AND YOU'RE ONLY PRODUCTIVE FOR THREE HOURS OF THOSE FOUR DAYS:

Iceland. Home to glaciers, dance-tastic pop music, and now a new rhythm to our working lives. From 2015 to 2019, the country ran the world's largest ever trial of a four-day working week, and on Monday the results came in. The trial, which grew to cover 1 per cent of the country's workforce, was an "overwhelming success," reducing stress while productivity held up or improved. The findings have encouraged Iceland's unions to renegotiate hours, and 86 per cent of the country's workforce could now gain the right to request a four-day week.

Back in Britain, when floated in the doomed 2019 Labour manifesto, a four-day week was dismissed as a token of naïve left-wing idealism. In truth, however, the idea has always been a more conservative proposal than its critics seem to think. If you zoom out to look at long-term trends in working hours, you see a steady but cumulatively dramatic decline over 150 years. In 1870, the typical worker in a western economy clocked in around 3,000 hours a year. In the latest available data (2017), that figure had almost halved, to a touch under 1,600 hours. And it has been entirely affordable to "buy" all this extra leisure: thanks to rising productivity, real incomes rose roughly sixfold over the same period. If you simply project those trends forward by drawing a straight line, we'd hit an average four-day week sometime in the early 2030s.

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