As the four-day week, hybrid working, and summer hours become increasingly popular, Friday has become the de facto day to take off work. Even media tycoon Simon Cowell has given up working on the last day of the workweek, because “it’s pointless.”
The 66-year-old multimillionaire revealed he’s ditched the traditional workweek and the hectic lifestyle of working almost 20 hours a day while running shows like The X Factor—and Cowell’s enjoying his newfound work-life balance so much that he’s evangelizing everyone else to switch to a four-day week too.
“Actually, the first thing is take off Fridays. Don’t work on Fridays, because you don’t have to,” the ‘America’s Got Talent’ creator told the British newspaper The Sun—and has more recently reiterated in The Diary of a CEO podcast.
“I’m not kidding about the Fridays,” the British entrepreneur doubled down. “I don’t think anyone should be working five days a week. It’s just pointless.”
Now his Fridays are filled with entertaining his son Eric, by doing the likes of driving “25 miles to buy a Pokemon card.”
After decades of hustling, Cowell also revealed, he has a few nonnegotiable habits in place to maintain his work-life balance.
“Eat dinner at five o’clock. Don’t take calls after 5:30. Don’t read emails after 5:30. Watch a happy movie. And stay outside,” he added.
Why it’s pointless to work on Fridays
Although Cowell didn’t divulge why he thinks working on a Friday is “pointless”—as opposed to, say, working on a Monday—research shows most people are either working from home or avoiding work entirely on the last working day of the traditional workweek.
Millions of workers have been ordered back to the office post-pandemic, with even the staunchest promoters of remote working like Meta and Zoom enforcing in-person working. But Fridays are rarely included in these RTO mandates.
Placer.ai’s Nationwide Office Building Index has been analysing foot traffic across U.S. office buildings since 2019, and it found most workers are at their desks from Tuesday through Thursday. But on Fridays, staff are notably absent. Despite increased 5-day in-office mandates, last year only 12.4% of weekday office visits happened on the last working day of the week.
Likewise, Steven Roth, chairman of New York–based real estate giant Vornado Realty Trust and one of New York’s biggest office landlords, declared Fridays in the office are officially “dead forever.”
Meanwhile, billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg went as far as to claim remote workers are all playing golf every Friday—and he may have a point. By 4 p.m. on weekdays, golf courses are packed, according to a Stanford University study. Studies echo that workers appear to have lower productivity on Fridays—some estimate a 20% to 35% drop in task completion compared to a Monday or Tuesday.
If you can’t beat them, you may as well join them: For those who are actually working, the lack of teammates around means that it’s become impossible to schedule a meeting on a Friday and emails are unlikely to be read—so as Cowell pointed out, working on a Friday can feel pretty pointless.
Four-day work week success
Cowell isn’t the only fan of the four-day week: Many other employers, including Samsung, are adopting a shorter workweek.
The shift to adopting a three-day weekend comes as pilots of the “100:80:100” working model—100% pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for 100% productivity—prove to be a roaring success around the world.
Following in the footsteps of Iceland, New Zealand, and Japan, when Britain completed the world’s biggest trial of a four-day working it experienced a 65% reduction in the number of sick days, maintained or improved productivity, and a 57% decline in the likelihood that an employee would quit, dramatically improving job retention.
The results even found that reducing employees’ working hours had a positive impact on the bottom line: Company revenue increased by 35% when compared to the same six-month period in 2021.
Meanwhile, in Iceland, where the four-day workweek was trialed between 2015 and 2019, workers represented by unions—close to 90% of the workforce—have now won the right to request a shorter workweek.
Likewise, in 2021, the Japanese government’s annual economic policy guidelines included a recommendation that companies let employees opt for a four-day workweek.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on November 20, 2023.
More on four-day work weeks:
- Could 2026 be the year of the 4-day workweek? Here’s what top business leaders have predicted about the shift
- Forget the four-day workweek: Despite what Bill Gates and Elon Musk predict, the CEO of the world’s largest workspace provider says it’s not happening
- Remote professionals are quiet quitting Fridays. Their rebellion could open the door to a 4-day work week
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