5in4: Working a 5 day week in 4: the reason for continuing /// IB

It is 3 months since we have been working a shorter week by concentrating 5 days of work into 4.The pros and cons have been much debated in the office but the anonymous decision is to continue for another 3 months, maybe for a full year.

The adjustment has been more difficult then we envisaged. The system does not work for staff who are commuting, some of us have not been able, or willing, to free Fridays of work, and long days are very tiring. There are concerns about productivity since we are all counting hours much more and overtime is impossible within the 4 days – challenging the overtime culture, established in our profession, was one of the incentives for this experiment but it is too early to assess its impact on business viability.

But there are also some great surprises – the ‘outside’ world has not been as condemning as might have been expected. We phonecalls on Friday have been very few – from 0 to 4 – and the volume of e-mails greatly reduced. It would seem that a lot of e-mails are generated by the office itself! Urgent phonecalls have been picked up on mobiles by job architects and none of them were really urgent.

Most clients and consultants respect the idea and wish they could implement it in their own offices. Many potential employees expressed the view that such working conditions would be a great bonus to them.

Other, less measurable things are emerging. There is a good moral in the team and a sense of purpose.  We are driven and creativity is flowing.

Private lives are enriched by longer weekends. We make different use of these: some for building homes, some for being with their families, and some for thinking, reading and working in a way that is simply not possible during a normal working day.

The big question that will eventually come up is whether we can reduce working week to 4 days of normal working hours – this will require a loss of earnings. The letting go of earning potential is the hardest obstacle of all – we need to get used to having less but this is easy for me to say because I am from a generation that had more then we needed.

But looking at the talented and accomplished people that make up our team we are all privileged and  we all have enough but the habits and values of consumer society made us dependent on having more. The ultimate purpose of 5 in 4 is to wean ourselves of this dependency.

5in4: 2 months update /// RJ

For me the first month of 5in4 mainly consisted of manageable and steady paced working which meant that I could really see the benefits of 5in4. The second month however saw the deadline of a competition entry that some of us were working on but this didn’t necessarily mean that 5in4 had negative impacts for me. In the second month my work spilled into the weekends, but this would have happened regardless of my contracted working hours. It’s the day-to-day overtime that we are seeing less of but the pre-deadline overtime is much more difficult to avoid and wasn’t a result of 5in4.

I still believe that the 5in4 strategy is beneficial to both my working life and personal life however the greatest benefits are geared more towards the latter. As an architecture student I spend a large portion of my weekends undertaking personal architecture projects and studies because it’s what I enjoy doing and I have the time to commit towards my future career. I have far less commitments outside of work than others in the office that have partners and children so my opinions of the experiment may differ greatly. I’m also not a main point of contact for a contractor or client say, so little to no correspondence is required from me on my Fridays off.

At BLA I feel that I’m achieving the same amount of work as I would over the original five day working week – which is great – but the difference that 5in4 has had on my personal studies and projects over the weekends has been hugely positive. Whilst this may not sound like 5in4 is benefitting my work at BLA there are also indirect impacts to consider – if I’m experiencing a happier personal life then is this in turn going to have a positive impact on my working life (such as feeling more refreshed on a Monday morning etc)?

All in all as a part one student who is trying to make the most of my year out between Part I and Part II, 5in4 is great and I’d be happy to continue with this way of working until I return to University.

5in4: Thursday isn’t the new Friday /// SW

2 months down for 5in4, I’m getting used to the ‘ins and outs’ of our experiment: what it means for work life, home life, carbon footprint, productivity levels, energy levels (!), and ‘satisfaction’ levels…

The latter point is, for me, most important. The 5in4 message could easily be weighted towards upshots for individuals: our increased free time, quality of life and personal satisfaction. This is important, yes (and I’ll talk about why in a minute), but as practitioners we must also meet the satisfaction of our Clients. Reduced office presence should not limit our capacity to deliver. Therefore the success of our condensed work-week is inseparable from the effectiveness of our time spent working.

