The lights in the office stayed off on a gray January morning in Reykjavík.
Not because the power went out, but because nobody came in. The city was quiet on Friday, but the economy was still going strong. People were at geothermal pools with their kids, hiking up snowy trails, or just sleeping in. There were never any traffic jams. The emails could wait.
This is how Iceland lives now.
The country started to really embrace the four-day workweek in 2019. Not a strange perk of a startup, but a real change in the way things are done. The experiment is mostly over now that we have the data five years later.
And Generation Z, the group that everyone said was lazy and entitled, suddenly looks like the only group that got it right.
What really happened when Iceland cut a workday
If you walk into a typical Icelandic office on a Thursday afternoon now, you’ll notice something strange: it’s calm.
People are shutting their laptops on time. People are actually talking to each other instead of just running from one meeting to the next with a death grip on their coffee. The unspoken stress that many people feel at work seems to have been turned down.
It’s easy to see why. A four-day work week changes the way life flows. Employees know they’re going to have a real three-day weekend, not just two days to recover from five. So they pace themselves, focus more in short bursts, and leave a little less of themselves at work every day.
It doesn’t feel like you’re just trying to get through the week anymore.
Iceland ran one of the largest four-day-workweek trials in the world, with more than 2,500 workers, from 2015 to 2019. That is about one percent of the people who work there.
They worked fewer hours, usually going from 40 to 35 or 36, and they didn’t lose much pay. Not just in tech and design companies, but also in hospitals, preschools, social services, and office jobs.
The results were almost scary for people who supported the old model. In most workplaces, productivity stayed the same or went up. Less people were burned out. Stress markers went down. People said they slept better, spent more time with their families, and felt like life no longer fit into a small evening window.
The change didn’t just go away when the trials were over. It got bigger.
By 2021, about 86% of Iceland’s workers had either already switched to shorter hours or had the right to ask for them in collective agreements. That’s not a fringe experiment anymore; it’s now a common policy.
And this is where Generation Z comes in. For years, people made fun of them for saying “no thanks” to grind culture and 70-hour work weeks, asking about mental health, and wanting time off as much as pay.
Five years later, the data from Iceland backs up what many of them had been saying all along. A shorter week doesn’t ruin economies, take away people’s drive, or mean that no one works hard. It just sees people as people, not batteries that can be recharged over and over. *That’s the quiet revolution that is hidden in the snow of Iceland.*
How the four-day work week really works in real life
The secret to Iceland’s four-day week isn’t some kind of magic way to get more done.
It’s boring, but it’s necessary. Teams cut out the extra work to make it take fewer hours. Meetings either got shorter or stopped happening. There were fewer email chains. Schedules got clearer and more honest: what really needs to be done and what is just a habit?
Managers started changing shifts so that public services wouldn’t stop. On Fridays, hospitals stayed open. Care homes were still open all the time. They rotated staff instead of stretching them too thin, made sure they got enough rest, and paid attention to what was important.
It’s not so much about cramming five days into four as it is about getting rid of the nonsense.
If you want a four-day week, you should be careful not to fall into this trap. They try to “earn” Friday off by making Monday through Thursday full of back-to-back calls, extra hours, and late-night laptop marathons.
That’s not change; that’s self-sabotage with better marketing.
To have a real four-day week, you have to say no. No to meetings that don’t have a point. No to busy work that looks good. No to managers who think being there is the same as making a difference. It tells teams to be honest about which tasks are just for show or because of tradition.
Let’s be honest: no one really does this every day. Some weeks, things go wrong. But the rule is still true: you protect your time off by fiercely defending your time on.
People who work in Iceland often say that the shift is more of a mental reset than a perk.
They say they want to have a “real life” again, which could mean learning new languages, volunteering, starting side businesses, or just having a quiet day with no errands. One worker for the city of Reykjavík put it best in a line that sounds almost like a manifesto:
“We didn’t get any lazier. We woke up more. The job stopped taking up all of our time.
For businesses and governments that are watching from a distance, the lessons coming out of Iceland are surprisingly clear:
First, cut down on meeting time: set limits on how long they can last, cut down on the number of people who can come, and cancel them by default unless there is a clear goal.
Protect deep work by setting aside “focus hours” when calls and pings stop so that real work can get done.
Don’t just shorten schedules; redesign them. Rotate shifts, stagger teams, and keep services running without burning people out.
This isn’t about a perfect world. It’s about seeing work hours as a limited resource, not an endless sponge for tasks.
What Iceland says about the future Gen Z keeps asking for. If you look at the Iceland case from a distance, you can see a pattern.
Gen Z has been very clear that work should fit into life, not take it over. They question working unpaid overtime, being glorified for being tired, and pay that doesn’t cover the cost of housing or mental health damage. People in older generations often thought of it as laziness or weakness.
But when an entire country moves its schedule closer to Gen Z’s values, the meltdown never happens. There isn’t a wave of national apathy or a sudden drop in productivity. The baseline expectation of what a “normal” week looks like changes.
All of a sudden, the person who wants time off isn’t the only one.
This doesn’t mean that Iceland has figured everything out. Many people still have to work more than one job, take care of kids, and work nights. Not every employer is generous, and not every sector can cut hours right away.
But the story has changed.
The idea of a four-day week is no longer just a fringe idea that people write about in self-help books. This model has been used in a real country for many years, in both the public and private sectors. That makes it harder for politicians and business leaders in other places to laugh it off.
We all know that feeling when you realize that the “way things have always been done” is just a choice someone made a long time ago.
The story from Iceland doesn’t give you a clear answer, and it doesn’t mean that every country can just copy and paste the model without any problems. Different cultures exist. There are differences between economies. The outcome is affected by unions, laws, and social safety nets.
But it cuts through a long-held belief that younger generations who want more balance are either naive or spoiled.
| Key point | Detail | Value for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Four-day week is viable | Iceland ran multi-year trials with 2,500+ workers and kept or boosted productivity | Shows that less time at work doesn’t automatically mean less output |
| Quality beats hours | Workers cut meetings, focused tasks, and reorganized schedules | Offers a roadmap for improving your own workday, even without a formal four-day week |
| Gen Z’s demands are grounded | Shorter weeks improved health, satisfaction, and work-life balance | Validates asking for balance, flexibility, and humane working norms |
They could just be the first people to use a new technology that is already working in another place.
Iceland is a tease for workers who are stuck in places where Fridays never end. It’s hard for managers who use “bums on seats” as a measure of performance. For policymakers, it’s a case study that will never go away.
The four-day week is no longer just a dream. It’s a matter of will.
