Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that&#x27;s missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone.<p>In tech it&#x27;s very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don&#x27;t do productive work all the time they&#x27;re present. Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren&#x27;t contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can&#x27;t do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they&#x27;re not really working. What they do doesn&#x27;t compress like that.<p>Consequently looking at this from the context of tech workers is far less interesting. The Japanese government isn&#x27;t saying &quot;Let&#x27;s get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!&quot; In tech removing the pointless nonsense isn&#x27;t actually reducing the amount of real work people do. Instead, Japan is saying &quot;Our country is wealthy enough and advanced enough that our people can <i>actually</i> do less work.&quot; That&#x27;s fascinating.<p>If you see this as &quot;removing the wasteful time spent on things that aren&#x27;t useful like meetinga&quot; then you&#x27;ve missed the point. It is that, but it&#x27;s much, much more than that too.