We are continually finding ways to work more efficiently, to react to the circumstances of our projects, to provide the same dedicated service and to reduce waste. 5in4 brings these efforts into focus. They can include simple things such as self-organisation, resource planning and good communication. Others include better use of technology (smartphones are admittedly useful, although we try to avoid slavish dependency) and we engage with new and emerging software to save time & add value to our work. Significantly, we try to think critically and work smarter too – questioning commitment of time unless the purpose and value is clear. When we are successful, this sometimes alerts our collaborators to the consequences of lost-time as well.

We regularly grapple with exigent demands on our time; and are familiar with peaks and troughs of workload. But for the most part, we are trying not to allow the 5in4 trial to be unduly influenced by a culture of immediacy and 24/7 availability. Oddly, we have even discovered that not being in the office on a Friday can be advantageous to our Employers & collaborators – it gives them a chance to either catch-up or forge-ahead where we rely on iterative information exchange, and it gives us the impetus to issue necessary information (by Thursday evening) in time for them to respond in the stop-gap.

It’s true that some of us have extended work-hours occasionally into Friday & the weekend (at the office, or remotely) but when this has happened it has been a realistic reaction to extraordinary circumstances. Relevantly, it has also been quite rare for most, because ‘Thursday’ has taken on a new importance. For my part, since the weekend is visibly 1 day nearer, I am learning to match and improve on the outputs which filled 5 days in the past, and so extra time need not be routinely given.

This is not to say that we worked in a relaxed fashion over 5 days, few architects do. The reward at the end of the week, an extra day of personal time, is a drive for effective working and valuable for both the individual & the company. With the extra day I can relax, attend to domestic tasks and – lest we forget commerciality – return to work galvanised into action. Friday is spent doing meaningful things that are otherwise difficult to do on a Saturday; and I can recharge in 3 days, something that rarely occurred in 2.

By my reckoning, the increased rate of work is a function of the condensed work period, and can’t be consistently applied over 5 days. ‘Burn-out’ was a risk we sought to avoid with 5in4, and 5 days at increased velocity would inevitably bring this about. This reinforces the ethos – a more productive work-week and healthier balance is struck at a ratio of 4:3 than 5:2.

These findings are not aberrations; they align with reports from Holland & certain states in America, where condensed working borders on common acceptance. Many of our Clients are familiar with different forms of non-standard work-hours and the associated benefits – such is the increasing prevalence of ‘flexible working’ – and we have received encouragement from many sources; public sector, private sector, businesses and individuals – for deviating from an accepted norm in order to address work-life disparity.

Thursday isn’t the new Friday, but to me 4 days is the re-booted sequel to 5. And it’s better than the original.

5in4: 2 months update /// TV

I consider myself quite an organised person, not militant but generally punctual and prepared. I thought I would be easily organised enough to contribute to a blog one post a week. The fact that I have not blogged anything for over a month and a half goes some way toward showing how busy with other things at work I have been.

A younger me, I think, would have completed the blog in my free time over the weekend, but recently I have become more and more attached to keeping this separated from work. How much of this is down to a new working pattern and how much is because of a six month old is difficult to say. Whilst I have found that letting go is getting easier I’ve found the week much harder- In the last two weeks, because of a work spike, I’ve found myself going home for tea and to put my baby to bed , then returning to work at 8pm and staying late. I am fortunate enough to live 400m from the office that makes this just about palatable but still I have missed 3 sets of visiting friends due to this in the last 6 weeks. Spikes in work are always going to be difficult to absorb in an office the scale of ours and especially difficult for a person in my position who is drawing and organising. To a certain extent they can not be avoided, but I think this one could have been reduced by more realistic resourcing – I am hoping it is a one off due to the unusual geometrical complexity of the project. Now the clocks have changed and the weather is thinking about getting better I’m keen to get my evenings back to do things with.

This last week has been particularly difficult, it took half a day to get through emails. I’ve had 3/4 of a day out teaching, with a bank holiday Monday and Friday off this has left 1 3/4 days to get some work done. The result has been lots of overtime.

