If you wanted to find the least likely place on earth to prove that working less raises output, you might choose Japan, a country with a specific word, karoshi, for death by overwork. Which is exactly what makes Microsoft’s 2019 experiment there so striking.
What did Microsoft Japan do?
In the summer of 2019, Microsoft’s office in Japan closed every Friday for a month and paid everyone in full. They called it the Work-Life Choice Challenge. The reported results were dramatic: labour productivity, measured as sales per employee, rose nearly forty percent against the same month the year before, while electricity use fell about twenty-three percent.1
Should you trust the 40 percent?
No, not at face value, and intellectual honesty demands saying so. It is the company’s own figure. It covers a single month. And a one-off change like this can carry a novelty effect, a burst of enthusiasm that fades. As a precise measure of what a permanent four-day week would deliver, the number is close to useless.
So why does the experiment matter?
Because of how they did it, which is the part worth keeping. Microsoft did not work magic and did not ask people to sprint through four days what they used to do in five. They capped meetings at thirty minutes and pushed work toward shorter, asynchronous communication.2 The lost Friday came out of meeting time, coordination, and the low-value busywork that fills a normal week, not out of the actual product of people’s labour.
That is the tell, and it lines up with every other shorter-hours experiment. The time is freed by cutting the fat, not by superhuman effort. When a four-day week succeeds, it succeeds because preparing for it forces an organisation to confront how much of the five-day week was never really work in the first place.
What is the broader lesson?
Read the Microsoft Japan story not as “shorter weeks boost sales forty percent,” which the evidence cannot support, but as a vivid demonstration of a transferable principle. Shorten the container and the contents reorganise. Given less time, people protect the work that matters and shed the work that does not, because they suddenly cannot afford the meetings and the polish and the status reports that quietly consumed the surplus.
You can run a smaller version of this on yourself without any company policy. Impose an artificial constraint, a hard stop at a set hour, a thirty-minute default on your own meetings, a cap on how long a task gets, and watch the low-value work fall away under the pressure of the limit. The constraint does the cutting that good intentions never quite manage. Microsoft Japan capped the week and the waste revealed itself. You can cap the day and get the same effect, minus the press release.
Frequently asked questions
What happened when Microsoft Japan tried a four-day week?
In August 2019 Microsoft’s Japan office closed every Friday with full pay. The company reported that labour productivity, measured as sales per employee, rose about 40 percent versus the same month a year earlier, while electricity use fell about 23 percent.
Is the Microsoft Japan 40 percent figure reliable?
Treat it as directional. It is the company’s own figure, covers a single month, and may carry a novelty effect. The mechanism it reveals, capping meetings and cutting low-value work, is more durable than the headline number.
How did Microsoft Japan get more done in less time?
They capped meetings at 30 minutes and pushed work toward shorter, asynchronous communication, so the lost day came out of meeting time and coordination rather than productive work.
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
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Microsoft Japan, “Work-Life Choice Challenge” (August 2019), reported by NPR, CNBC, and the World Economic Forum: labour productivity (sales per employee) rose 39.9 percent against August 2018, and electricity use fell 23.1 percent. These are company-reported figures from a single month and should be read as directional. ↩
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Microsoft Japan (2019): meetings were capped at 30 minutes and work pushed toward shorter, asynchronous communication. ↩