Yeah, Let's Do This [or, Yet Another Reason to Move to Utah and Get a Government Job}

I've always sorta felt this way (and it helps if you work for yourself/freelance, of course): as long as you get the work done, why does it matter when it gets done? If you're supposed to work 40 hours a week, why does it need to take 5 days to accomplish it? I mean, how lazy is that, really? I could just as easily waste 10 hours a day for four days as I could 8 hours a day for 5 days. Then I could have three days to actually live my proper life. It may even get the economy going again (if you give people three days with nothing else to do, they won't be able to resist going shopping and buying needless crap).

So this comes out of Utah, via Scientific American. 4-day work weeks (but still 40 hours long). Apparently it even saves money and energy while also letting people live their lives:

Local governments in particular have had their eyes on Utah over the last year; the state redefined the workday for more than 17,000 of its employees last August. For those workplaces, there's no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday's midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.

Perhaps as important, workers seem all too ready to replace "TGIF" with "TGIT". "People just love it," says Lori Wadsworth, a professor of public management at Brigham Young University in Provo. She helped survey those on the new Working 4 Utah schedule this May and found 82 percent would prefer to stick with it.

The environment seems to like it, too. "If employees are on the road 20 percent less, and office buildings are only powered four days a week," Langmaid says, "the energy savings and congestion savings would be enormous." Plus, the hour shift for the Monday through Thursday workers means fewer commuters during the traditional rush hours, speeding travel for all. It also means less time spent idling in traffic and therefore less spewing of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. The 9-to-5 crowd also gets the benefit of extended hours at the DMV and other state agencies that adopt the four-day schedule.