I think my wife is OK with this, but we’ve not really had the chance to talk about it in depth. We see Fridays differently: for the most part I’m shattered  [especially if I get drunk on Thursday] and don’t want to do anything and she is shattered and sees it as an opportunity to offload the baby.

I have no real idea if my productivity has dropped/increased or stayed the same. I suspect quantifying this in a meaningful way is not possible,  but the queue difference at the bar between a Thursday and a Friday is definitely smaller.

 

 

I’m sending the occasional email on a Friday because I’m worried what others outside the office may think.

 

5in4: 2 months update /// Wife of TV

At first I thought “this is great’: the extra time together, the possibility of reducing child care costs and no more unpaid overtime. Like many architects, architecture is more than a job for my husband. I could describe it as a hobby but that would undervalue it. My husband would frequently come home for tea and then head back to work, disrupt a weekend by having to go into work for the day or get stressed because it was hectic juggling his social life and work. If he wasn’t working in the evening then quite often he would be looking at architecture blogs, websites or reading architectural books (or maybe just looking at the grey photos!). I understand that architects love architecture, they have to in order to work all the additional thankless hours but this knocks on to their family. That is why the shorter week appealed. It raised the possibility of my husband having more free time away from his job to enjoy what he wanted to do that wasn’t architecture and might end the common nag “can we just not do anything this weekend”.

After my initial positivity the unknowns began to surface. Would my husband get home in time for bedtime? How much additional stress would there be by squeezing the working week into four days? Would he be able to leave work at work? The list went on. Reflecting on the past couple of months, its difficult to form a clear opinion of the shorter working week because we were already in a state of flux because of a new baby. Some things are definite though; lengthening the weekend has made it more relaxed. We’ve got time to sit still between activities but have also made the most of the free weekday. However, overtime has not disappeared and, whilst my husband is getting used to the shorter week, completing his weekly tasks plays on his mind when he is at home. We’re fortunate that we live a short distance from his office and he can come home for his lunch. If he had to commute half an hour then he wouldn’t see our son awake Monday to Thursday and I would be pulling my hair out! I think being in close proximity to the office means that we have benefited more than staff that travel a long distance to work.

Wife of TV

5in4: 2 months update /// ED

I started working at Bauman Lyons only a few weeks before the ‘5in4’ trial began, so the new working hours were part and parcel of me settling in, and didn’t feel like too much of an adjustment.

As a Part 1 I see my year out as a good chance to develop ideas and reflect on interests both within and outside the field of architecture, and working a four-day week definitely allows for this. It allows time to challenge and explore architectural thinking and prepare for what awaits in Part 2.

My 3 months of working in the office have flown by, and I can imagine working intensely for 5 days a week, as well as the occasional weekend (which most of my friends do) would make it go by even quicker – without really allowing any rest time to take a step back to look at what I’ve learnt/am learning.

Unlike my colleagues, I’m not a stage where I can compare ‘5 in 4’ to previous working routines, but it is an invaluable experience which I will undoubtedly reflect on in the future and something which I feel extremely lucky to be a part of.

The first couple of months of ‘5 in 4’ have felt positive and motivated, and despite my initial worries that longer hours would feel less productive I don’t think this has been the case – there is a definite sense of drive and purpose within the office.

5in4: 2 months update /// IB

It has been 8 weeks since we worked a  5 days in 4 week.

I know there are difficulties. It does not work for everyone: commuters, part time workers, families with school age children would not find many advantages. The 4 days of work are long and we get tired. Evenings are almost non existent.

Out of 8 Fridays I only had 4 that were work free.

But there is one benefit that outweighs all others.

The ‘free Friday’ is free for thinking. I never wanted mine to be free of work but rather to be free from the daily necessities of work : the meetings, the phonecalls, the e-mails, the pleasantries, the PQQs, the interviews, the cashflow, the fee negotiations, the chasing of everything, the website, the tweets, the chat with the cleaner, and the brewing and collective drinking of coffee……..STOP!!!!!!

