Why working 4 days a week is good for economy?

One a fine Thursday morning, I finally got up at 6 AM after snoozing my cell phone alarm for an hour and while staring  at my own face in the bathroom mirror, a thought sparked in my sleepy mind: 

Won't it be good if we had to  work for only 4 days a week? Every week we had Friday, Saturday and Sundays off. A four day work  week  and  a long weekend every week. 

Personally I am exhausted by EOD Thursday, I do go to office on Fridays and work but I see  that all major decisions are often  postponed for Monday and mostly  the productivity is equivalent to zero after lunch. But this might sound like an excuse coming from a sloth who never wants to work(Oh BTW I love my work). So, I started thinking more about it here are some of the arguments I came up with:- 

1.  The economy is bad, money is not flowing in the market and people are not willing to spend. I hardly spend on weekdays and all the expenditures are postponed till  weekend and this is true for most of the people who have a job and work  from 8AM to 5PM. If we give another day off people will  spend more. What will they do when they have 3 days a week off? plan more trips with family, eat out more, spend more... credit will start flowing again and economy will finally start moving north.

2.  The productivity  will increase. Yes it will . Regardless of how many hours we work in a week most tasks are going to get accomplished each week just as they did before, we just need to be more efficient in working and reduce the times we spend in coffee, cellphone, Internet browsing, personal mails and gossiping. And a long weekend is surely a motivation to work more.

3. Working parents get more time to spend with kids, they will be able to read to them, play with them... it means more happy kids and more happy parent and happier employees >> more productivity and better office environment. Goes very well with Obama's Idea of Education reforms. 

4. Fours days week is  also a Green concept. We spent less on travelling, consume less fuel, save a lot on oil cost to the country. Low emission of green house gases. Less traffic on roads. Just imagine how much fossil fuel will be saved if the entire world travel one day less to work. Not only this, we will save electricity, paper(less paper cups consumed for coffee and tea), parking... 

5. Will boost tourism, most of the tourist are locals in any country . 

Well, these are just the few reason that came to my mind. Excited by the idea, I started sharing it with people, my room partner ridiculed it saying it means a lost in productive hours every week and eventually people will start treating Thursdays as Fridays. The project manager laughed at it and said its a good Idea and advice to post it on the blog and I am doing it . Few appreciated it.  

I started browsing the net and came across this very interesting article by Prof.Goose who shares my view and came with  Sixteen Reasons why this might be an Idea whose time has come. Read it and you have more reason to believe why you should be working 4 days a week . 

Green Applications

I am very  fond of WordWeb and have been using it very  frequently since Somya introduced it to me sometime back . As not all  the good things in world are free, my trial version expired yesterday and before I could continue using it, WordWeb asked me to answer the following: 

How frequently do you fly In a commercial Airline in a year?

• Zero
  
• 1 return flight
  
• more than 1 return flight

Well, Courtesy my profile and my company I have to  take more than one return flight in a year and I honestly chose the 3rd option only to get a shocker from wordweb

Wordweb is only available for free to the people who fly very little because two medium-distance flight is equivalent to  more than one tonne CO2 emission, more than sustainable fper-person  limit for an year. The licensing model is designed to allow relatively non-wealthy people to use the program free of charge, and to provide a small incentive for other people who fly a lot to cut down. 

I get the message the WordWeb is trying to convey though its Green application and may be that's the way to go ahead,but as an end user what should I do if every application on the web turns 'Green'? 

• Quit my  job and stop travelling?
  
• Pay money to wordweb because my company makes me fly more often?
  
• Advise my company to make me sail through a boat across seven Seas... 4 times a year!!?

OR

• Uninstall  the application and reinstall being cognizant of the Licensing  policies and the off course the intent of the message. 
  

I think I got the answer.