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Interviewees:
Amanda Dennison, owner of Head Office, Dublin, Ireland
Jack Kellam, head of operations at Autonomy, a UK-based think tank
Juliet Schor, economist and professor of sociology at Boston College
Holger Schäfer, Labor market economist at the German Economic Institute (IW) in Cologne
Philipp Frey, Karlsruhe for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis
Script:
Kathleen: Hi Jen! Welcome back ... You've been off for a couple of weeks, right?
Jennifer: Hi Kathleen ... Yeah, thanks ... I was in my hometown Dublin for a visit. And while I was there, I also did some work, which is fitting because I've been looking into the idea of work – specifically how much laboring is actually good for us and the planet. So, I took a little trip to probably an unlikely place
to find out a bit more about this – and that was the local hairdressers for a blow dry.
I think you call it a blow out in the US...
Kathleen: Yeah, we do call in a blow out but I need to put a blow dry in Ireland on my bucket list.
Jennifer: Yeah, I was very happy with it. I got a nice curly blow dry. The salon is called Head Office. Head Office is set among a row of other one-story shops with a little car park in front. It's in a very working-class area of Dublin called Ballyfermot and opens Monday to Saturday from 9 to 5. It looks like your typical salon – wash basins, little reception desk at the entrance, a few workstations in front of mirrors, a nail artist in the corner.
Kathleen: Is that where you got your nails done because they look fabulous.
Jennifer: No, I got those done in Berlin but thank you. (laughs) It's a hive of activity, regulars getting their hair washed, cut, colored, styled, you know, sitting with cups of tea and chatting, while the radio is pumping out music. And Head Office is real community hub too.
Amanada Dennison: You get to know the grandchildren, come and get their hair done, their children will get their hair done. So, you'll be going through the weddings, communions, confirmations, and you do get to know people, over the years. You do make friends in that way as well as a hairdresser. People tell you things because it's quite intimate. A lot of people would come in because they're lonely. They'd come in just for a blow dry for a chat and they'd stay, here for coffee. And we often get people staying here for 2 or 3 hours, and they'd be finished in 20 minutes.
Jennifer: That's salon owner Amanda Dennison, who's been running the place for over 30 years. She got into hairdressing because
Amanada Dennison: I used to go with my mother to the hairdressers, and the one of the girls there said, would you like to come in and try? And I did, and I loved it. I fell in love.
Jennifer: Amanda is also doing something kind of unusual in her busy salon. And that's implementing a four-day work week for herself and five staff.
Amanada Dennison: All the girls only work the most four days and then three days and two days.
Kathleen: Why did she decide to do that, because I'd imagine it's not that easy when you're running a busy business that's open six days a week?
Jennifer: One big reason was that most of the women working there have kids
Amanda Dennison: As long as you let me know, they can change the days and we can walk around them because life gets in the way. Sometimes they have appointments or they've parents getting older now they need to be brought places. Children are sick.
Jennifer: And the other one is having free time. Just having that extra little bit of mental space.
Amanda Dennison We'd watch out for each other and it just makes life much more pleasant, . I think you need that time to relax your mind as well, because it is go, go, go.
Kathleen: I can totally relate to that. I mean I know a lot of parents, I’m a parent myself, and yeah, trying to work like a 9 to 5 schedule can be really tough.
Jennifer: Yeah, I think that having a work understanding work environment ...
Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely
Jennifer: The interesting thing is that Amanda and her salon are kind of accidentally part of a burgeoning movement for companies to move to a 4-day work week.
And there are some pretty big pilot schemes around the world have shown that cutting down to 32 hours a week for the same pay as 40 hours has benefits for businesses, employees and
Jack Kellam: …that reducing working time would reduce our carbon emissions.
Jennifer: That's according to a number of studies and researchers like Jack Kellam, who you just heard there. He's head of operations at Autonomy, which is a UK-based think tank that focuses on the future of work and the climate crisis. They also work with companies to implement 4-day work weeks.
Kathleen: So working 32 hours a week could be better for the environment than the usual 40?
Jennifer: Yeah, and that's something we'll really get into later in the episode.
But first, Kathleen, did you ever wonder where the 40-hour week came from?
Kathleen: Yeah, it seems like the 40-hour, 5-day week has been around forever, in the Western World at least ... But obviously that can't be the case.
Jennifer: Right ... And I do think it's important to explore how that 9-5, Monday to Friday grind immortalized in the Dolly Parton song became the inarguable standard for so many of us? It’s like the natural law almost. Because it's actually a relatively recent phenomenon and...