The are so many ideas every week and so many decision to make. I always feel that if I don’t make time to consider, analyse, assimilate, synthesize and disseminate, I will miss the point and will just keep on running to stand still.

It has been invaluable to extract the thinking time and to drink coffee alone just now and then.

5in4: 2 months update /// LC

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There’s been a lot of this in the last 2 months!

2 months have gone by pretty quickly and we’ve entered our last month of this trial.

So far it has been an interesting challenge and journey in evaluating whether this for me is a valuable and viable way of working.

As I started to understand at the end of February, this intensely condensed working pattern is not suited to my situation (I’m Manchester based).

I continue to notice the diminished contact with colleagues and directors, by being in the office one less day a week than my ‘standard’ days.

And although I travel less, saving 4 hours a week of commuting, the overall tiredness I accumulate in the days I work 10 hours, coupled with 4 hours of commute, is surprisingly overwhelming. The rest of the week is filled by other commitments in Manchester, so it’s not like as if I just put my feet up and rest.

I think 5in4 can work well, and I see some of my colleagues enjoying this work pattern, for those people who live locally to their work place and have no commuting time to add to a 10hr day.

I also realise, more strongly now after this experience, that such a different working pattern (i.e. the office being closed on a Friday) can work, without added stress, if others share and understand this. At this moment in time the construction industry has still a long way to go before the above can happen.

One discussion we had, in the office, right at the beginning of this trial, was the wish to find time to do personal activities that we would find enriching, activities that currently are not as valued as paid work, such as volunteering, looking after your own children, looking after the elderly, undertaking research and so on.

If there’s something that this recession has taught me is the importance of placing renewed value in non-paid work, as much as paid work. If we are to break the capitalistic society that isn’t making us more happy, on the contrary, then I think it’s imperative to wean ourselves off an all consuming working life.

Based on my personal experience, I think 5in4 can allow this to happen for those who have no added commute, as it still enables some flexibility to be retained in the hours at either side of a 10hr working day. When you add a commute like mine, for example, that flexibility unfortunately is lost.

This interesting article from the Guardian discusses the recent phenomenon of “work-life merge” where technology is allowing us to flip between private and work life seamlessly, which may be viewed as a good ‘solution’, but that has inevitably blurred the boundary of where one starts and one finishes. I don’t think this is an inherently good thing.

I have reached a point where I’m now weighing the positive aspect of less commuting – in fact for me the most positive aspect of this trial has been the ability to reduce my personal carbon footprint – against the negatives of increased tiredness and reduced interaction with my colleagues.

Stay tuned…

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This month we asked our partners to give us feedback on their experience and impact by our longer days. Here’s my husband’s input:

What I have mostly noticed since my wife has been working her new work hours/day pattern is that she is a lot more tired when I do see her. This is probably down to the fact that she leaves the house an hour earlier than previous (around 6.30am) and arrives home an hour later than before (around 9.15pm) and consequently often misses breakfast and eats her main meal of the day late. Although it is only for two days of the week, being out of the house for close to 15 hours for those two days is taking its toll and I doubt its sustainable in its current format beyond this short trial period.

I suspect that this arrangement may be better suited for those who don’t need to commute as far as she does and is contracted to a full week’s work – but I may be wrong. My personal feelings are that a part-time employee (3 days week) should continue to work just that – 3 days at normal hours – and that to create a 5in4 version for a part-time employee is more problematic than a feasible solution. It also runs the risk of making a flexible work pattern of 3 days/week less flexible for her and her commitments to both Bauman Lyons and those back in Manchester.

5in4: HAT Projects /// on flexible working

We are delighted to introduce our first guest post, by HAT Projects

Intrigued by their tweet in response to us announcing our 3-months trial of a 5in4 working week, we contacted Hana Loftus, co-director of HAT Projects, interested in knowing more about their experience of flexible working.

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The HAT Projects team!

                                                                      The HAT Projects team!

