What Covid-19 Taught Us About the Nature of Work: A Selection from Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (2022)

“When Covid-19 spread across the world, lots of people thought—amid all the tragedy and horror—that there might at least be one good outcome. Many people (not all) were freed from the daily commute and from the pressure to be seen at their desks all the time. So it was assumed that there might be a little space created for more rest. But work hours actually went up during Covid—in the first month and a half of lockdown alone, the average U.S. worker clocked in three extra hours a day. In France, Spain, and Britain, people worked two hours more a day on average. It’s not totally clear why. Some people think it’s because Zoom meetings take so damn long; others reckon it’s because, given all the economic insecurity, people were even more keen to show they were working so they didn’t get laid off.

What this shows is that no big outside force is going to come along and free us from the ratchet to work more and more hours—not even a global pandemic. We will only get it through a collective struggle to change the rules.

But Covid also showed us something else that is relevant to a four-day week. It demonstrated that businesses can change their working practices radically, in a very short period of time, and continue to function well. When I caught up with him on Zoom in early 2021, Andrew Barnes said to me: ‘If a chief executive of a British bank had said, “We could run a 60,000-person bank from home” a year and a half ago, you’d have said: “No chance.” Right?’ And yet it happened, pretty seamlessly. ‘So . . . surely you can run a business in four days, not five?’ Andrew told me other managers used to say to him that a four-day week couldn’t possibly work because they wouldn’t be able to trust their staff if they couldn’t see them. Andrew called them back and said they should think again now: ‘They all work from home. Amazingly, the work got done.’

The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable—until it changes, and then we realize it didn’t have to be like that in the first place.”—Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again (2022)