I'll Give them A Forty-Hour Day

For the past 10 ½ years, I’ve worked four days a week.

The days are a bit long – 10 hours of work, yes. Factor into that my commute, which starts at 5:30 AM and gets me home shortly before 7 PM, and you could say I’m “at work” fourteen hours out of each 24, Monday through Thursday.

I love this work schedule and would find it a challenge to adapt to a different one.

And while I acknowledge some of the stresses and sacrifices this job schedule makes, as Allard Dembe mentions in his article on extended work times at Slate.com, I can’t help but to wonder how Dembe and Slate’s editors thought this article made sense.

I’m a technical writer at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex (the nature of the work explains the necessity of a long commute, though I live in a town of only 75,000 residents). I ride a company bus each day, for which I pay about $30 a week – a significant savings over driving the 113-mile commute to and from work each day in my own vehicle.

While I typically sleep on the bus, making the trip much more pleasant , I have used some of that down time for reading, creative writing, grading papers – I also teach English part-time at a local university. The commute give me a little bit of me-time, and I look forward to it.

And the hours are regular. I used to work as a journalist, and got tired of the odd hours – invading my evenings and weekends – that took me away from home and family.

Working four ten-hour shifts, with Fridays off, has been a godsend, no matter what Dembe says.

Three-day weekends afford me time to work on our house – I’ve tiled the kitchen and dining room, I’ve installed a sprinkler system – with significantly larger blocks of time I would not have on a five-day work schedule.

Three-day weekends offer us more opportunities for family travel, particularly when combined with federal holidays and time off school.

Three-day weekends also tie in nicely with my volunteer work as a Scoutmaster with the Boy Scouts of America. I don’t have to scramble on a Friday workday to get ready for a weekend campout – I have all day to get things pulled together.

Yes, there are times I get tired of my long days, particularly during the darkest days of winter when I leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark. I often have to race from the bus stop straight to ballet recitals or band performances, and sometimes even miss them entirely.

But the pros outweigh the cons.

Four-day work weeks may not work for everyone. But I sure like them.