We were intrigued by Bauman Lyons’ recent announcement that the whole office was trialling a 5-in-4 day week, as a way to allow their team more time for family and other interests.  As a smaller practice, we’ve taken a flexible approach to our work patterns from the start – and would hope never to enforce a conventional working week.

The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, my co-director Tom and myself started a family at the same time as our practice. We were committed to real equality in childcare without having a nanny, so this meant a big change in the way we worked. From when our first child was three weeks old we split childcare 50/50, which was a tough mental shift for two naturally hard workers, but has paid huge dividends. We now work a more conventional week, but each of us still has a half-day off to spend with the girls. We never told our clients or collaborators how we managed – we did everything we could to maintain the quality and intensity of our work, and if this meant Tom getting up crazily early so that he could still pick up the girls from nursery at 5.15, so be it.

The second reason derives from our experience as employers. We started working with freelancers and part-time assistants as a way to limit our financial outlay while filling our needs. We realised that we would rather have several people working for us part-time, than packing those hours into full time roles. Partly this has been about using people’s skills appropriately – we need admin and architectural support but one person is unlikely to cover both. But also, as a small practice, the office dynamic is much healthier with more people coming in and out each week, and an early experience having a full-time employee also made us uncomfortable that she spent more time in the office than our 4.5 days a week. We made a decision that our employees should not work longer, or less flexible, hours than us.

We like having a team who have other projects on the go, bringing varied experiences to us – whether it’s running markets, studying, teaching or work for other practices. For the same reason, Tom and I also volunteer time as trustees to charities. We currently have a graduate working with us and although she would (naturally) like to be paid for five rather than the four days we employ her for, when we asked her about this for the piece, she commented that her ideal would be the 5-in-4 that Bauman Lyons are doing – full pay and Fridays off. Our other employed team member has just come back from maternity leave for a day and half a week, and will increase her hours over the next year. We have a wonderful freelancer who works with us when we need his skills in model-making or prototyping.

Of course Tom and I work far more than a ‘conventional’ work week when you include the evenings working late from home or in the office, but that’s no different from anyone else who owns their own business. I will confess to spending far too much time on my Blackberry. But we are both proud of the equality in our family and interested to see whether, as our practice continues to develop, we can keep having a team who work unusual hours. For us, it’s about getting the job done well, not watching the clock: trying not to set unreasonable expectations for what can be achieved in a certain number of hours, but also hoping our team takes seriously the responsibilities we give them. We’re ambitious and want hard workers, but we want people to have a life outside the practice too – and we hope that we lead by example.

                                          Jerwood Gallery by HAT Projects. ©HATProjects

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Thanks again Hana for your contribution, a great insight into how flexible working can be a viable model for architecture practice. 

If you want to find out more about HAT Projects and their work, we highly recommend their website and blog. You can also follow them on Twitter.

5in4: 5in4 Initial thoughts – M Lyons, founding partner

As with everyone in the Architectural design industry, I have noted the inexorable rise in the number of hours that individuals in offices are required to work in order to meet deadlines. These deadlines are very often set very unreasonably, to say:

  • Fit into a funding bodies’ end of financial year time scale, to suit their own bureaucracy and funding deadlines;

Or

  • Developers requiring redesigns because the “market” has run counter to their cost consultants’ estimates of schemes’ construction costs.

Or

  • Clients’ changes to designs required on site and the necessity to deal with the fall out, with increased contract administration not to mention redesign time. 

These time pressures are similar in many associated building consultancies such as engineering, but it is far worse, I feel, in architectural practice. Needles to say that this culture is not compensated for with increased fees, reflecting the extra hours worked as fees continue to drop rather than increase.

This ‘extreme hours’ culture eventually takes its toll on individuals’ lives both private and professional, with many dropping out of the profession.

Therefore our 5in4 trial period, is BLA’s attempt to start looking at this phenomenon in a way that – whilst working the hours of a full week – makes the extra hours often required from staff members to be either paid for separately or negotiated with a client, to then be added onto the programme of a commission.

