A Swedish city is experimenting with a 6-hour workday — and the results are fascinating

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Shortening the work week doesn't just make for happier employees — it could end up saving lives.

A radical experiment has been underway in the Swedish city of Gothenburg for the past several months. Rather than ask employees to work a normal 40-hour week, a nursing home, a hospital, a factory, and a tech start-up have all implemented six-hour workdays.

The Svartedalens nursing home shortened its shifts in the fall of 2015, and has already reported higher standards of care and received effusive praise from its 80-person staff.

"I used to be exhausted all the time," Lise-Lotte Pettersson, an assistant nurse at Svartedalens, told the Guardian last September. "I am much more alert. I have much more energy for my work, and also for family life."

The orthopedics unit at nearby Sahlgrenska University Hospital also switched 89 nurses and doctors to a six-hour schedule in 2015, the New York Times reports. The hospital hired 15 new staff members to make up for the lost hours (which officials admit was expensive), but since then, fewer employees have called in sick, more surgeries have been performed, and patients have experienced shorter wait times.

Working less, in other words, likely resulted in extra lives saved.

"For years, we've been told that an eight-hour workday is optimal," Anders Hyltander, the hospital's executive director, told the Times. "But I think we should let ourselves challenge that view and say, 'Yes that's the way it is now, but if you want to increase productivity, be open to new ideas.'"

Gothenburg's Toyota plant first implemented a similar policy 13 years ago, and the local internet start-up Brath also switched to 30-hour weeks in 2013. Productivity and profits have reportedly risen in both places.

The success of these initiatives supports a growing body of evidence in favor of working less.

Several experiments conducted by K. Anders Ericsson, one of the top experts on the psychology of work, have shown that people can only remain productive for four or five hours of concentrated work. After they pass that peak performance level, their output tends to flatline or even suffer.

"If you're pushing people well beyond that time they can really concentrate maximally, you're very likely to get them to acquire some bad habits," Ericsson tells Tech Insider. Those bad habits, which could include daydreaming or getting distracted by social media, hurt productivity. 

Not all experiments with shorter work weeks have withstood the test of time, though. The northern mining town of Kiruna, Sweden launched a similar program in 1989 but ended it in 2005 due to political changes in the local government.

However, as more organizations find that shorter workdays lead to increased productivity, those extra 10 hours per week start to seem like a waste of time.

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