The Four-Day Workweek

The Four-Day Workweek is the organizational reform Pang has studied, consulted on, and advocated for in Shorter (2020) and subsequent work. Companies that have moved from five-day, forty-hour structures to four-day, thirty-two-hour structures — without reducing compensation — consistently report flat or increased productivity, higher quality output, lower turnover, and improved employee well-being. The mechanism is not that employees work harder during the shorter week; it is that the structure forces the concentration of focused effort into the periods when cognitive resources are highest, with rest sufficient to maintain those resources. In April 2026, an OpenAI policy paper proposed that companies pilot four-day workweeks as the efficiency dividend from AI-driven productivity gains, bringing Pang's framework into explicit dialogue with the AI transformation.