Another long holiday weekend is upon us in the US of A, and with it comes the predictable cascade of news coverage about gas prices, TSA lines, and highway traffic that somehow surprises us every single time. The holiday-meets-weekend alignment happens several times a year, and each time, a significant portion of the workforce collectively decides that it’s time to close the laptop, load up the car, and leave their coworkers to figure it out.
But guess what? The 3-day weekend isn’t really 3 days. It’s 5, at a minimum … and everyone knows it.
Thursday evening, of course, marks the unofficial start, which is why a certain kind of energy takes over offices on Thursday afternoons. By Friday, the people who do show up are operating at a level of productivity that can only be described as sloth-like. No meetings have been scheduled because scheduling a meeting on a pre-holiday Friday is considered, in most workplaces, an act of aggression. Instead, what happens is long lunches, a healthy amount of YouTube scrolling, and hallway conversations that start with “so, any plans?” (and last 25 minutes). The parking lot empties by 2 PM.
Then comes the long weekend itself which passes, as they always do, faster than it should. Naps, food and, perhaps, a few household chores fill the time.
And then Tuesday arrives. Tuesday, of course, is re-entry day, and it functions less like a workday and more like a controlled decompression chamber. No one schedules meetings before Noon on a post-holiday Tuesday because that, too, is an act of aggression. The morning is consumed by email archaeology as we all excavate our inbox and reconstruct what happened in the long-ago past. And by “past” we mean “last week.”
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A brief, necessary pause here: not everyone gets to observe a 3-day holiday weekend. For healthcare workers, hospitality staff, people in logistics, manufacturing, law enforcement (and many more), the calendar doesn’t automatically provide a holiday. For a lot of those folks, a national holiday just means more volume, more crowds and more cries of “we’re short-staffed again.” So remember that the 3-day weekend, if you get to observe it, is a workplace luxury. I certainly think that’s worth acknowledging before we commiserate further.
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And yet, somehow, despite the abbreviated effort on Thursday, the pleasant vacancy of Friday, the long weekend itself, and the gentle easing-back-in of Tuesday, we return feeling more wrung out than before we left. Navigating the post-holiday 4-day workweek feels like an expedition to the prairies of hell itself. We quickly realize that the time away – ostensibly to help us rest, relax, and recharge per workplace well-being gurus and HR teams – has instead rendered us barely able to make it through this shortened workweek. And no one has a satisfying explanation for this.
Because here’s what makes the compressed workweek so sneaky: it stacks everything that would have been spread across 5 days into 4, which means the pace is slightly higher, our calendars are slightly fuller, and the feeling that we’re behind-in-everything is slightly more overpowering than usual. By Thursday of the short week, it feels like we’ve been working for 11 days straight, that 3-day weekend of rest, relaxation and rejuvenation feels like a fever dream, and we get through it by sharing a mindset of collective delusion with our co-workers.
The 3-day weekend giveth.
But the resulting 4-day workweek absolutely taketh away.
