Bill Gates recently predicted that artificial intelligence could shrink our workweek to just three days. In a future where machines handle all the tedious work, we humans will have plenty more leisure time. It’s certainly a radical vision, but perhaps the most radical part of it is the idea that these numbers are entirely negotiable.
We tend to think of the five-day workweek as a law of nature, as certain as the rising of the sun. But it’s nothing of the sort. The five-day workweek is a human invention that was introduced just over a century ago to solve the specific problems of the industrial age. By now it’s so ingrained in our lives that we’ve forgotten we created it in the first place—but we did create it and we can also un-create it.
This wouldn’t be the first time anyone attempted a radical re-engineering of time. During the French Revolution, reformers proposed a system to replace the seven-day week. The French Republican calendar still divided the year into twelve months, but each month was made up of three, ten-day “weeks,” or décades. Days were then divided into ten hours, each hour into one hundred minutes, and each minute into one hundred seconds.
Nobody uses that system today, which tells you everything you need to know about how well it went. For one, workers were accustomed to a day of rest every seven days, and they found the new rhythm of nine straight days of labor much more exhausting. But the issue was more than just the physical toll of the extra workload. The traditional Sunday served as the cornerstone of community life: a day for church, for the market, and for the social gatherings that had kept villages together for centuries. The new, state-mandated rest day, the décadi, offered none of that shared ritual. As a result, many peasants defied the law and continued to observe their old Sunday, sometimes at great personal risk.
A bit of a failed experiment, the Republican calendar still lasted over a decade. Its biggest lesson: timekeeping must adapt to people, not the other way around.
No such thing as a natural rhythm
If artificial “clocks” don’t work, should we simply return to a more “natural” rhythm? The idea sounds appealing, but we run into an immediate problem: What, exactly, is a natural rhythm? Is it the cycle of sunrise and sunset? Is it our own internal biological clock? The moment you try to define it, you discover there’s no universal standard.
Even if we conveniently set aside Einstein’s theory of relativity—and the fact that time itself isn’t a universal constant—we still run into a rather personal complication. People simply don’t experience time uniformly. Sometimes a boring meeting stretches a minute into an hour, or, for someone else, a deep conversation can compress an evening into mere moments. Our focus, emotions, and level of engagement constantly reshape our perception of time.
Our internal clock is further shaped by our culture’s deep-seated beliefs about what time is. Anthropologists often distinguish between “monochronic” cultures, where time is seen as a finite resource to be saved and spent, and “polychronic” cultures, where time is a more flexible, flowing medium for human connection. For example, the logic of the 9-to-5 is a product of the monochronic view, adopted by many in North America and Northern Europe, where punctuality is a virtue. In polychronic societies, however, relationships often take precedence over schedules. A meeting starts when the important people arrive and finishes when it needs to—not when the clock says so.
The search for a single, “natural” rhythm, then, is a fool’s errand. What feels natural and polite in Berlin might feel absurdly rigid in Bogotá. We are guided by many clocks at once: the biological, the psychological, and the cultural, and these are rarely in perfect sync.
The opportunity of an optimized life
If there is no universal “natural” rhythm that we can all follow, one popular modern answer is to engineer your own. The entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss championed this idea in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, proposing that we apply the logic of a startup to our personal lives. His approach is to apply business principles, like the 80/20 rule, to optimize for personal freedom. Life’s ambitions become well-defined projects, turning spontaneous adventure into meticulously planned “lifestyle design.”
This feeling of profound responsibility—the pressure of being the sole architect of a meaningful life—is not a new phenomenon. It’s a modern expression of what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called being “condemned to be free.” Sartre argued that, without a preordained purpose, humans are terrifyingly free, and entirely responsible for creating their own meaning and values. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself,” he writes, suggesting that this is the very source of our deepest anxiety.
Sartre’s philosophical dread is visible today in the psychology of leisure. Studies on retirement, for example, consistently show that an abundance of unstructured time often leads to a decline in well-being, rather than an increase in happiness. As psychologist Barry Schwartz explains in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, infinite options can lead to paralysis and dissatisfaction, not liberation.
The question, then, is not how to escape structure, but what kind of structure actually leads to a fulfilling life. The five-day workweek, designed for the industrial age, was one answer. The four-hour workweek, designed for the age of the individual entrepreneur, is another. As remote and asynchronous work becomes the norm, we are being given a historic opportunity to experiment with new answers—to invent a life that includes both productivity and purpose.