Jack Kellam: A weekend probably seemed like a challenge to companies to implement one hundred years ago and faced many similar criticisms that the 4-day working week does nowadays... It couldn't but possibly work in this sector you know the economy would collapse - that was heard about the weekend at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Jennifer: So, let's do what we love on Living Planet and take a little historical journey into the evolution of work.
Let's go back to, say 13,000 years ago, before the advent of agriculture to the time of the hunter-gatherer. You've just come back from a few hours fishing at the nearby river. You've picked up a nice haul of fish and some freshwater mussels. That'll pair nicely with the wild plants and nuts you picked the other day. Now you've just got to prepare your food and build a fire.
You've probably put in about 20 hours graft this week. Which is the average work time for a hunter gatherer, according to researchers. Now, after you've had your meal, you can kick back and shoot the breeze with your group, or maybe do a hunter gatherer hobby.
Fast forward, a few thousand years and humans have switched from foraging to farming. We're living in larger, settled communities. Populations are growing and technology and wealth are advancing. You're probably working about 30 hours a week on the farm, tending to cattle or crops.
But your work is determined by seasons and when the sun rises and sets. You're not required to clock in or clock out at set times.
In the 19th Century, as urban centers, wealth and populations grow, people are getting together, swapping ideas and inventing new machines that make economies more productive. Advancements in technology mean fossil fuels like oil and coal are more accessible and factories run on them begin to spring up.
Hourly waged labor becomes the norm. But conditions in factories are often terrible. You toil 16 hours a day, 6 days a week in dangerous conditions with no ventilation. Sunday, the traditional Christian day of rest, is your only day off.
But you're not happy with your lot. You join a trade union, which is campaigning for better working conditions and wages as well as Saturdays and Sundays off. One of the slogans "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will" catches on.
Titans of industry aren't on board, worrying about the effect on their business and the economy. Some argue that two days off could make workers lazy and lead to moral decay. "Idle days breed mischief," says one real estate mogul.
The workers' movement starts to see some successes. In 1926, car manufacturer Henry Ford becomes one of the first employers to implement a five-day, 40-hour work week. It's good for productivity and other companies follow suit. Eventually laws are implemented codifying things like paid overtime.
Ok, so it's a bit more complicated than that, Kathleen, but that's a very condensed version of how the 5-day work week and the weekend were invented... And it's really stuck, even though, as Jack Kellam from Autonomy explains, famous economists like John Maynard Keynes predicted back in 1930s that because of higher productivity and automation....
Jack Kellam: We'd all be working 15-hour weeks by this point. We've seen these massive changes in the last one hundred years have made society considerably more productive. And yet we're still working a very long working week and still have basically the same two days off that workers had a hundred years ago that doesn't square the productive improvements we've had. Where has it gone because it hasn't gone to workers?
Kathleen: Interesting, so why has the debate about shortening the work week gained such prominence again now?
Jennifer: So, some economists and activists have been arguing for a shorter work week for quite a while. But it's really started to go mainstream for a number of reasons including ...
Jack Kellam: Particularly since the pandemic there's been an increase in white collar companies particularly having a sort of difficulty around recruitment and retention for staff. So, I think that's come up more and more as a reason that companies are interested in offering a four-day working week.
Jennifer: Kellam is referring to the ongoing labor shortage worldwide that's partly connected to strong economic growth, so more jobs to fill. And ageing populations, which means there aren't enough people to replace retiring workers.
The US, for example, saw an unprecedented labor market reshuffle during the pandemic which has become known as the Great Resignation when workers quit en masse for reasons like poor wages, inflexible remote work policies and job dissatisfaction.
The lack of workers has hit almost every sector. Restaurants have been struggling to find servers and cooks, hospitals are short on doctors and nurses, and construction companies need more builders. So, it's essentially a workers' market. If staff aren't happy, they will move on and look for better conditions – like shorter hours.
Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense ...
Jennifer: Actually, a shorter work week is one of the reasons Dublin salon owner Amanda Dennison says her staff have been with her so long. Four of them have been there for over 20 years.
Amanda Dennison: I'm very blessed in that way because the girls are with me a long time. The girls are happy in here and everyone says that they walk through the door.
