The future of work is 4 days

5-day weeks are just a habit of history. People are talking increasingly more about mental health, avoiding burnout, and work-life balance.

microfounder

Remote work was a niche thing in tech for quite some time until COVID acted as a catalyst. But we never wanted just to work from anywhere. It was always about a more flexible lifestyle.

And 4-day weeks could be the next important step. The tech sector will be probably leading the way, just as it did with remote work.

Making a Google Sheets

I wanted to see how many tech companies I could find who are already advertising 4-day weeks on their career pages. So I started to build a list on Google Sheets and so far I've found 42 companies.

Building a frontend

Google Sheets is nice, but I needed a proper front end. I installed a fresh Laravel (my favorite!) and made an html/css draft. I never design in Figma, I like web browsers as my canvas directly.

Registering a domain

First, I wanted 4dayremote.com but it was taken. I also considered 4daysok.com but that's too similar to remoteok.com

I went with 4daytech.com (registered via NameCheap).

Setting up database

I wanted to keep everything as simple as possible as I don't know if I will be working on the project in the future. It depends if it gets some traction or not.

I discovered that Google Sheets has an API where I can just fetch data from a URL – perfect, I could use my already existing Google Sheet as a database.

Some technical work

Before getting the site up on the web, I had to do some technical stuff, like changing DNS records, creating a new site on my Digital Ocean server, and adding Plausible for gathering statistics.

Email list

I've learned that it's always important to add a way for people to leave their emails. You never know, you might get some attention on Hacker News or on Twitter.

Again, I didn't want to spend much time on it so I just added a simple Google Form which stores emails on, again, Google Sheets.

Launch!

It didn't take much time and this was important to me. I can't be sure if I can make some money with 4daytech.com so I wanted to start with something super simple.

I spent some time in the morning at home and now wrote the blog post in a nearby park.

I think 4-day weeks can be an important shift in the way we're working. More people than ever are thinking about how much they want to spend time at work.

This means that freelancing and part-time work are getting more popular. Also, people are getting started with their side projects and solo startups. 4-day weeks are just one part of the bigger shift that's happening.