I call this living "off-peak." It's exhilarating and lonely at the same time. I go to brunch on a Tuesday and the beach on a Wednesday, and there's rarely anyone around. I've been working remotely since 2008, but I noticed a stark contrast after COVID. Everywhere seems busier. For instance, there don't seem to be off-peak times at grocery stores anymore. And there are often remote workers using the dairy aisle as a remote office (annoying).
I love it - not only the concept itself, but your way of thinking about the entire system and not the symptom. I wonder how much benefit we would see from creating more equilibrium ... because if peak demands strains the roads, we're straining the vendors too which means those tourist businesses have to overcompensate as well. You wonder how many jobs / entire economies are born of slack in the system... spiky whiplash demand. The problem is those large Wall Street banks don't think about the second and third order impacts of what they do. Thanks for provoking some thought!!
Spiky whiplash demand for sure. Day care that surges from 3pm to 5pm, tourist business/resorts that spikes at Thanksgiving and Christmas (requiring so many more workers, temporarily), premium travel bills on the weekends. More even demand would benefit the businesses (who could enjoy mid week business) as well as all of us who don’t have to pay a premium for peak hours!
Completely. We see it with energy consumption too - peak demand loading the grid (ie Tv usage, appliances, etc) spiking right after work. I'm sure the same patterns exist with broadband and compute. There's the norms and there is our expectation of access without constraint that together cause a shearing force on the system. Wonder what sort of economic impact the smoothing of activity would have...
Curious about school schedules. Not sure I can see those being so flexible. At least not as easily.
You know the HOV lanes you can pay for? What if those were incentive based? You earn points by traveling during off peak hours. Spend points when you need access to the lane or to pay for bridge crossings.
If your employees earn points the employer also gets something like a tax break or something.
School schedules already don't line up with the work week, which means employees already have to be flexible or pay a lot of money for childcare or not work! Flexibility, for employees would help. And eventually, maybe school schedules could be staggered too if needed!
More employees rely on cloud and GenAI tools to do their work and organizations are running into a hard limit: compute can’t handle peak-hour demand. I’ve experience more delays with tools during the workday but they run smoothly at night. This constraint is already pushing companies toward off-peak scheduling, asynchronous AI workflows, and could lead to new operating rhythms driven by infrastructure capacity. Let my agent talk to your agent while I’m out skiing on Tuesday.
I think there’s something romantic or biblical about how inefficient the weekend is. It would make so much more sense to stagger everyone’s days off, but it’s also nice to have set days that everyone you want to see and meet are out recreating at the same time.
"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."
The fact that you wrote these words is to me in itself a great progress: I have been secretly hoping I will get to live through something like this ever since I can remember: I hated going to school early in the morning. But then, in 9th and 10th grade we had to go in shifts, due to the overcrowding in our high-school: we started the day at noon and finished late in the afternoon and I absolutely loved it.
The only other time this happened was during the pandemic: therefore, I tend to believe that there is something that makes us think that we need to be creative only when we are forces to by unexpected circumstances. We do not trust one another enough in regular times! 😥
You are really on to something here, Elle. I "fell" into shift work with my first job in life and, somehow, have always been off from "regular" working schedules. After several decades, I have come to prefer it! I can do my grocery shopping and errands when everyone else is at work and it is SO much faster. I also can get more done AT work when I am the only one there. A win-win for productivity.
I became a full-time freelancer more than a decade ago. It was very easy for me to see a doctor, to buy groceries at quieter times, to work at hours when my brain was at peak productivity.
I never understood why people needed to do everything at prescribed times and on prescribed days. I still don't.
I don't know how you would navigate religious Sabbath days with this. Regardless of the federal policy you would still have large clustering effects based on religious and other identities
Judging by how we do this now, I imagine the workweek will remain M-F, but the async flexibility will just allow people to take Wednesday off and work on Saturday if they want. Or start work earlier in the morning so you're done earlier. Etc...
Elle, you’ve prompted me to reconsider a strongly held view I have, which is that common rhythms of work and play are really vital to a healthy society, and that a society should actually work through laws and regulations to help create those common rhythms.