Jennifer: So, Autonomy has been working with London nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, the University of Cambridge and Boston College on a number of ongoing pilot schemes in countries like the US, UK, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa which have been
Juliet Schor: for the last two and a half years studying companies who are giving their employees four day reduced work weeks with no reduction in pay
Jennifer: That is Juliet Schor, an economist, sociologist and professor at Boston College and is a lead researcher at 4 Day Week Global. Schor also wrote a book
Juliet Schor: called The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, which was published in 1992.
Jennifer: So, before we get into the climate impact, I'll just explain a bit about how the pilots worked and the outcomes for businesses and employees.
Kathleen: Sounds good, go for it!
Jennifer: As part of the pilot projects, staff retain 100% of their pay for working 80% of the time but they have to keep up their previous level of productivity. The trials are mostly made up of white-collar firms, but include some construction, manufacturing and healthcare businesses too. The UK trial has a fish and chip restaurant and a brewery. And in nearly all of the trials so far, most companies say they intend to stick with the reduced work week.
Take the UK trial. Some 61 organizations signed up to six-month pilot in 2022. Results announced in February this year found 89% of companies said the policy was still in place, switch more than half making the change permanent. Resignations plummeted, which means firms don't have to waste time training new people. They also said they had bigger and better applications pools. And
Juliet Schor: Productivity went up. At the very least they're not losing productivity.
The trials also used 27 indicators to measure employee well-being, including in their experience at work and life outside of job. And they found
Juliet Schor: Just remarkable increases in wellbeing on pretty much all of the measures. Burnout, stress fatigue, more positive emotions, fewer negative, big decline in work family and work life conflicts. More exercise, less anxiety, better sleep.
Jennifer: In the UK trial, 96% said it had benefited their personal life. 87% said it had a positive impact on their work. And most said they wouldn't like to go back full-time.
Kathleen: If these trials are anything to go by it seems like it's very good for employees – surprise, surprise. But they also seem to be working for many of the employers. What about the environment? This is an environment podcast after all, Jen.
Jennifer: Of course! The climate issue is one of the big reasons why some are advocating for the four-day work week. So here comes the environmental bit! There are a few ways to look at the climate impact here. In the trials, Schor and her colleagues wanted to get data on
Juliet Schor: how carbon footprints for households and the companies would be changing because you have the building energy use, right? If a company is shutting down one day you want to count that. But more people are in their houses, so they are using more electricity, heat or air conditioning.
Jennifer: But Schor says the data on household and company energy wasn't really usable. They also wanted to see if any benefit from working less might be outweighed by what people did in their spare time. Like, would they jet off somewhere for a long weekend? But
Juliet Schor: it's really hard with carbon use because carbon is an input into pretty much everything that people do. Everything you buy, every activity that you have has some energy component to it. I mean some of it may be very small. You may be just walking somewhere but remember you're using calories, which means you have to eat more, you know, so it's a devilish problem.
Jennifer: So, they asked people at the beginning and end of the trial about their personal carbon footprint and the kinds of activities they were doing with their extra time. The idea being that more time enables people to make healthier and more sustainable choices.
Instead of eating a frozen pizza or convenience food which has a higher environmental impact, you have time to cook fresh food. Or instead of jumping in a car, you might cycle or take public transport instead to get where you're going.
And what the researchers found was that people did make more sustainable choices and that they weren't flying all over the place on multiple vacations.
Juliet Schor: What they're doing on the off day for the most part they're staying close to home. They're doing low carbon things: personal grooming, housework and hobbies. You know so there might be a little bit of carbon there. you have a little bit of transportation, local driving but not lot. We do see people saying that they're doing more walking and cycling rather than driving.
Kathleen: Interesting, so there's a correlation between having the time to think about the environment or just think about taking better care of yourself.
Jennifer: Yeah, exactly, you just have a little more mental space to do that. And that actually chimes with what hairdresser Amanda Dennison said when I asked her what she does on her day off.
Amanda Dennison: So for me, I'd go hiking, but a lot of girls. I notice they would go off for the day with their children. They spend the time with their children.
Jennifer: So, according to the researchers, personal carbon footprint
Juliet Schor: does fall a little a little bit.
Kathleen: Ok, interesting, so not a huge drop
Jennifer: Yeah, the other area where they expected a big carbon saving was travelling to and from work. Transport is a major contributor to country emissions. So many of us sit for hours in traffic on long commutes to the office.
Juliet Schor: Overall story here is we see quite small I mean there are some reductions in carbon use. Commuting by car goes down by about percent so very small. Commute time falls by about half an hour a week so that's significant.
Kathleen: So again, not huge?
