Forget the four-day week — future of work is six-hour day

Polly Dunbar, The Independent

When Lysanne Currie was establishing her content agency Meet The Leader back in 2017, she knew she didn’t want to adopt a typical nine-to-five working day. Over the decades, while working in the publishing industry, she’d seen many brilliant people fall by the wayside because they simply couldn’t fit their complex lives around sitting in an office for eight hours a day. Surely, she thought, there had to be a model that would enable her fledgling business to optimise productivity, while allowing its employees to do what they needed to do outside work: drop children off at school and collect them, or fulfil other caring obligations — perhaps even take a moment to exercise or do something they enjoyed.

The solution she came up with was a six-hour day. “It allows these really talented people to work around their other commitments without feeling stressed about how they’re supposed to cram it all in,” she says. For many of us, clocking off after working just six hours is the stuff of fantasy. In reality, even the concept of nine to five seems laughably outdated in 2025. New research from recruitment firm Reed reveals that 42 per cent of British employees work beyond their contracted hours, equating to 14 million people working an entire extra day per week. Forty per cent say their workloads exceed the time available, leaving them overwhelmed.

But calls for a sea change in the structure of our working lives are growing. Labour MPs, including Peter Dowd, are currently pushing for legislation to implement the four-day week across Britain. Dowd, who has drafted a proposed amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, says it is needed because as artificial intelligence grows increasingly prevalent, it will inevitably reduce employment. According to the 4 Day Week Foundation, 200 companies across the UK, representing 5,000 workers, have already permanently reduced workers’ hours to 32 or less per week. But with the government focusing on trying to grow the stagnant economy, it seems unlikely we’ll see this model being widely adopted anytime soon. And there’s another group of workplace forecasters who believe the four-day week isn’t the answer – that a better solution, not just to our work-life balance, stress levels and broken childcare system, but to maximising our overall output, lies in the six-hour day.

During the industrial revolution, when factories needed to run 24/7, 12-hour days were common, but in the early 20th century, the Ford Motor Company cut hours to eight while doubling wages, amazing everyone by increasing productivity. Now, however, research shows that maintaining peak productivity for an entire eight-hour workday is unrealistic for most people. We’ve all experienced what’s known as Parkinson’s law: the phenomenon that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. But it isn’t just down to procrastination; our brains aren’t wired to concentrate fully for long periods of time. In fact, studies show that we only get around three to four hours of real focus out of any eight-hour period. In 2014, a landmark study from Stanford University demonstrated that any link between hours worked and productivity is weak. The research found a “non-linear” relationship between hours worked and output: results start to slide dramatically around the 50-hours-per-week mark. Too much work, it found, can damage productivity.

By contrast, a series of pilot schemes in which six-hour days have been trialled (while keeping pay at 100 per cent) indicate that a shorter working day has multiple benefits. One of the most famous, which took place over the course of two years at the Svartedalens retirement home in Sweden and was funded by the Swedish government, showed that 68 nurses who worked six-hour days took half as much sick time as those who worked standard longer shifts. The nurses were also 20 per cent happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time. This also contributed to greater productivity, as they recorded performing 64 per cent more therapeutic activities with elderly residents, such as games and outdoor walks. The policy was adopted in other Swedish industries, including at the Toyota plant in Gothenburg, which switched to a six-hour day as long ago as 2003. Since then, it has recorded a 25 per cent profit gain, as well as increases in employee health.

So should we be considering adopting the model here in Britain? According to Christine Armstrong, a speaker and researcher on the future of work, the answer is a resounding yes. “I’m a big fan of the six-hour day, and all my research suggests it’s potentially a better model than the four-day week,” she says. “It’s a cliche, but based on interviewing people, men tend to be more enthusiastic about working four days, because they use the fifth to do something they really enjoy. When I speak to women, they say they end up working longer hours during those four days, and then on the fifth, they end up doing domestic admin. And, most importantly, the four-day week doesn’t help with the school day, while the six-hour day does.” In an antiquated working world designed for one breadwinner to go off to an office while the other parent maintained the domestic sphere, it’s no surprise that parents are struggling now both have to work, while somehow simultaneously juggling pick-ups and drop-offs.