But your stories of the ski slopes help me see the big cost in those things. It does seem crazy to spend a half $1 billion for 36 hours of relief, as you say.
Of course, everyone speaks from their own perspective. You speak from Utah. I speak from Portugal, where I am living now.
One of the things I love about Portugal, and most places in Europe I know, is that they still have very strong common rhythms. Most stores here close from about 1 to 3 PM so that people can go have lunch. Even most grocery stores close!
This is practically sometimes a strain, but it creates those common rhythms that mean people can enjoy their lives more. And lunch.
Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist, would call leisure time a social good. Meaning it increases in value when other peoples have it at the same time. And decreases in value when other people do not have it at the same time.
I believe United States is way too fractured. We have put too much of a premium on efficiency and individual choice. I actually would do more to encourage the United States to have common rhythms again, even if it means we have difficulty buying butter at 10 PM or something.
I agree that leisure time is a social good, and that we should have shared time off with community. But I also enjoy being able to choose that leisure time. And allowing that to ease the congestion that has resulted from lack of that choice.
It's true, there's no forced siesta in America, but I can choose to take one whenever I want. I can put off work in the morning to take a leisurely brunch with my husband, or take the afternoon off to spend it with my nieces after school. Flexibilty still allows for that leisure, but it just allows us to choose it.
I have the luck of working at a flexible coffee shop with a timetable and always get days off during the week. I'm loving this because I'm able to go wherever I want with fewer people around.
I also take holidays every September for the same reason.
What you are saying makes a lot of sense.
The solution you are offering saves a significant amount of money and time.
But people love the glamour of the weekends.
Weekends shine, and it's the best thing to say to others when you are back on Monday at work.
But why should we suffer for saying this to others? It's so pointless.
Like many commenters here, I also see a few things that need to be ironed out, like syncing time off with family and friends. And school holidays, rushing to ski, etc., will not decrease, which is a significant portion. Before kids, I usually try to take holidays outside our school holidays, and it makes a big difference. Back in Malaysia, traffic also drops significantly during school holidays.
Overall, though. I totally agree that 9-to-5 is outdated, and we should all be free to work at whatever time suits us or our preferences. Trust that we will all deliver the same or even better results without needing to sit in the same place at the same time.
Hi Elle I understand where you are coming from if you look at it from within the prison of our current world. For me it feels part of the march of 'progress' of the economic machine - which is the decay of society and culture. Deeper human values being replaced with the modern non-stop culture of $$$. It makes every day and every hour simply another day of economic activity. With that more destruction of community and the planet. More eroding of the family. More pressure. Constant activity. No quiet time. Unless we deal with the core issue of growth we will fill all those highways and ski slopes every minute of every day. The problems you talk about are so current they are happening in real time. This hasn't happed over the last thousand or even hundred years. It's happening so fast. Weekends have already been given over to consumerism at the altar of growth. Previously in Australia most shops were not allowed to open on the weekend. Now the economy never sleeps. In the past people connected in all manner of ways and slowed on weekends. Still in places like Spain, where I am at present, just about everything shuts during the day - bad for the economy no doubt but people come together. Not very flexible and of so inconvenient but so valuable on so many other levels. Around the world weekends are now just another day to earn and spend. Everything is about the economy. The family and the non economic values of caring, nurturing, loving, growing, cooking all handed over to the economy. Soon all the last bits will be gone too. Unless we rebel. Rather than getting rid of weekends a radical act of rebellion is to not enter the economy on weekends at all. Come back together as family and community. Connect with the earth. With each other. Grow, cook, share love. To change our trajectory the only option is to give worth to non-economic values. Connecting and sharing in all manner of ways outside the 'economic machine'. As the machine grinds on people are not happier and more fulfilled. People did believe in progress but current surveys reveal the death of the idea of progress. It's ok to give the forests, mountains and waves are break from us. Just let them be. I'm sure they won't fret and will enjoy the break. The machine convinced us to accept giving up everything. To me 'flexibility' is just another way to give every moment of every day to the one and only current value, taking away our freedom to live.
I'm not saying work seven days a week, I'm saying work the four or five days of the week of your choosing. It's not giving your life over to capitalism, but giving it over to however you want to live your life. To the days you want to have for yourself, not the ones imposed on you by the workweek.
