'Everyone wins': why the future is the six-hour day

Forget the four-day week, writes Polly Dunbar, reducing our daily hours can help fix a status quo that's sent work-related stress through the roof and is costing the economy billions

- Polly Dunbar

When Lysanne Currie was establishing her content agency Meet The Leader back in 2017, she knew she didn’t want to adopt a typical nine-to-five working day. Over the decades, while working in the publishing industry, she’d seen many brilliant eople fall by the wayside because they simply couldn’t fit their complex lives around sitting in an office for eight hours a day.

Surely, she thought, there had to be a model that would enable her fledgling business to optimise productivity, while allowing its employees to do what they needed to do outside work: drop children off at school and collect them, or fulfil other caring obligations – perhaps even take a moment to exercise or do something they enjoyed.

The solution she came up with was a six-hour day. “It allows these really talented people to work around their other commitments without feeling stressed about how they’re supposed to cram it all in,” she says.

For many of us, clocking off after working just six hours is the stuff of fantasy. In reality, even the concept of nine to five seems laughably outdated in 2025. New research from recruitment firm Reed reveals that 42 per cent of British employees work beyond their contracted hours, equating to 14 million people working an entire extra day per week. Forty per cent say their workloads exceed the time available, leaving them overwhelmed.

But calls for a sea change in the structure of our working lives are growing. Labour MPs, including Peter Dowd, are currently pushing for legislation to implement the four-day week across Britain. Dowd, who has drafted a proposed amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, says it is needed because as artificial intelligence grows increasingly prevalent, it will inevitably reduce employment.