Mooorning and welcome to Still Monday.

If you’re back, excellent.

If you’re new, welcome.

If you tried to unsubscribe yesterday and somehow ended up here again, that feels like something your company’s IT department would do.

Today we need to discuss Friday.

Specifically, whether we need all of it.

Let’s get to work.

The four-day workweek has spent years sitting in that strange category of workplace ideas that sounds wonderful to employees and mildly dangerous to anyone responsible for a quarterly target.

The basic proposition is unusually easy to understand:

100% of the pay.
80% of the hours.
100% of the output.

The last number is where management usually starts asking questions.

Fair enough.

But companies keep testing it — and the results continue to make the five-day week look less inevitable than it once did.

Recent research examining Australian companies that tried the 100:80:100 model found improvements in work-life balance and reduced burnout. More interestingly, researchers found that maintaining previous performance didn't necessarily require employees to become 25% more productive every hour.

Companies changed the work itself.

Meetings were reconsidered.

Processes changed.

People became more deliberate about interruptions and boundaries.

In other words, taking away a workday forced companies to look at what they were putting inside the other four.

That may be the more interesting part of the experiment.

Because a five-day schedule contains an assumption we rarely question:

If 40 hours are available, work will somehow find a way to occupy 40 hours.

And it is remarkably talented at this.

A 30-minute meeting becomes 60.

Six people attend something that requires three.

A status update gets a status-update meeting.

Then someone creates a spreadsheet to track the status updates.

The four-day week changes the constraint.

You don't get Friday.

Figure it out.

And apparently some companies do.

Research from large four-day-week trials has found lower stress and absenteeism, while a large majority of participating companies chose to continue with the arrangement after testing it.

That doesn't mean every hospital, factory, restaurant, retailer or global company can simply close on Friday.

They can't.

Different businesses require different schedules, and recent research in Spain found companies using several approaches: shorter daily hours, removing Friday entirely or rotating days off depending on operational needs.

Which suggests the interesting question may not be:

Should everyone work four days?

It might be:

How much of the fifth day are we keeping simply because we've always had it?

Friday has declined to comment.

Salary transparency is spreading.

Salary transparency, apparently, has not been informed.

A new analysis of nearly 230,000 live U.S. job postings found that only 32.5% included an employer-disclosed pay range.

In states requiring salary ranges in job postings, disclosure was much higher: 42.6%, compared with 16.1% in states without such requirements. The dataset covers jobs published through five major applicant-tracking systems, so it isn't representative of every U.S. employer, but the gap is hard to miss.

Apparently “competitive compensation” remains extremely competitive with actually telling you the compensation.

A new ranking of America's hardest-working states put South Dakota at #1, followed by North Dakota and Alaska.

The analysis looked at things including workweek length, employment, unused vacation, commute time, multiple-job holders and leisure time.

Michigan finished last.

We will not be taking sides in this dispute.

Still Monday has subscribers to acquire in all 50 states.

Only about 60,000 U.S. jobs have been added since May, and economists expect hiring to remain sluggish.

Job openings are roughly 40% below their 2022 peak.

But layoffs remain relatively low and unemployment is around 4.1%.

So we're stuck with the strange labor market we mentioned yesterday:

Companies don't particularly want to fire you.

They also don't seem particularly excited about hiring your friend.

Please adjust your LinkedIn “Open to Work” banner accordingly.

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Not reschedule.

Not shorten.

Delete. (…please)

Find one recurring meeting on your calendar that has survived longer than the reason it was created.

You know the one.

Nobody remembers who started it.

Half the attendees multitask.

Someone says, “I don't have any updates from my side.”

Then everyone waits 28 minutes before discovering nobody else does either.

If you can't cancel it yourself, ask the organizer one simple question:

“Do we still need this every week?”

A 30-minute weekly meeting with six people consumes 156 working hours a year.

That's almost four full 40-hour workweeks.

Suddenly the four-day week doesn't seem like the radical scheduling idea.

Your calendar does.

There is something wonderfully strange about a job advertisement that tells you exactly what the company expects from you but not what it plans to give you in return.

Responsibilities?

Seventeen bullet points.

Experience?

Five years.

Software?

Six platforms.

Salary?

Competitive.

With only about a third of the live U.S. job postings in one recent dataset publishing salary ranges, applicants are still entering plenty of conversations without knowing whether the economics make sense.

So here's a useful rule:

If a recruiter contacts you about a role without compensation information, ask before the first interview.

Something as simple as:

“Before we schedule, could you share the compensation range budgeted for the role?”

No speech.

No apology.

No elaborate explanation about respecting everyone's time.

You are discussing a job.

Money is one of the things jobs famously provide.

And if the answer is:

“It depends on the candidate…”

Fine.

“What range has been approved?”

There is usually a number somewhere.

It may simply be hiding behind “competitive.”

Six people attend a 30-minute meeting.

How long was the meeting?

Your calendar says:

30 minutes.

Payroll says:

3 hours.

Add preparation, context switching and the five minutes everyone spends afterward wondering what just happened, and the number gets worse.

This is why one of the easiest ways to think differently about meetings is to stop measuring them in calendar time.

Measure them in people-hours.

Eight people × one hour = eight hours.

Twenty people × one hour = half a workweek.

The meeting may still be worth it.

But at least now it has a price tag.

Technically Tuesday. Emotionally Monday.

See you tomorrow.

— The Still Monday Desk