Having a forced weekend came with a lot of benefits, and we should still have shared time off with our communities. But it was also incredibly difficult and expensive to visit my family on the weekends because I had to fly on a Friday or Monday. Now I can fly to them on a Wednesday and stay for a week! And it was incredibly difficult and expensive to do things with family on a weekend because everything is booked. Now we can do things together mid-week.
We should still have shared time off, but why can't it be the time off of our choosing?
Hi Ellie, how would we have shared time off as families and communities it we all individually were choosing different times? Even in just a larger family everyone would be choosing different times. The sense of community would be gone completely with the economy and work going on 24/7 with every moment being given over to the economy at the expense of family and community. There would eb no shared family and community time. It all depends on what we value. More time off from economic work is obviously desirable - we should aiming for less work and planning for less economic work as we so called 'progress'. When we talk about a the working week, what we don't mention is that families now are working at least twice as much as they did a short time ago with both partners working. Kids are institutionalised in the economy. Community is all about the economy now. Community and family time and community and family values have been completely eroded and are now all completely part of the economy and the machine. Flexibility is a nice word but it will just mean no shared or community time when the economy and the machine stops.
I suppose I'm not seeing that as = the end result of flexibility. Everyone I know has more flexibility than they had before the pandemic, and that has translated to more community and family time not less. Nearly all studies, and the poll I ran for my subscribers, shows similar results.
For instance, because I work remotely, I was able to stay with my sister all summer and babysit her kids. Because I work async, I was able to pick them up from school at 3pm. How is that not more time with community?
It's true that both parents have to work now when they didn't used to, but that's not because of increased workplace flexibility, that's because of capital capture at the top. The capital owners are earning the returns from our productivity rather than the workers.
Hi Ellie, I do understand where you are coming from. Working from home has helped a lot of people who are beholden to the machine. Superficially getting rid of weekends sounds like more of the same. However the machine of the economy, growth and 'progress', have consumed everything and will continue to do so unless we take decisive steps. Production and consumption are now already essentially 24/7 which was never the case. Restoring times when we make collective decisions to shut down the machine so it does not operate, is one of them. No economic work, no production, no consumption, no shopping, no growth, no 'progress'. Reclaiming our lives, our families and our communities. If we don't it will ultimately consume life on earth.
The Spanish are amazing in that respect. They have the siesta. The Sunday is holy. And there are a gazillion holidays, festivals and celebrations to get people to spend time together.
I already live this way since I am able to make my own hours. Working on the weekends and going out on weekdays means no lines, no traffic, and no crowds. Sometimes I'll go out on a weekend for an event and I'm suddenly reminded I live in a big city. If more people did this we could have more Wednesday events!
This is a very good idea. My wife and I have ignored the idea of 'work week' and 'weekends' for a decade now. We take a break when the weather is fine, or when we feel like we've worked enough. It's tougher to balance your time (for instance, we often end up working too much, and so we found it important to keep our day structured even if our week is not).
But the immense freedom to work with the seasons, the micro-seasons, with the weather, just feels like it puts us into a natural rhythm that a work week can never accomplish. It reminds us that the work week and the month are very anthropocentric ideas that have been awkwardly shoe-horned into the rhythm of the earth. It never really fits, does it?
So even though we are not farmers explicitly (I'm an artist/writer and my wife is a herbalist) the way we work is similar in flow to how our farming friends work. Maybe they have it right, and maybe we need to learn from that, regardless of what we do for a living?
I so agree. I love, for instance, that in the winter I can get out in the middle of the day and go for a nordic ski or a walk, instead of getting done with work and it's dark out and I have to stay inside. Freedom allows to live in the seasons better!
I call this living "off-peak." It's exhilarating and lonely at the same time. I go to brunch on a Tuesday and the beach on a Wednesday, and there's rarely anyone around. I've been working remotely since 2008, but I noticed a stark contrast after COVID. Everywhere seems busier. For instance, there don't seem to be off-peak times at grocery stores anymore. And there are often remote workers using the dairy aisle as a remote office (annoying).