Jennifer: No, though Schor says that's partly because they started the trials
during the pandemic when remote working became more common and
Juliet Schor: the movement back into the workplace has been slow for a lot of people.
Kathleen: Ok, interesting – the environmental benefits seem kind of modest.
Jennifer: Schor and the researchers say there are benefits compared to working a 40-hour week but it's something they are trying to collect more data on for sure. And we will come back to another aspect of the climate impact later...
Kathleen: I do have another question though. I can really see how this would fly in certain kinds of work environments, like maybe a government office or an accountancy firm, where they might be able to shut down for a day, but what about a hospital?
Jennifer: Yeah, the 4-day work week researchers say it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. And organizations have to figure out what works for them. Like in an office, you might try to also streamline your workflows. Many companies in the trials dropped unnecessary meetings, for example. But manufacturing companies, let's say, might not have a lot of meetings to cut out. That doesn't mean they can't make it work. Take the UK brewery I mentioned earlier. Brewing has periods of intense work and they
Juliet Schor: did time and motion studies on every one of their machines. Brewing involves lots of different processes, and a lot of cleaning of equipment and they figured out to order things tasks differently. How to fit some tasks into the dead time in others and ended up saving a lot of time that way.
Jennifer: Dublin salon owner Amanda Dennison said she no longer takes walk-ins and has switched exclusively to bookings, which makes schedules easier to manage. She does say you need to make sure you're taking in the same amount of money each month.
Amanda Dennison: if you were to do that, it'd be a certain amount of money. They'd have to take you in per day. And once they do that and it covers for the week. Yeah, you could do it.
But some places like – you mentioned hospitals - might have to hire extra staff, which is difficult given staff shortages globally. This actually brings us to some criticism of the 4-day work week compared to a five-day one. Firstly, there is criticism of the trials' design
Holger Schäfer: The point is the findings can only be applied to the companies that took part in the experiment.
That's Holger Schäfer, who is a labor market economist at the German Economic Institute, a think tank in Cologne. Basically, Schäfer thinks the results don't tell us much about introducing reduced hours across the economy for two reasons. One is that the companies who took part in the trial, wanted to, so there is a positivity bias there. The second is that there is no control group.
Holger Schäfer: Shorten to: Why is that important? Let’s say, I look at how sales performance develops, and see revenue has gone up or stayed the same. But I can’t say anything about the impact of the 4-day work week if I don’t compare these findings to those of another company that didn’t shorten its hours.
Jennifer: Schäfer also says productivity wasn't measured consistently in the trial.
Holger Schäfer: So productivity is value added per hour worked. And what was measured there was at best sales development. But that’s the same as productivity. Productivity is turnover minus input.
and that many, particularly large companies, have already trimmed the fat off their workflows as much as possible.
Holger Schäfer: I’m not sure where this productivity reserve is supposed to come from. We have companies in the manufacturing industry, for example, that have squeezed out every ounce of productivity for decades.
Jennifer: Actually, Schäfer says that a drop off in productivity growth would be a disaster for the economy
Holger Schäfer: We’re talking about a decline in the order of 20 percent and not just for a year – but permanently. That is catastrophic, to put it mildly. The consequences are unimaginable.
Jennifer: We'll get to some of those potential consequences in a bit. But the idea of productivity growth gets to the core of some fundamental questions about the nature of work, how we value our time and whether economies can keep growing infinitely on a finite planet.
Ultimately, 4-day work week advocates, say, the big climate gains and emission cuts don't come from your personal carbon footprint but ...
Juliet Schor: When you slow down your growth rate or if you contract, I mean we see that in a recession. Emissions fall because there's a still pretty strong connection between how much you produce and how much you emit. That's where you get bigger savings than in the sort of household adjustment.
Jennifer: Something like that happened during the pandemic. There was a dip in CO2 emissions when part of the global economy shut down. But those emissions rebounded quickly when everything started to open up again. Several studies show a link between long working hours and high carbon emissions – particularly in high-income countries. One paper Juliet Schor co-authored in 2012 looked at OECD countries between 1970 and 2007 and found that a 10% drop in working hours corresponded to a carbon reduction of 14.6%. Another study by British environmental group Platform predicted that the UK could decrease its emissions by around 127 million tons by 2025, if it went down to a four-day work week.
Kathleen: But what exactly is happening here?
Jennifer: Well, it all comes back down to productivity. And it gets a bit technical here, and perhaps I should briefly explain what that is. It refers to how much output can be produced with a given set of inputs. Productivity increases when more output is produced with the same amount of inputs or when the same amount of output is produced with fewer inputs.
