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Four Days

The four day work work-week seems a very logical for many kinds of jobs. People start to trail on Fridays unless there is a crisis. It is also the designated travel back home day if you had been working offsite for the rest of the week. Giving people more time to recuperate and have the incentive to drive things to completion to earn the day of rest on Friday, are likely to produce good results. 

Between 2020 and 2022, 51% of workers in the country had accepted the offer of shorter working hours, including a four-day week, two think tanks found, saying the figure is likely to be even higher today.

Last year, Iceland logged faster economic growth than most European countries and its unemployment rate is one of the lowest in Europe, noted the Autonomy Institute in the United Kingdom and Iceland’s Association for Sustainability and Democracy (Alda).

“This study shows a real success story: shorter working hours have become widespread in Iceland… and the economy is strong across a number of indicators,” Gudmundur D. Haraldsson, a researcher at Alda, said in a statement.

Children and elderly in need of care and time from those in the workforce are big beneficiaries of that extra day. If the family has lower stress levels as a whole, that can only be a force of good for society. I wish this data would be used for decision making on how people work going forward.

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