Dairy aisle as a remote office?? Now that's taking things to the next level!!!! 🤯
I love it - not only the concept itself, but your way of thinking about the entire system and not the symptom. I wonder how much benefit we would see from creating more equilibrium ... because if peak demands strains the roads, we're straining the vendors too which means those tourist businesses have to overcompensate as well. You wonder how many jobs / entire economies are born of slack in the system... spiky whiplash demand. The problem is those large Wall Street banks don't think about the second and third order impacts of what they do. Thanks for provoking some thought!!
Spiky whiplash demand for sure. Day care that surges from 3pm to 5pm, tourist business/resorts that spikes at Thanksgiving and Christmas (requiring so many more workers, temporarily), premium travel bills on the weekends. More even demand would benefit the businesses (who could enjoy mid week business) as well as all of us who don’t have to pay a premium for peak hours!
Completely. We see it with energy consumption too - peak demand loading the grid (ie Tv usage, appliances, etc) spiking right after work. I'm sure the same patterns exist with broadband and compute. There's the norms and there is our expectation of access without constraint that together cause a shearing force on the system. Wonder what sort of economic impact the smoothing of activity would have...
Yes!!!
Curious about school schedules. Not sure I can see those being so flexible. At least not as easily.
You know the HOV lanes you can pay for? What if those were incentive based? You earn points by traveling during off peak hours. Spend points when you need access to the lane or to pay for bridge crossings.
If your employees earn points the employer also gets something like a tax break or something.
School schedules already don't line up with the work week, which means employees already have to be flexible or pay a lot of money for childcare or not work! Flexibility, for employees would help. And eventually, maybe school schedules could be staggered too if needed!
More employees rely on cloud and GenAI tools to do their work and organizations are running into a hard limit: compute can’t handle peak-hour demand. I’ve experience more delays with tools during the workday but they run smoothly at night. This constraint is already pushing companies toward off-peak scheduling, asynchronous AI workflows, and could lead to new operating rhythms driven by infrastructure capacity. Let my agent talk to your agent while I’m out skiing on Tuesday.
That's an interesting point, peak hours are causing an overdemand for servers too. Makes sense!
I think there’s something romantic or biblical about how inefficient the weekend is. It would make so much more sense to stagger everyone’s days off, but it’s also nice to have set days that everyone you want to see and meet are out recreating at the same time.
"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."
The fact that you wrote these words is to me in itself a great progress: I have been secretly hoping I will get to live through something like this ever since I can remember: I hated going to school early in the morning. But then, in 9th and 10th grade we had to go in shifts, due to the overcrowding in our high-school: we started the day at noon and finished late in the afternoon and I absolutely loved it.
The only other time this happened was during the pandemic: therefore, I tend to believe that there is something that makes us think that we need to be creative only when we are forces to by unexpected circumstances. We do not trust one another enough in regular times! 😥
You are really on to something here, Elle. I "fell" into shift work with my first job in life and, somehow, have always been off from "regular" working schedules. After several decades, I have come to prefer it! I can do my grocery shopping and errands when everyone else is at work and it is SO much faster. I also can get more done AT work when I am the only one there. A win-win for productivity.
I'm so with you!
Furthermore, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 seems to be corporate office culture at least here in Europe.
I know many people working in fields and industries where these days and hours are not standard.
I became a full-time freelancer more than a decade ago. It was very easy for me to see a doctor, to buy groceries at quieter times, to work at hours when my brain was at peak productivity.
I never understood why people needed to do everything at prescribed times and on prescribed days. I still don't.
I don't know how you would navigate religious Sabbath days with this. Regardless of the federal policy you would still have large clustering effects based on religious and other identities
Judging by how we do this now, I imagine the workweek will remain M-F, but the async flexibility will just allow people to take Wednesday off and work on Saturday if they want. Or start work earlier in the morning so you're done earlier. Etc...
Elle, you’ve prompted me to reconsider a strongly held view I have, which is that common rhythms of work and play are really vital to a healthy society, and that a society should actually work through laws and regulations to help create those common rhythms.
But your stories of the ski slopes help me see the big cost in those things. It does seem crazy to spend a half $1 billion for 36 hours of relief, as you say.