I, of course, have worries about what we are embarking on :

  • Loss of 20% visibility during the week.
  • Inability to meet urgent deadlines as staff will be unavailable for that 5th day of working if needed.
  • Negative perceptions within the client group of part time working.
  • Disproportionate effort by certain individuals to maintain “the safety net” of being available on the Fridays for emergency issues. 

However on the positive side:

  •  BLA will still work a 38hr week, it will just be compressed into 4 days.
  • Individual staff members will have a reduced commute to and from work.
  • There will be an extra day for staff members’ private lives, potentially making family life less pressured.
  • We should be able to manage the expectations of clients and contractors that meetings and queries are arranged in the first four days of the week. 

Going forward:

  • For the 5in4 to truly work we will have to work much smarter. There will have to be less repetition; less pondering re design; less bespoke unique solutions.
  • There will have to be much faster initial solutions, with modelled presentations leading to faster and firmer sign offs of frozen design stages.
  • We are going to have to gauge our clients needs in how bespoke they wish to be in design, or in fact how they want to simply have a standard solution.
  • We are going to monitor and possibly scale back the “service” we provide to inexperienced and under-resourced contractors and clients.

5in4: Wk03 – LC

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What makes life richer? Friends, be challenged, be part of your community, live the city and be surprised by it [through my lens]

End of Wk03

As I’m about to begin Wk04, I’m starting to realise that even my 4in3 is proving tougher than I thought. Perhaps I was being too optimistic?

With the 4in3 format I’m working in the office two days a week with one day then worked from home.

I actually really miss that office interaction over three days.

Another thing I realised is that with the 10hrs day, which means I don’t return home till very late, I’ve been missing simple but important things in life like friends’ birthdays. In this month alone I missed two dinners because while the others met after work, which for them meant 7pm, I couldn’t make it anytime before 9pm. One may say that missing a birthday dinner is not the end of the world, but life is made special by small things and friends’ birthdays (especially those who are more like family than just friends) are one of those important ‘little’ things that enrich life.

I am also so tired by the time I get home that those two days (10 hours plus commute time) worked in the office, on a private/personal level they don’t exist as I simply.just.’work’.*

I’m starting to appreciate and value even more than before the reasons why a working day has been set as 7.5hours. There is something vital about being able to balance life and work everyday not just on the day ‘off’.

Could the 8am-3pm day (over a ‘normal’ week) that Cedric Price advocated (already implemented in other countries) work better? Or even the good old 9till5 where you are able to truly clock off at 5pm (which has never happened in all my career life so far, due to the nature of the profession).

When I was very young, still a student, I had a classic interview where I was told that ‘you can’t practice architecture part time’. I begged to differ and I’m glad that 10+ years on the conversation is including and extending to the value of part time, yes even in architecture. But at this moment in time I’m not sure the right balance lies in the 4in3 model.

I’m learning that the 4in3 and even more so the 5in4 may render ‘flexibility’ even harder if not impossible to achieve. Because once you’ve worked 10 hours, there’s little flexibility left in the day to ‘play with’.

I may change my mind again as we progress with our trial. And this is what this trial is about, challenging ourselves to find a better life-balance that the current set up may or may not offer us.

*I am aware that this is unique to my situation as I’m the only one of BLA that lives the furthest from the office.

Notes:
– two days in office only also makes it hard to cross with directors, as they have the busiest schedule. This makes it harder for project and design reviews to take place in good time for meeting deadlines.
– the two-days only spent in the office, make time feel very rushed.

5in4: Hopes & Worries

Overview

  • An early start hasn’t been a problem – I generally feel more productive in a morning but I do start to feel less productive when it gets to about 5 o’clock.
  • Breaking off for lunch and getting some fresh air actually makes a difference and is really important when working longer hours – before I didn’t really leave the office for lunch.

Hopes

  • I think it should start to get a bit easier after a couple of weeks so the last few hours of the day don’t feel unproductive.
  • Having Fridays off means planning to do something valuable with my time so that it doesn’t feel wasted. Hope to start doing more artwork and explore Leeds a bit more on my bike as I haven’t really had the chance to do so since moving here.

