Want happier employees? Start with a 32-hour workweek – and 4 weeks vacation. | Your Turn
40 hours a week is too much labor for the amount of genuinely useful work there is today. It's time for a 32-hour workweek.
If the procedure were real in the television show "Severance" – where people's selves and memories are divided between work life and personal life – I would not get the procedure.
Ideally work should be rewarding in itself. Even if it's work that isn't enjoyable in itself, it should be rewarding in its usefulness to you and others. If you have a bunch of work that isn't visibly useful then you have a broken system. I would rather switch jobs than write off a third of my life.
I think it's possible to have work-life balance. It's having enough time left for life to make it worth the work. Work should be rewarding, but it can't be all there is. I think that 40 hours a week is too much labor for the amount of genuinely useful work there is today, and a great start at the government level would be a 32-hour week.
Reduce the available labor and thereby increase its value. Maybe replace some of it with universal basic income. Or start people at four weeks of vacation.
Another view: Work-life balance is real – I have it. My secret? Remote work. | Your Turn
Alternately, businesses could embrace working from home and flexible schedules, including my favorite: "Leave when you're done." People will be happier and less exhausted. Nobody should be forced to work a job that only exists because they need a job.
I work fully in the office. But I think remote work is better for work-life balance. I don't have the option to work remote, but I like the idea.
The ideal work environment is working collaboratively with people you like on something that creates some sort of real benefit for society. A bad work environment is working by yourself or with people you don't like on projects that amount to a Sisyphean box-checking exercise just to appease management.
— Matt Belben, Citrus Heights, California
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