A history of the two-day weekend | Hacker News Reader

A history of the two-day weekend

qz.com

58 pointsmgiannopoulos17 comments

Hmm... Reading this article about the transition from a 6 to 5 day work week makes me think it's possible to transition to 4.

4 days no 3 days off makes a hell of a lot more sense than 5 days on 2 days off.

I'd love to see an 8 day week with three days off. The five day workweek is a great rhythm. Four days on, three days off just seems too decadent. I think the ideal would be 5 on, three off with 6 hour workdays.

For a few months I worked 3 days a week. It's decadent, maybe, but it's awesome. By the time Monday came I was thirsty to get back to work.

The only problem was - it's harder to keep in mind what you worked on the last week when you get back, but it's not a big deal (just make more notes, commit more often, and hibernate computer instead of shutting it down).

I'd be fine breaking up the work days with a break day in between - I'd probably avoid it some weeks for a longer weekend event, but I think I could do 2 days on, 1 day off, 2 days on, 2 days off...

If I had that I think I'd wind up working at least a half day or so just to keep from getting too bored.

You're talking to a guy that spent half of a 2 month vacation in Colombia learning web development.

Basecamp works 4 days per week from May to August[0]. The variation could be part of why it works. I’d like to see more tech companies experiment with their schedules this way.

[0] https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-only-work-4-days-a-week-du...

This quote seems key: “Time is now currency: It is not passed but spent,” wrote historian E. P. Thompson.

"But the week is man-made, arbitrary, a substance not found in nature."

One thing that occasionally makes me wonder is the universality of the day of the week. Everywhere you go - with the possible exception of the people living on either sides of the imaginary International Date Line - people are in agreement on which day of the week it is. Just imagine the white Christian colonialist coming to Africa, or some other part of the world, and finding native Muslim populations and yet both agree on what day of the week it is.

When I started school, I misheard the hours as 2 days on, 5 days off. Come the Wednesday, I was rather put out (and remain so).

Reminds me of what a mate's kid said after he got home from the first day at primary school - he genuinely thought it was for one day only. Then there was the dismayed look on his face after it was explained that this routine was now for the next eighteen years of his life :)

Weekends were never a universal thing. They were for very specific people, while a huge number of us were expected to work them regardless. Setting aside the historical male/female devides (no weekends for moms) we just expect certain jobs to be there. Priests and nuns work weekends, have done for centuries. Cops, food service, health care providers, prisons and the entertainment industry to name a few. The sat-sun weekend has always been a luxury. Those that lament its passing as some sort of societal shift show thier colours.

I write this as a i sit on a monday morning waiting for the work i did over the weekend to be read and evaluated by clients worth far more than i will ever be. They dont work weekends.

> Priests and nuns work weekends, have done for centuries. Cops, food service, health care providers, prisons and the entertainment industry to name a few.

While such jobs require indeed people working on weekends, it doesn't mean that the workers themselves need to be present 7 days a week. It's possible to uniformly distribute 2 free days per week among workers and still guaranteeing 24/7 service.

> Those that lament its passing as some sort of societal shift show thier colours.

Not sure what "their colours" mean. Why should we lower our expectations to the lowest working conditions? Instead, why don't we all aspire to redistributing our working ours to ensure a fair share of free time.

If you arent getting sat-sun off then i seriously doubt you have any stable 2day weekend. These are shift workers. By "colours" i mean that they are from a background where sat-sun weekends are a thing. Thier parents were not shift workers. They expect to have sundays off. Many, possibly most in many areas, no not have such expectations and envy those who do.

My girlfriend is a shift worker and while she doesn't always get stable 2 day weekend (she gets every other weekend off and generally Tuesday and Thursday the other week) but her schedule is reasonably stable. If you are a shift worker and your schedule isn't stable at all then that means your schedule is bad even as shift workers go

There have always been professions, such as doctors, that require some degree of 24x7 coverage but I wouldn't describe that as shift work.

In the US, probably the biggest change over the past few decades is that pretty much everything that could be closed on a Sunday was closed (with the exception of restaurants which historically closed on Monday). When I went to school and for a number of years thereafter, essentially no stores were open on a Sunday.

>Why should we lower our expectations to the lowest working conditions?

Because when you expect 9-5 5 days a week sat-sun off then some how the 10s of millions of us that work at all the businesses that don't keep banking hours are exceptions to the norm and because we're treated as exceptions instead of a normal, integral and enormous part (majority?) of the system: we get ignored; or treated as something that will just take care of itself if people "fix" what ever part of the system they think is the norm.

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