Worries

  • Being unproductive towards the end of the day / making mistakes due to tiredness could lead to more time being spent rectifying them.

5in4: Experiences & Expectations

My experiences so far:

  • Shifting my sleeping pattern by an hour and a half made the first morning a little tough, but since then I’ve felt much livelier again as the new working hours are becoming routine.
  • The additional working hours of each day have so far remained productive and haven’t yet given me that ‘it’s been a long day’ feeling. Neither do I feel that my evenings have been significantly shortened; there’s still plenty of time for me to relax and refresh for the following day.
  • Starting work at 7:30am has encouraged me to be more efficient with my time in the mornings before I leave for work and I’ve so far managed to cut down my morning routine by roughly 20-25 minutes!
  • The most frequent question I’ve been asked regarding the 5 in 4 experiment has to be ‘won’t people just work on the Friday anyway when a deadline is approaching’… At this stage we can only wait and see what the answer will be.
  • It doesn’t seem like the local newsagent is too happy about us buying one less paper each week!

My experiences so far:

  • I’m hoping that this long weekend will be one of my most productive weekends to date due to the extra time that I will be able to spend on my personal projects and studies outside of the workplace. I believe that more can be achieved in the one Friday than in the five evenings of the previous working hours.
  • As I’m not living with family here in Leeds I won’t experience many of the effects that the new hours have on family life, but I’m certainly interested to see how those living with partners and children find the change in routine.
  • Although the first weekend is yet to come, I feel that there will be a positive impact on work/life balance
  • I wonder if tea and coffee consumption will increase with the longer working hours, I’ll keep an eye on it!

5in4: Adjusting

The 2nd week is nearly over already. At this pace, before we know it, the first month of this trial period will pass us by in a flash!

So far (but these are still very early days), I’m finding this new set up positive overall.

Because I get up quite early anyway, the earlier alarm clock hasn’t bothered me at all. I am actually finding that getting up at 5.30 is much easier than 6.30am. I enjoy the quietness before the hustle & bustle of the day commences.

On the other hand getting home much later than ‘normal’ is not being very easy nor pleasant. BUT it is compensated with the days that I don’t travel, because as mentioned previously, I work part time.

One thing that makes the longer days/condensed week harder for me is travelling in bad, winter weather! Today for example, Leeds has been covered by few cm of snow. You can imagine the chaos! I am writing this post on my slow train home. Tonight I won’t get home till long gone dinner time. But at least, I hope, these are rare occasions, so it’s important not to dwell on it too much.

I am picking up good vibes from my colleagues. Certainly there seems to be a general good mood in the office. I haven’t yet asked whether this is because of the longer weekend.

Amongst the projects I am working on, one is an invited competition with a very interesting brief, but I expect the next few weeks to test and challenge our 5in4 format quite a lot. Will we manage our time effectively within a ‘shorter’ week? Will the tight deadline be just too tight?

Will our Fridays be truly off? In all honesty, I don’t know. But at least we are trying and we are not sticking our heads in the sand pretending the current culture in our profession is ‘just fine’. The architectural profession has a serious, latent problem with unhealthily long hours, which must be challenged (a global problem, not just for British architects). Similarly with another latent issue which is still pervading the profession.

Crunching those numbers!

My 4in3 means I now travel to work one day less than ‘normal’ and I found that:

  • I save 4 hours a week in train travelling
  • I commute 80 miles less a week
  • I save approximately 7kg of CO2 from travelling, a week (calculator used and its assumptions);
  • I save approximately £80 a month in train fares!

Onwards & upwards!

5in4: Links & articles /// Wk01/02

These are some of the articles, debates and papers that have caught our eye lately:

Britain’s happiest places to live:


5in4: Wk02 – Adjusting [LC]

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This week has consisted of more snow (!), teaching at Sheffield School of Architecture and good, productive meetings (a nice change).

2nd week is nearly over already. At this pace, before we know it, the first month of this trial period will pass us by in a flash!

So far (but these are still very early days), I’m finding this new set up positive overall.