Of course, everyone speaks from their own perspective. You speak from Utah. I speak from Portugal, where I am living now.
One of the things I love about Portugal, and most places in Europe I know, is that they still have very strong common rhythms. Most stores here close from about 1 to 3 PM so that people can go have lunch. Even most grocery stores close!
This is practically sometimes a strain, but it creates those common rhythms that mean people can enjoy their lives more. And lunch.
Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist, would call leisure time a social good. Meaning it increases in value when other peoples have it at the same time. And decreases in value when other people do not have it at the same time.
I believe United States is way too fractured. We have put too much of a premium on efficiency and individual choice. I actually would do more to encourage the United States to have common rhythms again, even if it means we have difficulty buying butter at 10 PM or something.
I agree that leisure time is a social good, and that we should have shared time off with community. But I also enjoy being able to choose that leisure time. And allowing that to ease the congestion that has resulted from lack of that choice.
It's true, there's no forced siesta in America, but I can choose to take one whenever I want. I can put off work in the morning to take a leisurely brunch with my husband, or take the afternoon off to spend it with my nieces after school. Flexibilty still allows for that leisure, but it just allows us to choose it.
Thought-provoking, your idea.
I have the luck of working at a flexible coffee shop with a timetable and always get days off during the week. I'm loving this because I'm able to go wherever I want with fewer people around.
I also take holidays every September for the same reason.
What you are saying makes a lot of sense.
The solution you are offering saves a significant amount of money and time.
But people love the glamour of the weekends.
Weekends shine, and it's the best thing to say to others when you are back on Monday at work.
But why should we suffer for saying this to others? It's so pointless.
I don't understand the logic of shiny weekends. Do all people hate their jobs and professions? Probably yes.
Also, why not have a day off that doesn't fall on Saturday or Sunday?
Not all but most are in this loop.
I have a friend that he is upset because the manager doesn’t give him day off in the weekend.
I personally pursue quiet days, they are more effective in all areas.
I like to imagine a better world with you.
Like many commenters here, I also see a few things that need to be ironed out, like syncing time off with family and friends. And school holidays, rushing to ski, etc., will not decrease, which is a significant portion. Before kids, I usually try to take holidays outside our school holidays, and it makes a big difference. Back in Malaysia, traffic also drops significantly during school holidays.
Overall, though. I totally agree that 9-to-5 is outdated, and we should all be free to work at whatever time suits us or our preferences. Trust that we will all deliver the same or even better results without needing to sit in the same place at the same time.
Hi Elle I understand where you are coming from if you look at it from within the prison of our current world. For me it feels part of the march of 'progress' of the economic machine - which is the decay of society and culture. Deeper human values being replaced with the modern non-stop culture of $$$. It makes every day and every hour simply another day of economic activity. With that more destruction of community and the planet. More eroding of the family. More pressure. Constant activity. No quiet time. Unless we deal with the core issue of growth we will fill all those highways and ski slopes every minute of every day. The problems you talk about are so current they are happening in real time. This hasn't happed over the last thousand or even hundred years. It's happening so fast. Weekends have already been given over to consumerism at the altar of growth. Previously in Australia most shops were not allowed to open on the weekend. Now the economy never sleeps. In the past people connected in all manner of ways and slowed on weekends. Still in places like Spain, where I am at present, just about everything shuts during the day - bad for the economy no doubt but people come together. Not very flexible and of so inconvenient but so valuable on so many other levels. Around the world weekends are now just another day to earn and spend. Everything is about the economy. The family and the non economic values of caring, nurturing, loving, growing, cooking all handed over to the economy. Soon all the last bits will be gone too. Unless we rebel. Rather than getting rid of weekends a radical act of rebellion is to not enter the economy on weekends at all. Come back together as family and community. Connect with the earth. With each other. Grow, cook, share love. To change our trajectory the only option is to give worth to non-economic values. Connecting and sharing in all manner of ways outside the 'economic machine'. As the machine grinds on people are not happier and more fulfilled. People did believe in progress but current surveys reveal the death of the idea of progress. It's ok to give the forests, mountains and waves are break from us. Just let them be. I'm sure they won't fret and will enjoy the break. The machine convinced us to accept giving up everything. To me 'flexibility' is just another way to give every moment of every day to the one and only current value, taking away our freedom to live.
