The 4 1/2 Day Workweek

It sounds nice in theory, but I know that in practice I'd resent it. I hate being told when it's "break time", doubly so if I know that people are going to freak out two days later because some project isn't done yet.

At the last company I worked for, they had a nice system: about every two weeks they'd find some excuse for the company to pick up the bar tab after work. A big percentage of people would go, but you didn't have to. Some people would be there right at the start, others would show up later and you could leave whenever you wanted to.

Coffee areas with couches also payed big dividends -- again, the idea was that you'd yack with your coworkers, but only when it fit in with your work schedule.

I think the take-away from this article isn't that you should absolutely use the 4-1/2 day workweek model at your firm; instead, I read it to say that they had experimented with several different schedules, put some serious thought into what worked and what didn't, and then implemented a solution which was tailored to their team, deployment schedule, and customer base.

If you want something which works as well in your business, don't just mindlessly clone this, or the 37signals 4-day week, or the first-stage startup 80-hour deathmarch, or any existing schedule -- work it out for your own environment.

Personally, I've been doing a lot of tweaking of my own schedule at work over the last year, and found that having at least one full day a week where work from home is a big booster to my productivity. It's an entire day where I can avoid random interruptions, and I never have that meeting in the middle of the morning that basically wastes the day through lunchtime.

I definitely think having a single designated "meetings day" would help just about any company. Monday morning meetings have to be the most life-sucking idea ever. While I can see value in meeting briefly with your direct team--the one or two people who are working on the same part of the codebase--at the first of the work week, a bunch of people working on a random panoply of things in a room at 8:30 Monday morning is comparable to beating productivity with a Louisville Slugger and leaving its bloody barely breathing body in a ditch down by the highway. Starting the week off that way is just asking for trouble.

Though the Wufoos are more fun than most people I've met, so they can probably make Fridays into a vacation without having to actually be free from work. I suspect not many employers have a comedy goldmine like Kevin, Ryan, and Chris around to tap into. (And, if they do, they probably think of them as a problem to be managed into submission rather than given a raise and put in charge of something.)

We actually took the opposite approach a couple of years ago and designated a specific "no meetings" day every Tuesday for the development team (and so many people work remotely on Fridays that it's effectively a meeting-free day as well). Our team is too big and too diverse to effectively wall off much more time than that without running into major scheduling issues, but even having one day a week completely walled off from any sort of meetings has turned out to be really helpful.

It would be interesting to know how they measured productivity in order to come to the conclusion that 4 days just didn't cut it.

This is somewhat like what we have at my present workplace. Friday afternoons, it is mandated that we socialize and break out beers. At corp headquarters, they play foosball. In Houston, we break out Guitar Hero.