Edsel Ford, quoted in a 1922 issue of The New York Herald:
Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation. The Ford company always has sought to promote ideal home life for Its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more time to spend with his family, more time for self-improvement, more time for building up the place called home.
The Ford Motor Company implemented the 5-day work week in 1926, adding 3000 new workers while keeping pay unchanged. Today, many corporate environments could officially give everyone a 4-day work week, and most should. But for a small business, especially indie developers, we will need to be more deliberate about it.
No one is going to tell me, “You can now work less often and be content with it.” There is a never-ending list of tasks. There is no “done”. Working faster is great, but working less is not going to happen automatically just because AI.
I work on Micro.blog at least a little every day, weekends too. It is not sustainable to work all day at the pace that is now possible. AI can be empowering and also exhausting. It feels foolish to take the productivity gains from our helper robots and just throw away the saved time. Over the next year, I’d like to claw back some of my time, perhaps embracing a “mostly work in the mornings” schedule.
This is a lucky position to be in. In many ways, a luxury. But I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation for the future for everyone who works on computers. More people should be working a shorter week, or fewer hours per day, just as we’re no longer stuck with the 6-day work week of 100 years ago.
