Forget the four-day week – the future of work is the six-hour day
For many of us, clocking off after just six hours is the stuff of fantasy, writes Polly Dunbar, but doing so could be key to fixing an outdated system that’s causing unprecedented levels of work-related stress and costing the economy billions...
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 In reality, even the concept of nine to five seems laughably outdated in 2025.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.
The mismatch between school hours and the working day, combined with extortionate childcare costs, has contributed to the number of women leaving the workforce increasing for the first time in decades – depriving the economy of their skills, experience and income tax.
As a result, says Armstrong, “It makes great sense to me to offer a shorter working day, especially given that our current research shows the constant distractions we all live with now from all our tech mean a lot of people say they barely get two hours of focused work done in a long day.”
The rise of AI is predicted to transform our working lives in the coming years. If Goldman Sachs’ chilling forecast comes true, 300 million jobs, including highly skilled and highly paid jobs such as law, finance and medicine, could be lost.
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
A more positive vision of the future could see us all working fewer hours as automation increases. “There could be an opportunity to improve job quality, if some of the more routine tasks are taken away,” says Claire McCartney, policy and practice manager at the CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development. It’s possible people could work a shorter day and focus on more interesting work during that period.”
Working fewer hours is also strongly linked to a reduction in stress and burnout, with studies showing that employees who work less tend to be happier and more engaged when they’re at their jobs – all of which has a major impact on productivity.
Bex Spiller, a workplace wellbeing consultant and founder of the Anti-Burnout Club, also believes the six-hour day “would have a hugely positive impact on work-related stress”. The latter costs our economy an estimated ?28bn per year, primarily through lost working days caused by poor mental health, so measures to boost workers’ wellbeing aren’t merely “nice-to-haves”, they’re essential.
Paul Corcoran, founder of Liverpool and Manchester-based Agent Marketing, has seen the rewards from reducing the hours worked by his staff. Until the pandemic, the company worked a hybrid week, working normal office hours for three days and six-hour days for two.
He found that efficiency improved every bit as much as wellbeing. “What I learned is that when you give adults the opportunity to think about how best to deliver their work in the time they have, without compromising on quality, then they’re brilliant at finding the answer,” he says.
“They’ll say, ‘Well, I don’t really need to be in that meeting.’ Or, ‘Does that meeting really need to be an hour and a half, or could it be 20 minutes?’ It enables people to think about how they’re most productive, rather than just how they’re going to make it through the hours they have to sit there. It hasn’t affected us from a profitability perspective, and it’s also been a very attractive part of what we offer when we’re bringing in new talent.”
Three years ago, the agency changed to a four-day week, which Corcoran finds works better for his business: “They take a Monday or a Friday off, but there’s always a team there to deliver what our clients need,” he says. “For us, the six hours were too rigid – it was difficult when, say, a client wanted to come in for a meeting at 4pm.”
His experience of the six-hour day has changed forever his views on working hours, though. “Taking the chance to really think about how to have valuable time at work, rather than presenteeism, is so worthwhile,” he says. “It’s about trusting your staff to use their time effectively – and them really engaging with it, because they’re seeing the benefits.”
For Currie, the six-hour day is proving hugely beneficial for both work-life balance and productivity at her company, which helps business leaders tell their stories. Her team are given the choice of when to work their six hours: “They can start when they want and finish when they want, and for seven years, it’s worked really well. It fits around the team’s schedules: most people keep their six hours within the working day, but some will do three hours in the morning, then three in the evening, so it gives them flexibility. They can be extremely productive in that time, and manage their lives, too – so everyone wins.”