The 4-day Week

Don't let the title fool you, I'm definitely working all five days this week and it's a crying shame. But that's why I'd like to suggest a re-assessment of how our current work week is laid out. I really don't know the story of how we collectively agreed to work 5 days a week, while only taking 2 for rest and calling it our weekend. I'm a huge fan of rest, a man of leisure, if you will. I don't consider myself lazy by any means, I just know how to relax when it's time to relax. Which is why I think everyone should consider banding together and re-formulating our work week from 5 days to 4.

It seems arbitrary to me that 5 days is the optimal amount of days to work. Very few of us have the luxury of working whenever we want; most of us are forced to adhere to a system that insists on us being up in the morning on Monday and being miserable until at least 2pm that day. I say, "why continue this nonsense?". I think from now on Mondays should be the new Sundays and then we go back to work on Tuesday and work til Friday. Far from being equally arbitrary, there are some good reasons to suggest this. The first is obvious, now we're looking at 3-day weekends all the time. Who in this miserable spectrum we call "corporate America" doesn't look forward to a 3-day weekend? The answer is nobody...we all do. Thus, it seems linear and rational to adjust accordingly and make that the new work-week.

Another reason is the nature and "personality" of a Tuesday as opposed to a Monday. Everyone hates Mondays, but I don't know of one person who has beef with Tuesdays. Tuesday has the most neutral image and personality of any day of the week. We don't look forward to a Tuesday necessarily, but nor do we hate it; thus making it the perfect day to kick off our work-week. No one wants to "go in" on a day that they hate, and neither do we wish to "go in" on a day that we like. Tuesday is the perfect day to start work. With this new implementation of attitude toward days of the week, we find ourselves in an agreeable shift pattern. With the 4-day work week, we no longer feel the creeping stress on Sunday nights in thinking about the next morning. Consequentially, we no longer dread Mondays and yet as an added bonus, our love and appreciation for Fridays remains in tact. This is a win-win proposition; one worth serious consideration.

Another viable reason (for me at least) is that HBO has some stellar programming late at night that keeps a man up later than he'd wish to stay up given that the next day he must go back to work. I'm not talking "cinemax late", I mean that if I want to catch Eastbown and Down to end my weekend, daddy has to stay up til 10:30, which isn't that late, but it kind of is for most people. Thankfully I have DVR.

So I would like to start a movement in American culture that has us sleeping late on Mondays knowing full-well that Tuesday--a day marked by attitudinal neutrality--will be the start of our week. Of course one might critique this philosophy by stating that this will only shift the aforementioned anxieties and problems forward one day...Monday will become the new Sunday and Tuesday will become the new Monday. But I remind my critics to keep one last crucial argument in mind.......this is just a blog!