How to work a four-day week

Following on from a recent post regarding the four-day working week, is it actually possible to have a full-time job but just work a four-day week every week for a year using annual leave (the word holiday sounds too frivolous to use nowadays in the serious office environment; after all, it won’t be a holiday per se; you’ll have your phone on the beach and check work emails every day), Bank Holidays (an official term so the word is permitted), and the odd sickie? In short, probably not, but let’s give it a try anyway.

Let’s say you get 25 days annual leave a year (I’m feeling generous) – that’s automatically half a year of four days, but still a way to go. There are eight Bank Holidays, including Easter, Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year (let’s be equally generous and pretend Christmas Day and Boxing Day fall on different weeks), so that’s 33 weeks in total taken care of. But still leaves 19. Hmm, now it gets tricky. You could probably get away with five days of paid sick leave. Let’s chuck in the odd funeral and hope your company believes in compassionate leave. At best, that makes ten weeks remaining. Hmm, very tricky now. The only option is just not turning up for work one day a week (for ten weeks) and hope nobody notices.