A four day work week would be amazing, I could go out on Thursday nights.

Great idea! At thoughtbot, we spend Monday - Thursday on client projects and use Fridays as internal/side-project investment days.

Sometimes you might work on a client project on a Friday, but it's usually in an effort to get ahead of schedule.

We still keep the general 9-5 hours Mon-Fri.

I would also ask the Elepath guys about this. I know they have experimented with 4-day work weeks.

Work when there's work to be done. Rest when you've earned it, or you need it. Ideally both. At least that's what I've always done.

I work 40 hours, sometimes more (yay overtime/deadlines/etc.), a week over 4 days.

tl;dr: I do this and I love it, use day off to work on personal projects.

I take mondays off because they suck. Joking aside, I actually like Mondays and usually use the day to work on my own stuff. (I am currently re-designing my portfolio. Long overdue.)

My boss suggested this as I travel almost 2 hours to work each day. (Yeah. Crazy. I know. Not getting into it.)

I love it! Sure, my days are incredibly long, but my productivity has gone up. I get more stuff done, but that might be to the fact that I am usually the only one in the office.

Like I said above, I am using my mondays to work on personal projects or on less productive days, the usual weekend stuff.

That said, I'm young and I only see family on weekends anyway.

I am usually tired by the end of the day but no more tired than I was before working "normal" days.

One issue that I've found is the confusion of whether I get paid for stat-holidays since i don't work on mondays but still work a 40 hour week.

This work style suits me. (I think this is key) I am an exception in my company. I am not sure if that's breeding resentment, but they also commute an average 30-45 minutes/day.

I would consider offering your employees a choice & see how it works out for them. Circumstances might be significantly different. They might have kids, family or other needs.

My apologies for the essay. ;) If you have any questions, please feel free to ask here or on twitter (@pumpki).

Ryan Carson of the late Carsonified but current Treehouse swears by this working method. There are quite a few articles on his blog about this.

I'm guessing the success of his businesses are some what testament of how well it can work out :)

Sounds like a good experiment and it can’t hurt to try! I’ve taken a few days off every now and then to work with such a schedule, but just couldn’t find myself able to focus for 10 hours per day (I probably should have experimented for longer).

I have a standing appointment every Wednesday afternoon which is across town and forces me to leave the office around 1pm and then work from home for the rest of the day.

I rarely bring actual 'doing' work home with me but rather use the time to more loosely think about what I'm working on.

I have found that my productivity has increased dramatically because I force myself to focus on 'doing tasks' on the half day on Wednesday and genuinely make creative leaps in the afternoon work from home time I would never make in the office with all of its distractions. Better yet, I then usually head to the office a little early on Thursdays to take advantage of the quiet time to do they work related to my Wednesday afternoon thinking.

In the 9am–6:30pm, Monday–Friday that I had been doing for 3+ years put me in a pattern where all of my time was spent at a desk trying to work in a state of constant interruption with great difficulty focusing.

Being allowed to respect our individual, natural working/creative patterns in our commercial work (instead of being forced to follow a strict timetable) could be hugely beneficial for workers as well as companies.

I think at 37signals (now Basecamp) they also do that during Summer

http://dcurt.is/work-like-hell