Work in Progress

Employees Who Shift to 4-Day Week Devote New Free Time to Sleep

Employees working condensed weeks sleep much more than you do.

Photographer: Tom Skipp/Bloomberg
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When employees can slash their traditional five-day workweek to four days, they tend to allocate their new free time to one surprising activity: sleep.

Workers who shifted to 32-hour workweeks logged 7.58 hours per night of sleep, nearly a full hour more than when they were keeping 40-hour workweeks, according to lead researcher Juliet Schor, a sociologist and economist at Boston College who is tracking over 180 organizations globally as they shift to truncated schedules through six-month pilot programs.