about their own situation. They did try it, it did work and the gains are real. There’s no trick being played.

The trouble starts when you ask who else is in that situation. Take a twenty percent pay cut for a forty percent reduction in hours and you’ve immediately excluded almost everyone because very few people can absorb a fifth of their income disappearing. Anyone with a mortgage set against their current salary is out. Anyone supporting somebody else is out. Anyone who is one bad month from trouble is out and that’s a lot more people than it’s comfortable to think about.

So it filters down to workers paid enough that losing a fifth of it doesn’t hurt, which mostly means the big technology employers. And those are exactly the companies where the offer makes no sense from the other side of the table. A business awash with cash isn’t looking to shave twenty percent off a wage bill it doesn’t notice. It wants more output and it’s already paying overtime to get it. Saving money on salaries isn’t an incentive there, it’s a rounding error and the thing you’re offering to give up is the thing they actually want more of.

Then there’s the commute and that is the part that gets left out of every version of this. If you spend an hour a day travelling, a shorter day doesn’t shorten it. The travel is fixed and the work shrinks around it so the proportion of your day spent getting to the thing goes up rather than down. A half day with a thirty minute commute each way feels like a waste in a way a full day never does and that feeling isn’t irrational, it’s an accurate read of the ratio.

None of this means the idea is bad. Where it fits it fits well and the people it fits should absolutely take it. It’s just that the conditions are doing far more work than the argument admits: you need to be paid well above your outgoings, at a company that values salary savings over output, with little or no travel, doing work that genuinely compresses.

That’s a real set of people. It isn’t many of them and it isn’t the ones who’d benefit most.

This is the pattern worth carrying away rather than the specific arithmetic of a shorter week. A working practice that requires you to already be comfortable is not a fix for being uncomfortable. It’s a perk and perks flow to the people who need them least, which is fine as long as nobody dresses it up as the future of work. The future of work for most people is the same number of hours and the interesting question is what happens inside them.

The wider version of this is worth holding on to whenever a new way of working gets written up. Ask who has to already be fine for it to work and the answer is usually somebody with savings, without dependents, without a commute and with an employer who is relaxed about output. Every one of those is a form of slack and the practices that get called innovative are mostly ways of converting slack you already have into something more pleasant.

That is worth doing if you have the slack. It just is not a model and treating it as one quietly tells everybody without slack that they are doing work wrong when what they are actually doing is paying a mortgage.