Mark Woods: Who says time must lord it over us?

“Why indeed son, why indeed,” was my mysterious and patently time-buying answer as I searched the web. It turns out of course that we are lucky to even get two days free from toil. It was only at the turn of the last century that a New England cotton mill added the Jewish sabbath to the Christian one to sow the seeds of the weekend. Once Henry Ford began shutting down his factories for the two days as well in the 1920s other industrialized nations slowly fell into line.

All of which left my six-year-old a little nonplussed it has to be said. It turns out though that he’s not the only one questioning the way things pan out each week.

A recently published book, Time on Our Side, examines the case for a shorter working week and points a predominantly feminist finger at the current set up, dismissing it as a relic from another time, a time when the majority of women stayed at home. The situation today of course is that many women don’t just go out to work to bring home a much-needed wage, they do so while having to care for their children and increasingly elderly parents too. As the gender fabric of society slowly shifts, more and more men are finding themselves in a similar position too and no matter what your sex a patchwork of part-time jobs requiring full time attention brings with it huge personal, social and professional costs.

The answer, according to the book anyway, is a purposeful move towards a 30-hour week for everyone, a world where part-time becomes the new full-time, where each of us is able to fully focus on the task in hand, rather than fretting about the task we are inevitably late for.

I know at least one little boy who would wholeheartedly approve.

Twitter @mark_r_woods