As just about anyone who is forced to work knows, working for five days a week constantly can be utterly exhausting and draining.
So when you hear about the concept of a three-day work week, your first reaction was probably to start asking where you can sign up for it.
Luckily, research has got your back.
A study published in the Melbourne Institute Worker Paper series in 2016 revealed that a three-day work week would encourage the best performance out of employees over the age of 40.
For many of us who have spent most of our lives slogging through work, this is old news, if not blatantly obvious.
This research was performed at the University of Melbourne by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research.
They had brought in about 3,000 and 3,500 Australian men and women respectively to do tests that would enable the researchers to analyze their work habit.
After collecting the data, they then factored in other possible variables like family structures, employment, economic well-being, and the participant’s quality of life.
As it turns out, those who worked on average 25 hours per week normally were the best performers.
This seemingly-nominal number seems to be the threshold for overall cognitive performance – beyond this point, scores for cognitive tests then began to suffer from fatigue and stress.
In other words, a five-day work week is overworking you.
No matter how much you love your job or take pride in your work, overworking raises the risk of a burnout.
Here is a list of symptoms to watch out for if you find yourself at the office more often than not:
- Using drugs or alcohol to relax.
- No productive results despite working long hours.
- Feeling fatigued constantly and lacking sleep.
- Sadness or even depression affecting your everyday life.
- Working overtime even though you already work long hours.
- Suffering from sore eyes and body aches.
- It feels like your relationships with friends and family are falling apart.
As you can imagine, suffering from these issues is the last thing you want.
With retirement looking less secure and the age limit on state pension keeps getting pushed back, you might find yourself working longer hours to cope.
Unfortunately, considering the effects long working hours has on your body and mind, keeping up this pace is clearly unsustainable.
This is why European countries like France made emailing employees after the working day has ended illegal, to ensure a good work-life balance.
There are more reasons to swap to a shorter working week.
The same study showed that those who maintained extremely long work hours had even lower cognitive functioning than the baseline of those who don’t work.
So you can imagine there really isn’t any point to work such long hours.
Unfortunately, reality doesn’t quite give us all the luxury of having sustainable pay, let alone being able to support oneself on a three-day work week.
Until then, what you can do is fill up your life with meaningful activities and relationships, and fight for the day where we can get better working hours.
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