In other words, imagine you are selling lemonade, and you figure out a way to squeeze more lemons faster or you make more lemonade with the same number of lemons. That means you are being more productive. You can take that productivity gain by selling more and raking in that sweet lemonade money. Or you can work less.
Juliet Schor: There's some portion of productivity growth that you can put to work time reduction. Maybe all of it. The reason I focus on the future and productivity growth is that it is very hard to take away income from people. Once they have it, I'm focusing on future income. Instead of income increases, let's give people increases in time. That's what productivity allows us to do gives us the choice. More production which the other the flip side of production is income. It's a trade-off of future income for time.
Kathleen: But if we do that, the economy stops growing or at least slows down hear that's a bad thing
Jennifer: Exactly. Without sustained increases in productivity, there is no economic growth, says the World Bank. And this gets to the question that some economists and climate researchers are at odds over. Basically, whether we can continue to grow our economies, just in a greener way. Or if we have to forsake growth. At least in rich countries with high living standards that are responsible for most historical emissions heating the planet. According to economist Holger Schäfer that would hurt wellbeing...
Holger Schäfer: Shorten to: And we must be aware that this has serious consequences, not only for our level of prosperity –but also what we can redistribute, for example for social purposes. These are also goods and services that have to be produced. Tax revenue is roughly proportional to what we produce. That is the state's tax base. And if less is produced, less is taxable. That is unavoidable.
Jennifer: Really it comes down to how much we need to transform our economies in the face of the climate crisis. And the answer to that for some is perhaps something like green growth. That means continuing to grow but moving away from greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuels, creating circular economies to reuse resources and essentially "decoupling" growth from emissions.
Holger Schäfer: We’ve actually succeeded in the past in decoupling wealth and consumption and hope this will be the case in the future with technical progress. I can’t say whether that will be enough, I’m not a climate expert. But I think that’s a more promising approach because no one’s left behind.
Jennifer: Schäfer is right. Some rich industrialized countries like Germany have decoupled growth from planet-heating emissions.
A 2021 analysis found that 32 countries have managed to grow their economy without increasing their emissions. After accounting for emissions embodied in goods they imported from abroad, this fell to 23 countries. But in big economies from Brazil to Indonesia, growth and pollution are still tightly linked. And a 2020 paper found decoupling rates were too slow to hold global warming to 1.5 C. Current policies put us on track for a disastrous 2.9 C warming by the end of the century. Researchers say the consequences of planetary heating could also shave trillions off global GDP by 2050, so either way, countries must be ready for a decline. And one policy that could
Philipp Frey: reconcile, in a way, ecological and social sustainability is working time reductions.
That's Philipp Frey from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis in Germany. Frey actually did an assessment of how much work would be ecologically sustainable going forward. But his starting point was the increasing automation of work and growth of artificial intelligence rather than emissions.
Philipp Frey: The main strategy to deal with the automation of work in Germany is to generate more economic growth. So the idea is you can prevent technological unemployment by simply growing the economy ever greater. The economic system that we have today is set up in such a way that continuous economic growth is very important to stabilize the labor market and thus also our social systems. And so I think in that sense, these economists are right. We need economic growth in the current system.
But that got him thinking....
Philipp Frey: Okay, so that's one perspective on the whole subject. But just increasing our productivity, increasing our industrial output more and more might not be ecologically sustainable.
Jennifer: We know that our current resource use is unsustainable - Earth Overshoot Day, which is the day that humanity has already used more resources than it can regenerate annually, comes earlier every year. When Frey did his assessment, he found
Philipp Frey: that a nine-hour work week would still be sustainable given our level of productivity and our level of carbon intensity.
Kathleen: That surely would be unimaginable?
Jennifer: Yeah, and Frey says himself that a switch to a nine-hour work week
Philipp Frey: would be something like degrowth by disaster. I mean, I cannot see a social consensus around the nine-hour work week, um, that would be linked to very, very deep cuts into, um, into consumption and various areas of our lives.
Jennifer: But he says the question for him is
Philipp Frey: if we move towards a more sustainable economy, what can that look like?
Kathleen: And what could it look like?
Jennifer: There aren't really easy answers. But Frey comes back to reduced working hours and uses the example of collective bargaining for German steel workers. Green steel production is going to require fewer workers, so unions pushed for a 4-day working week while maintaining pay.
