Where would the utilities savings come from?
Thanks everyone for the responses. Ya’ll have made me feel better about the whole thing. I’ve decided it will just be another one of those changes that will probably suck at first but then I’ll adjust to.
I was also thinking it would be kinda cool to have a truncated Monday and no Fridays. So yeah, there’s the time crunch in the middle, but I have two things to look forward to during the week.
I’m single and childless, so this isn’t a concern of mine. But I do wonder how parents, especially single parents, deal with four-tens. I’m thinking it would suck for them.
Yeah, you get used to it. Then you’ll change back to 8 hours/5 days a week at some point in your career and hate that change.
Agreed. You really get used to three day weekends every single weekend!
I work 12-hour days (7a-7:30p) and have done so for more than ten years. Probably 80% of my co-workers do the same.
Yeah, they’re long days, but you really do get used to it. You just don’t plan on doing anything on your work days, aside from working, commuting and sleeping.
The fact that I work only three days a week certainly makes it more bearable.
mmm
I really liked the 4/10s schedule when I had it, and wish I could have it again.
My thinking: One less day of commuting every week, yay!
One day off during the week to get stuff done without taking off work, yay!
One day off during the week to go to a movie when it wasn’t crowded, yay!
Now I didn’t have a physically exhausting job or things might have been different. But I am all about entropy. Once there, I didn’t mind staying there. In fact many nights I dawdled around because the drive home was actually worse than anything else I’d faced all day.
And I had to do it one less day a week.
The only better thing was working from home.
I work four tens with Fridays off. I’ve been doing it for a few years. I hope they never go back to a 5 day 8 hour schedule at my company. I LOVE the 3 day weekends. My alarm goes off at 4:30am every work morning and the best feeling in the world is waking up on Friday morning, then rolling over for more sleep when you realize you don’t have to work. Yes, those four days are very long, but it is well worth one less commute, one less day of getting up early, one less lunch to pack. Plus, many holidays in the US fall on a Monday so I sometimes have a 4 day weekend. YES!
I’ve worked 5 10s for years now. A paid lunch…so it’s STRAIGHT 10 hours.
10 hour work days aren’t really bad at all, once you get used to it.
When I’ve had 4 10s from time to time, it’s just GREAT, having a whole other day off.
I can still get plenty done on my working days, as long as I don’t let myself oversleep or laze around too much. Most of my schedule issues are due to working at night, and not the length of the shift!
Going back to 8 hour days a few times was like a cake walk. I felt like I’d just got there and it was time to leave again.
Can you not perhaps change therapists? I know that you need to develop trust with your therapist for it to work the best, but to keep from going nuts you really should move the day to Friday. 10 hours is a damned long day, you have to add in transit to and from work, making your evening meal, getting up and off to work in the morning, and anything that has to be done on a daily basis [child care if you have one, cleaning the house, even just washing up after dinner]
A similar schedule is the standard in veterinary medicine. Usually it’s about 7:45 to 6, with an hour for lunch, four days a week and until noon on alternate Saturdays. In many practices, these are your theoretical hours rather than your practical ones–at my last primary care practice we often wound up doing emergency surgery during lunch so we wouldn’t have to cancel a bunch of afternoon appointments, and at this one we’re often there until almost 7 because the afternoon has been overbooked. At the emergency clinic, we were scheduled 4 10’s but in reality stayed until all the work was done, which on a busy night was often an extra hour or two. Even when you spend your day toting around 80-lb dogs who can’t walk, an extra 2 hours isn’t that big a deal.
I mean, yes, I’m tired at the end of the day. Some days I’m just totally pooped and don’t want to do anything but sit on the couch with my feet up. But I came home from 6-hour shifts waiting tables and 8 hour shifts in an office chair tired, too. Some days completely beat and wanting to do nothing but sit on the couch with my feet up. And on days when things are dead and they send me home 2 hours early, I’m still tired.
