Why? Because we consistently underestimate executives’ ferocious attachment to face time. The very leaders rhapsodizing about a shorter workweek in the future are demanding more time, not less, from their employees in the here and now. Mr. Musk requires a “minimum” of 40 hours in the office, and has said it takes 80 hours or more a week to have real impact. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who also foresees a four-day workweek, has said he personally works seven days. The JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon, who predicts a workweek of 3.5 days, insists on five full days in the office, and is a vociferous critic of remote work.
The forecasters predicting the four-day workweek also overestimate how much time technology will actually save. When I was a college intern at The Wall Street Journal in the early 1980s, we typed on manual typewriters using triplicate carbon paper, and fixed mistakes by cutting and pasting with scissors and glue. Theoretically, our work hours should have plunged with the advent of digital tools — but instead they exploded, as technology created the ability to publish around the clock.
Full-time employees last year worked an average of 41.9 hours per week, a figure that hasn’t changed much since the pre-internet 1990s. And at home, the advent of the internet didn’t decrease the amount of time Americans spent on housework. It’s an old pattern: As dishwashers and microwaves supercharged productivity in the 20th century, expectations about cleanliness, nutrition and child-rearing ballooned accordingly, and chores like laundry that once might have been outsourced migrated right back to homeowners.
A.I. appears to be following the same trajectory, increasing our output rather than decreasing our workload. A recent study of a 200-employee tech firm concluded that “A.I. tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it,” leading to “workload creep” as employees began taking on additional responsibilities. Similarly, a 2025 paper found that A.I. use “is associated with longer work hours and less leisure.”
Perhaps this time really will be different, and A.I. will significantly reduce the workweek. There may be no choice, if those who believe we are on the verge of an A.I. jobs apocalypse are correct. Already, Cisco, Block, Coinbase, HP, IBM and Salesforce are among the companies that have cited A.I. as a reason for layoffs. Some economists believe we will need to reduce work hours to allow more people to share in the labor and the paychecks.
