Today’s Solutions: October 20, 2026

Working fewer hours does not lead to a loss in productivity and does increase happiness and health of workers. That’s the outcome of a 2-year experiment in Sweden with companies that switched to a 6-hour workday. In an earlier government experiment, the Swedes concluded that the extra costs were too high for the benefits of a shorter workday. But a follow-up experiment by small tech companies now shows that the shorter workday can make business sense. “Our work is a lot about problem solving and creativity, and we don’t think that can be done efficiently for more than six hours. So we produce as much as—or maybe even more than—our competitors do in their eight-hour days.”

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