Philipp Frey: And they basically argued, okay, we want a transformation towards a more sustainable economy, but in that economy there will be less need for, um, industrial manufacturing, labor. And what our proposal is to basically to reduce the working hours per worker so we all can maintain our lifestyle and still provide clean steel to the economy.
Jennifer: We'll need technological fixes like transitioning to green steel to stop the unfolding climate disaster, but technology doesn't operate in a vacuum. Automation technologies and cleaner tech can liberate us from work and give us more time or they can eat up any efficiency gains like we have seen with bigger and bigger cars. And that can push us toward more growth.
Kathleen: Sounds pretty complicated and like it would be a huge undertaking to get everyone on board.
Jennifer: Yeah, but we also know we can't keep consuming and emitting as we are without walking further into climate disaster. At the same time, it's hard to imagine a world without growth and how we could get there. The question of the shorter working week does give us a way to critically approach the world of work and how our economies operate – and gives us space to ask what is ultimately important to us. Like, instead of focusing on what we lose by limiting our consumption, we could look at what we gain instead.
Philipp Frey: There's actually an attractive offer there that basically people could be freer to enjoy their own time. What really moved me in the beginning of my research was, um, a study conducted with people in retirement homes that they were that were about to die and what regrets they have. And many of them basically said, I well, looking back, I would have liked to spend more time with my family and friends and less time working.
Jennifer: Back in the Head Office salon in Dublin, owner Amanda Dennison says time is something she has come to value more as she's gotten older. During the Irish economic boom years of the 2000s, she hadn't considered that she could work less.
Amanda Dennison: We're afraid to lose our jobs at that time that we had to let down our families. And since Covid especially, you realize you can be closed down overnight, and nobody has any control about anything.
Jennifer: The extra time has also given her something else.
Amanda Dennison: I go up into the mountains and back to nature. And I think that gives you appreciation for the environment. When I stand on top of the mountain and looking out at the sea, you realize you're just a small pebble in this world and you're not really that important. You haven't got that right to destroy. So I think because I have that time, that mental space, I can take that in.
Kathleen: Well, Jen, that's I have to say, I was really surprised by some of those findings. I don't know like Can you imagine doing a four-day work week with our job?
Jen: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. We'd have to really change the way we work. I think it would be difficult, right, because it's just hard to schedule interviews and. I think also like trying to be creative. It can take a little bit longer. You know you need to sit and think about things. I mean, it'd be nice if we could figure out. Do you. I mean?
Kathleen: Yeah, I mean, this debate has been going on now for a while and I always keep thinking about it in terms of like our work, like how would how would this work and you know it kind of sounds like a dream to have one extra day, a weekend week or one extra day, you know, to take care of stuff.
But then, like you know, we have a lot of public holidays here and this year we a lot of them fell in May and I definitely experienced that of like having to put you know a full time week into four days.
I have to say it was actually pretty difficult, but then you were also talking about, I think with one of the manufacturers, like you would have to redistribute the work. And yeah, I don't. I don't know what to. I don't know what to think about it. I mean, I'm generally in favor of maybe working less if we can. But yeah, it's hard to kind of reconcile with what the needs are in terms of of productivity, because the work has to get done at some point.
Jen: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, one of the things that this like comes up this idea of you shouldn't if you're doing this four day work week and you're taking part in the in these trials, you shouldn't be having more intense work days where you're actually just end up working longer hours or you're super stressed out on your days that you are on, you have to look at all of your workflows and your processes. And walking and really look at like what can go, what's unnecessary here?
Kathleen: I think one thing that really resonates is, you know, just having the time to think beyond rushing through your work week and if you have a family to take care of or just even if you don't like just, you know, private obligations or just taking care of yourself, it's a lot. And actually I was talking to an expert recently for a different episode and we were talking about environmental awareness and. Yeah. And she kind of said it had to do with, like, chemicals and sunscreen. And, you know, she was saying she personally had the feeling that, you know, people don't have time to think about every time.
Anything that they're doing that has an environmental impact because they already have a lot on their plate and yeah. And so that really resonated when you were saying at the at the hair salon that or I'm sorry, it wasn't the hair salon that in the study they found you know it did have a positive impact on how much people's behaviors were affecting the environment or their carbon footprint because they had more time to think about how they were living.
Jen: Yeah, but even Amanda says at the very end there in the last quote that actually going out into nature and having that time gives her more time to reflect on the environment and to realize that we are just a very small part of this much larger Organism.
Kathleen: Well, great stuff, Jen. Thank you so much again. And yeah, we look forward to hearing more from you in the future on Living planet.
Outro