I'm not saying work seven days a week, I'm saying work the four or five days of the week of your choosing. It's not giving your life over to capitalism, but giving it over to however you want to live your life. To the days you want to have for yourself, not the ones imposed on you by the workweek.
Having a forced weekend came with a lot of benefits, and we should still have shared time off with our communities. But it was also incredibly difficult and expensive to visit my family on the weekends because I had to fly on a Friday or Monday. Now I can fly to them on a Wednesday and stay for a week! And it was incredibly difficult and expensive to do things with family on a weekend because everything is booked. Now we can do things together mid-week.
We should still have shared time off, but why can't it be the time off of our choosing?
Hi Ellie, how would we have shared time off as families and communities it we all individually were choosing different times? Even in just a larger family everyone would be choosing different times. The sense of community would be gone completely with the economy and work going on 24/7 with every moment being given over to the economy at the expense of family and community. There would eb no shared family and community time. It all depends on what we value. More time off from economic work is obviously desirable - we should aiming for less work and planning for less economic work as we so called 'progress'. When we talk about a the working week, what we don't mention is that families now are working at least twice as much as they did a short time ago with both partners working. Kids are institutionalised in the economy. Community is all about the economy now. Community and family time and community and family values have been completely eroded and are now all completely part of the economy and the machine. Flexibility is a nice word but it will just mean no shared or community time when the economy and the machine stops.
I suppose I'm not seeing that as = the end result of flexibility. Everyone I know has more flexibility than they had before the pandemic, and that has translated to more community and family time not less. Nearly all studies, and the poll I ran for my subscribers, shows similar results.
For instance, because I work remotely, I was able to stay with my sister all summer and babysit her kids. Because I work async, I was able to pick them up from school at 3pm. How is that not more time with community?
It's true that both parents have to work now when they didn't used to, but that's not because of increased workplace flexibility, that's because of capital capture at the top. The capital owners are earning the returns from our productivity rather than the workers.
Hi Ellie, I do understand where you are coming from. Working from home has helped a lot of people who are beholden to the machine. Superficially getting rid of weekends sounds like more of the same. However the machine of the economy, growth and 'progress', have consumed everything and will continue to do so unless we take decisive steps. Production and consumption are now already essentially 24/7 which was never the case. Restoring times when we make collective decisions to shut down the machine so it does not operate, is one of them. No economic work, no production, no consumption, no shopping, no growth, no 'progress'. Reclaiming our lives, our families and our communities. If we don't it will ultimately consume life on earth.
The Spanish are amazing in that respect. They have the siesta. The Sunday is holy. And there are a gazillion holidays, festivals and celebrations to get people to spend time together.
Hopefully they will withstand for a while longer. If we were truely progressing we would be having more not less of this community time.
I already live this way since I am able to make my own hours. Working on the weekends and going out on weekdays means no lines, no traffic, and no crowds. Sometimes I'll go out on a weekend for an event and I'm suddenly reminded I live in a big city. If more people did this we could have more Wednesday events!
This is a very good idea. My wife and I have ignored the idea of 'work week' and 'weekends' for a decade now. We take a break when the weather is fine, or when we feel like we've worked enough. It's tougher to balance your time (for instance, we often end up working too much, and so we found it important to keep our day structured even if our week is not).
But the immense freedom to work with the seasons, the micro-seasons, with the weather, just feels like it puts us into a natural rhythm that a work week can never accomplish. It reminds us that the work week and the month are very anthropocentric ideas that have been awkwardly shoe-horned into the rhythm of the earth. It never really fits, does it?
So even though we are not farmers explicitly (I'm an artist/writer and my wife is a herbalist) the way we work is similar in flow to how our farming friends work. Maybe they have it right, and maybe we need to learn from that, regardless of what we do for a living?
I so agree. I love, for instance, that in the winter I can get out in the middle of the day and go for a nordic ski or a walk, instead of getting done with work and it's dark out and I have to stay inside. Freedom allows to live in the seasons better!