When someone tells you a whole society could never move to shorter hours, the honest answer is that one already did. Between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran what remains the largest shorter-hours trial in the world, and it did not quietly fade away. It rewrote how most of the country works.
What did the trial involve?
Led by Reykjavik City and the national government, the trials covered more than 2,500 workers, over one percent of Iceland’s entire workforce.1 What makes the result powerful is the breadth. This was not all software firms and marketing agencies. It included hospitals, preschools, and social services, the kind of essential, human work that supposedly cannot be compressed. Hours fell from forty to around thirty-five or thirty-six, with no cut in pay.
Did the work suffer?
It did not. Productivity and the quality of services held steady or improved across most of the workplaces, while workers’ wellbeing rose markedly.1 That last point matters: the people doing demanding, presence-based jobs got the same work done in less time and felt better doing it.
How did they pull it off?
Not by sprinting. The gains were supported by redesigning the work itself: digitising workflows, trimming low-value tasks, and shortening or eliminating meetings so that fewer hours did not mean worse service.2 This is the recurring lesson of every successful shorter-hours experiment. The time is not freed by effort. It is freed by removing the waste that nobody had thought to question.
What happened next?
The trial worked so well that Icelandic unions took it to the bargaining table and negotiated shorter hours permanently across the economy. Today around eighty-six percent of Iceland’s entire workforce, some 174,000 people, work shorter hours or have won the right to.1 A pilot became a permanent national norm through collective bargaining, which is the route individual willpower can never take.
What did it feel like for the people in it?
The statistics can make it sound abstract, so it is worth the human detail. Parents described mornings that were no longer a frantic scramble. Men in heterosexual couples reported doing noticeably more of the housework, a small redistribution with large consequences.3 The reclaimed time did not disappear into more screens. It went into the ordinary fabric of a life.
Why does Iceland matter for everyone else?
Because it dissolves the two objections people reach for first. The objection that shorter hours only suit cushy desk jobs is answered by the hospitals and preschools. The objection that a few willing companies prove nothing is answered by an entire national workforce. Iceland is the existence proof at scale: the conversion of productivity into time is not a fantasy, and it does not require everything to fall apart. It requires the work to be redesigned and, crucially, a collective mechanism to make the change stick. One person cannot negotiate a national norm. But one person can borrow the method, audit their week, cut the waste, and reclaim the hours the redesign reveals.
Frequently asked questions
Did Iceland actually shorten its working week?
Yes. Trials from 2015 to 2019 covering over one percent of the national workforce cut hours from 40 to around 35 or 36 with no loss of pay. They succeeded so clearly that unions then negotiated shorter hours across the economy, and about 86 percent of Icelanders now work shorter hours or have the right to.
Did productivity fall in Iceland’s shorter-hours trial?
No. Productivity and service quality held steady or improved across most of the workplaces tested, which included hospitals, preschools, and social services, not just office jobs.
How did Iceland make shorter hours work without losing output?
Workplaces digitised processes, trimmed low-value tasks, shortened or cut meetings, and redesigned shifts, so the same work was done in less time rather than crammed into fewer hours.
About the author
Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.
Footnotes
Footnotes
-
Autonomy and Alda (Association for Sustainability and Democracy), Going Public: Iceland’s Journey to a Shorter Working Week (2021): trials from 2015 to 2019 covering more than 2,500 workers (over 1 percent of the workforce), reducing hours from 40 to 35 or 36 with no pay cut, productivity and services maintained or improved, and about 86 percent of the workforce subsequently on shorter hours or entitled to them. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
-
Reporting on the Iceland trials notes that gains were supported by digitising workflows and trimming low-value tasks so that shorter hours did not reduce service. ↩
-
Autonomy and Alda, Going Public (2021): participants reported calmer mornings and a more equal division of domestic labour, with men in heterosexual households taking on more housework. ↩