So, to make this make sense, it’s important for me to share a couple interesting little details about where I live and my daily routine.
About ten years ago, we built a house—well, hired a company to build a house—next door to the house I grew up in.
Then, six years ago, my oldest child started attending the same school that I attended from elementary school through high school graduation. It’s about a 20-minute drive away. I handle morning carpool.
The combination of those two elements means that every single morning, I drive the exact same route that I drove every single morning 20 years ago when I was a senior driving myself to high school.
That’s given me some weird perspective on how some things have changed. For one, although there’s this idea that traffic is generally always getting worse, I can say with confidence that for this particular singular route, traffic has actually gotten better over the last 20 years. When I was a senior, if I didn’t get out of the house by 7:10AM, I wouldn’t be in class by 8:00AM. The route is 20 minutes with no traffic, but back then, traffic was bad, and it got exponentially worse from 7:10AM to 7:30AM. But nowadays while we aim to leave at 7:10AM, we’re actually just fine as far as literal tardiness is concerned if we pull out at 7:25AM or 7:30AM.
But there’s a more specific trend I’ve noticed. When I was in high school, traffic on Friday was always worse. On Fridays I really needed to aim for 7:00AM. I don’t know why that was, but it was reliably true. There’s actually an old joke that made the rounds on social media about Atlanta traffic—I found a version of it on reddit. The key line is:
The morning rush hour is from 5:00 am to noon. The evening rush hour is from noon to 7:00 pm. Friday’s rush hour starts on Thursday morning.
It was a joke, but it felt like there was some truth. Friday rush hour was always way heavier.
This morning, I took my kids to school. We rolled out at 7:07AM: I checked the timestamp on our security cameras. Usually at that time on other weekdays, we’d be looking at about 25 minutes. Back in high school, Friday would add 10 minutes. But instead, we rolled into carpool at 7:26AM. 19 minutes. For context, when I took them to an event on Saturday morning when there were basically zero other cars on the road, it took us 17 minutes.
That wasn’t a one-off occurrence. The past two years, I’ve known that on Fridays, we can afford to leave fifteen minutes later and still get to school in plenty of time. But twenty years ago, Friday meant leaving ten minutes earlier.
What changed, and why am I babbling about this in an article about a four-day workweek? More and more, I’ve been reading about how one of the “compromises” around remote work has been remote Fridays. Companies are specifically designating Friday as the work-from-home day. There’s some precedent for that as well: I remember when I worked for a company, they instituted no-meeting Fridays as a similar opportunity to focus on deeper work. I know colleagues at Georgia Tech who similarly try to set aside Friday for paper-writing, assignment-grading, and other non-meeting activities.
If everyone’s working remotely on Fridays, that certainly explains the lack of traffic I’ve seen. But there have also been lots of articles about Friday “quiet-quitting”, or confession posts on sites like reddit from employees noting how they actually spend their remote days.
In my opinion, here’s the reality: while throughout history there have been times where a big, top-down mandate for a 40-hour workweek or a 5-day workweek or some other constraint has been handed down, the majority of developments happen over time, naturally, and organically. Right now, with the rise of AI, we’re seeing individuals’ productivity rise in a way that has many people calling for shortened workweeks. But rarely does a company come out and say, “Everyone’s 25% more productive, so you all get Friday off!”
But what does happen is that the productivity gains from AI merge with the social changes toward remote Fridays to create a world where people are able to work four day workweeks with no real negative repercussions. They get their work done, and their new day off happens to coincide with a day where their colleagues, who are given the same “remote” day, are also off, so the real-time pressure to be available diminishes. The four day workweek isn’t dictated, but it emerges.
Of course, there are places this will take more time than others. Anything that requires a lot of synchronous interaction will by necessity be slower to move. But coming out of COVID, lots of schools have replaced snow days with digital learning days. Is it a far stretch to imagine a near-future where schools institute digital learning Fridays, where Friday is set aside as a day for students to work asynchronously and for teachers to catch up on planning and grading… only to quickly morph into another day off as those tasks are instead integrated into typical free periods and study halls?
Ten years from now, it would not surprise me in the least if the world—or at least the United States—had generally converged on an unspoken four-day workweek for office workers, where Friday is designated as a remote work day but where—like good students in middle school—we all finished our homework during the day and got some free time back.