Because I get up quite early anyway, the earlier alarm clock hasn’t bothered me at all. I am actually finding that getting up at 5.30 is much easier than 6.30am. I enjoy the quietness  before the hustle & bustle of the day commences.

On the other hand getting home much later than ‘normal’ is not being very easy nor pleasant. BUT it is compensated with the days that I don’t travel, because as mentioned previously, I work part time.

One thing that makes the longer days/condensed week harder for me is travelling in bad, winter weather! Today for example, Leeds has been covered by few cm of snow. You can imagine the chaos! I am writing this post on my slow train home. Tonight I won’t get home till long gone dinner time. But at least, I hope, these are rare occasions, so it’s important not to dwell on it too much.

I am picking up good vibes from my colleagues. Certainly there seems to be a general good mood in the office. I haven’t yet asked whether this is because of the longer week end.

Amongst the projects I am working on, one is an invited competition with a very interesting brief, but I expect the next few weeks to test and challenge our 5in4 format quite a lot. Will we manage our time effectively within a ‘shorter’ week? Will the tight deadline be just too tight?

Will our Fridays be truly off? In all honesty, I don’t know. But at least we are trying and we are not sticking our heads in the sand pretending the current culture in our profession is ‘just fine’. The architectural profession has a serious, latent problem with unhealthy long hours, which must be challenged (a global problem, not just for British architects). Similarly with another latent issue which is still pervading the profession.

Onwards & upwards!

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Crunching those numbers!
My 4in3 means I now travel to work one day less than ‘normal’ and I found that:
– I save 4 hours a week in train travelling;
– I commute 80 miles less a week;
– I save approximately 7kg of CO2 from travelling, a week (calculator used and its assumptions);
And… (wait for it…)
– I save approximately £80 a month in train fares!

5in4: Wk00/01 – RJ

Experiences so far:

– Shifting my sleeping pattern by an hour and a half made the first morning a little tough, but since then I’ve felt much livelier again as the new working hours are becoming routine.
– The additional working hours of each day have so far remained productive and haven’t yet given me that ‘it’s been a long day’ feeling. Neither do I feel that my evenings have been significantly shortened; there’s still plenty of time for me to relax and refresh for the following day.
– Starting work at 7:30am has encouraged me to be more efficient with my time in the mornings before I leave for work and I’ve so far managed to cut down my morning routine by roughly 20-25 minutes!
– The most frequent question I’ve been asked regarding the 5 in 4 experiment has to be ‘won’t people just work on the Friday anyway when a deadline is approaching?’… At this stage we can only wait and see what the answer will be.
– It doesn’t seem like the local newsagent is too happy about us buying one less paper each week!

Expectations/Thoughts:

– I’m hoping that this long weekend will be one of my most productive weekends to date due to the extra time that I will be able to spend on my personal projects and studies outside of the workplace. I believe that more can be achieved in the one Friday than in the five evenings of the previous working hours.
– As I’m not living with family here in Leeds I won’t experience many of the effects that the new hours have on family life, but I’m certainly interested to see how those living with partners and children find the change in routine.
– Although the first weekend is yet to come, I feel that there will be a positive impact on work/life balance
– I wonder if tea and coffee consumption will increase with the longer working hours, I’ll keep an eye on it!

5in4: Wk00/01 – ED

Overview:

– An early start hasn’t been a problem – I generally feel more productive in a morning but I do start to feel less productive when it gets to about 5 o’clock.

– Breaking off for lunch and getting some fresh air actually makes a difference and is really important when working longer hours – before I didn’t really leave the office for lunch.

Hopes:

– I think it should start to get a bit easier after a couple of weeks so the last few hours of the day don’t feel unproductive.

– Having Fridays off means planning to do something valuable with my time so that it doesn’t feel wasted. Hope to start doing more artwork and explore Leeds a bit more on my bike as I haven’t really had the chance to do so since moving here.

Worries:

– Being unproductive towards the end of the day / making mistakes due to tiredness could lead to more time being spent time rectifying them.