Is a shorter workweek in the United States possible? I was recently contacted by Jeanette Watkins, founder of “People for a Shorter Workweek” (www.shorterworkweek.com). She had seen my appearance on the NBC Nightly News broadcast about vacation deprivation in America, and she wanted to share some of their site’s resources.They feel that we can all use a 3-day weekend on a regular basis, with a 32-hour workweek of 4 eight-hour days. While some companies have tried to provide longer weekends by changing hours, they are still going for the standard 40-hour week. Some schedules now run like this:

However this is not a shorter workweek. It is simply a more intense 40-hour standard. Is there any chance we could switch to 32 hours as the norm? In all of my vacation-focused postings during July, the struggle was to be able to use even the days that we have now. There is another organization, “Take Back Your Time,” (www.timeday.org) that is working on getting a law passed giving all Americans a three-week vacation each year. They work closely with Joe Robinson, founder of the “Work to Live” (www.worktolive.info) vacation campaign.Do you think we can improve our time mangement processes so that we increase productivity to the point that a company would feel comfortable converting to a 32-hour weekly standard? Right now efforts are to fit everything into the 40- or 50-hour week. Yet when I do individual consulting with companies, I see so much room for improvement in getting work done, just employing a few techniques like scheduling one uninterrupted time block per day and grouping like activities on your schedule. Knowing that you had a 3-day workweek would also limit the need to do personal activities during work hours each day. At present the average amount of time spent on personal tasks at work is 36 minutes each day, with men averaging 44 minutes and women 29 minutes.