We need to get rid of weekends

It’s not sustainable for all of us to work and play at the exact same time.

Have you ever tried to get a dinner reservation on a Friday night, go skiing on a Saturday, book a campground on a weekend, or get a flight on a holiday weekend? Or even go to the gym or grocery store after work?

If you have, you might be inclined to think that your city is too congested—there are just too many people!—but really, the problem is that we’re all working and recreating at the exact same time.

Dinner reservations are usually freely available on a Tuesday, the ski slopes are empty on a Thursday, campgrounds and national parks have open availability mid-week, and the streets are clear in the middle of the day. The gym and grocery stores are usually empty mid-day.

Where I live in Utah, there has been a debate about what we should do with Little Cottonwood Canyon where, every winter, thousands of cars create a two-hour-long queue up to the ski destinations Snowbird and Alta. To solve this, the Utah Department of Transportation proposed two options: We could widen the road and build a bus system, or we could build a gondola. Both cost in the $500 millions.

The problem with both plans is that traffic isn’t bad every single day—it’s only bad on “peak days.” When I reached out to UDOT to clarify the term “peak days,” they told me they were solving for periods when traffic in the canyon exceeds 1,000 vehicles an hour, and there are 39 of those every winter—usually on weekends, holidays, and after big storms—and only three the rest of the year.

In other words, this whole $500 million project is to solve the 39 hours a year that traffic is bad because people want to go skiing when work is out. Similarly, most freeway widening projects are solving for the hours between 6 am and 9 am, and 4 pm and 7pm, when everyone is driving to and from work. The problem in both cases isn’t too many cars—it’s too many cars at the same time.

Now it doesn’t sound like a transportation problem—it sounds like a business problem.

After all, the only reason peak days fall on the weekends is because most people work on weekdays. And the only reason rush hour happens during rush hour is because most people get off work at 5 pm. And the only reason both things happen is because, during the labor movement, companies and banks set their hours that way.

Back then, 9 to 5 jobs required a physical person to turn the knob and crank the widget. We needed to be “on the clock” and that notion carried over to office work. But office jobs changed the game, and remote jobs changed it again. We don’t need to be in the office at the exact same time, working nine to five Monday through Friday.

Some of us could take Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, rather than Saturdays and Sundays. Others might take Mondays and Tuesdays off, or work different hours. When I started working for myself two years ago, I began working 6 am to noon seven days a week, rather than 9 to 5 for five.

When office hours become less rigid, we see congestion ease up everywhere else. Decades of transportation research (both pre- and post-pandemic) show that staggered hours and teleworking disperse travel from peak to off-peak hours and ease congestion. Traffic in San Francisco is still down 6% compared to pre-pandemic numbers.

Flexible work has not only cleared roads but boosted local economies where restaurants, campsites, and national parks can enjoy customers every day, rather than just on the weekends. OpenTable has seen an 11% uptick in Wednesday night dinner reservations because of remote work, Recreation.gov reports a 12% uptick in weekday camping reservations, and ski resorts like Alterra have seen a lift in weekday business, reducing the weekend surge.

We don’t need to widen our highways or build a $500 million transportation project to the ski slopes. We need to change the hours we work and play, so that we’re not all doing both at the exact same time.

Yvonne Choinard has long been a champion of this idea. As the founder of Patagonia, he knew surf breaks didn’t just happen on the weekends, so he let employees surf when it was good, and work when they were back at their desks. In Utah, Spectrum Recruiting Solutions has a similar policy: Workers can ski when there’s a storm and are trusted to get their work done when there’s not.

Now I wonder: If Ford once converted the whole world to a Monday through Friday workweek, could a new batch of companies change the workweek once again? Companies have already become more nimble during the pandemic—remote work has alleviated rush hour traffic and improved Utah’s air quality. Could a new generation of businesses adopt an asynchronous workweek and solve our traffic problem for much less than $500 million?

I’d argue that, at some point, we’re going to have to. It’s not sustainable to have the entire world working and recreating at the exact same time and on the exact same holidays. We’ve already widened 1-15 to six lanes just to solve for rush hour; now we’re contemplating spending millions on Little Cottonwood Canyon just to solve for 39 hours. Instead, we could shift the workweek, trust employees to work the hours and days of their choosing, and let our workers ski and recreate outside of peak hours.

If even a quarter of the white-collar world adopted an asynchronous schedule, we could benefit local businesses, traffic congestion, even air quality.

The question isn’t whether we will do it or even when—it’s which companies are going to be the first?

Thanks for reading,

Elle Griffin