It does take a little bit of mental adjustment when you first make the switch, though. You can’t go to the bank or the post office or that little independent hardware store up the street most days unless you go on your lunch hour, because they’re closed by the time you get off work. You absolutely will not be sitting down to dinner at what most other people consider a normal time to eat. (A lot of people I’ve worked with bring a small snack for around 4 or so.) If you have a housecleaning schedule it will most likely have to shift some because you won’t have as much time after work. But once you wrap your head around that, it’s nothing.
I like it, myself. It’s nice being able to go to the bank or post office or grocery store when it’s not crushed with people trying to get shit done during lunch or after work. Mondays and Fridays being typically busier than the middle of the week, industry standard is to have your day off be Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, which breaks the week up nicely–you’re never more than a couple days away from a day off. When I worked 5 days a week, I frequently got the feeling that this goddamn week was never. going. to. end. Mondays sucked soooo much, because it was at least 5 days before I had any more time off, and when I waited tables they’d often stack my weeks back to back, so I was working 10 days in a row.
I haven’t considered changing therapists, but I don’t really want to. I mean, if keeping my Monday afternoon appointment turns out to be a bad idea, I’d rather stop going to therapy all together. I’ve done the doctor-hopping thing before. It was important to do a few years ago, but not now. It wouldn’t be worth it, starting all over from scratch with a new person. (Especially since my current therapist is giving me a very significant discount on her services, since I’ve gone over the alottment that my insurance allows).
I’ve worked out a tentative schedule.
M 6:45-3:00 = 7.75 hours
T 6:30-5:45= 10.75 hours
W 6:30-5:45= 10.75 an hours
Th 6:30-5:45 = 10.75 hours
If I want to keep walking, I’ll have to wake up at 4:45 AM…which still constitutes nighttime to me! That should get me out of the door by 5:30, which will allow for the hour long-walk to get to work on time. Getting home around 7:00ish is what happens now, so that’s no biggie.
The only major change will be my bedtime. No more staying up to watch Anderson 360. I will have to work on my rather time-consuming hobbies over the weekend or on Monday evenings and opt instead to entertain myself with reading and surfing the web. (Hmmm…maybe that justifies a downgrade in my cable?) I know sleepiness will also be an issue. Maybe I’ll take up coffee-drinking or start popping caffeine pills. Dinner can be prepared on the weekend and eaten as leftovers throughout the week (which is how I normally function). To make things easier in the morning, though, I may eat breakfast at work. That way, I won’t have to do any rush-eating, like I do now.
So it will work out.
I work 7am-5pm 3 days a week (M/W/F for now; it changes based on my tennis schedule). I love it.
Just to add to the chorus, I worked 4 10’s in a shitty factory job in my twenties and loved it. The free Friday more than made up for any extra exhaustion suffered during the previous days, enabling things like extended weekend trips (Thursday evening - Monday morning), shopping at noon etc.
Why not just work through lunch? that’d take care of most of your extended time, just eat at the computer while you’re working or skip it all together.
I love the schedule I had until recently–8-6 four days a week, but the day off was random. If I needed a particular day off and had a few weeks’ notice I could change things around, but for the most part it came as kind of a surprise. (The schedule was made well in advance, but unless I needed to I didn’t think about it more than a week or so ahead of time.)
Before that I had every Wednesday afternoon off, and I found that it didn’t take me long to take it for granted. But with this schedule it never stopped feeling like a “real” day off.
It might not be for everybody, particularly people who have kids and a lot of other obligations to plan around, but I really miss it.
I don’t know why, but we’re required to take at least a 30 minute lunch. But we are allowed two 15-minute long coffee/smoke breaks that are “paid”…so it’s weird. So I could chop my lunch down to 30 minutes and add 15 minutes of “paid” time to it. Then instead of leaving at 5:45, I can leave at 5:30. Those last fifteen minutes of the day sometimes feel like they go on forever, so that would be a merciful adjustment.
Probably has to do with your state labor laws.