Working nine to six, what a way to make a living…” was not the lyric Dolly Parton went for when she penned her famous anti-rat-race anthem back in 1980. And not just because “five” has more rhyming opportunities. No, Parton was referencing the commonplace, standardised workday, consisting, for most humble employees, of a seven-hour shift with an hour’s lunch-break in the middle – equating to 35 hours a week. This, she concluded, was a bit of a drag: lining a boss’s pockets for little reward or recognition, all while being passed over for promotion and having your best ideas nicked.

Today, however, many of us would be thrilled to find ourselves confined to a straightforward 9-5. Google co-founder Sergey Brin raised eyebrows at the beginning of March after writing in a leaked internal memo that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” – and that anyone working less than that was doing “the bare minimum”.

Even for those working in less highly strung environments, the stealthy creep of the “9 to 6” in many workers’ contracts, requiring an extra five hours of work per week for seemingly no extra pay, is making the 9-5 feel like a distant dream from a golden age.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), average weekly hours have actually gone down over the past 30 years in the UK – from 38.1 hours a week in 1992 to 36.5 in 2024. And yet, anecdotally, the majority of my friends and peers are now contracted to do a 40-hour week as standard. Online forums like Glassdoor, Reddit and Quora are full of threads of people asking: “When and why did 9-5 become 9-6??” and “When did 9-5 turn into 8-5?” As one post reads: “When I first started working in the late Nineties it seemed 9-5 was the normal time people started and finished their day at work (if I’m not mistaken there was even a song made about it). I can’t remember when it happened but now any time I browse the UK job market the hours I see listed are either 8am-5pm or 9am-6pm? How did the powers that be get away with adding an extra hour on to your day’s work without anyone putting up a fuss?”

In fact, it’s been a while since 9am-5pm ruled the roost. According to one YouGov poll from 2018, only 6 per cent of people in the UK followed that working pattern. So how did the 9-5pm become standard practice in the first place? And does it matter that things have shifted?

In Britain, ideas of reducing the working day were already afoot by the early 1800s. Robert Owen, the Welsh textile manufacturer, social reformer and all-around stand-up guy, first campaigned to reduce the workday to 10 hours in 1810, implementing it for workers at his textile mill in New Lanark, Scotland. Seven years later, he had gone a step further and come up with an eight-hour workday instead. It may have been over 200 years ago, but Owen’s vision still holds up – he didn’t pluck “eight” out of thin air, but after carefully considering people’s lives. “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”, was the slogan behind this manifesto. It was such a simple yet beautiful idea: that work should hold only the same amount of importance as leisure and sleep; that the 24 hours of each day should be carved equally to hit the perfect balance of all three.

The idea never became officially mandated across the board in this country, but it soon took hold as the ideal, with Owen’s tagline frequently used during the Industrial Revolution when factory workers, including children, were expected to work for up to 16 hours a day.

Across the pond, Henry Ford famously instigated an eight-hour-a-day, five-day working week at Ford Motor Company in the 1920s. The rest of the country followed suit the following decade – the 40-hour work week had become standard, with legislation requiring that employers pay time and a half for anyone working more than that. During the Great Depression in the US, cereal magnate WK Kellogg went one better, instituting six-hour shifts in place of eight-hour ones in 1930 in order to rehire employees who had been laid off – and because he genuinely believed in the social good of giving more time back to workers.

Hours in the US have clearly since increased, but several countries in Europe have stuck by the 8-8-8 rule. For example, in France, the 35-hour working week is legally mandated to the point where, if you leave a job (be it your choice or your employer’s), you can claim back money for any and all hours of overtime worked during your employment there.

In the UK, the laws are somewhat sketchier. Working hours are governed by the Working Time Regulations, which dictate that employees can work a maximum of 48 hours per week on average over a 17-week period. It’s not a hard and fast rule though; workers can “choose” to opt out. A friend tells me about a certain London members club he worked for which forced every member of staff to sign a waiver so that they could work 60-hour weeks.

Then there’s the employment contract itself, which dictates a worker’s set hours – and usually also includes a sneaky clause stating that the employee can be asked to work more as and when required. “It kind of makes the whole law a bit of a nonsense,” says Gearalt Fahy, an employment law expert and partner at Womble Bond Dickinson. He adds that employers aren’t legally required to pay for overtime; in many workplace cultures it can simply become the norm, or even expectation, that employees eat lunch at their desk and work that extra half an hour, hour, two hours for no money.

“It’s really a bargain between the employer and employee,” says Fahy. “As a result, it comes down to what the employer requires and what the employee is prepared to tolerate.”

Research from Canada Life last year revealed that more than half (51 per cent) of UK employees regularly exceed their contracted hours, with 17 per cent clocking at least two hours of overtime every single day. Analysis from TUC in 2024, meanwhile, found that 3.8 million people did unpaid overtime, putting in an average of 7.2 unpaid hours a week – the equivalent of £7,200 per person a year.

All this extra working – both official and unofficial – is part of an increasingly “always-on” culture that seems to equate idleness with immorality. As Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work, puts it: “We live in this society that loves to revere work and celebrate CEOs; it ties personal productivity to self-worth.”

Technology that was supposed to make our lives easier and enable more leisure time by boosting productivity – computers, smartphones, email, AI – has, if anything, only upped the pressure to work longer and harder, as well as blurring the boundaries between work and home life.

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“One of the side effects of professional communication becoming digitised and deliverable wirelessly is that now almost every waking moment is a moment in which you can be signalling your value, be it in dashing off a quick email response or replying to a Slack chat,” explains Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. “Because of this reality, work can now intrude, even if only in small slivers, to a larger and larger footprint in our lives, which makes its presence increasingly suffocating.”

While research shows that many employers find ways to smuggle implicit commitments to hours beyond the 48-hour legal maximum into contracts, the real issue is “soft” coercion, claims psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, author of Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. “Where long hours are the norm, new employees are loath to assert themselves on this point and risk their job security and promotion prospects, and so quickly internalise the obligation to work above and beyond their contracted hours.”

The irony of all this is that research shows that more hours at the coalface do not always equal more work getting done. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to one Stanford University study, productivity per hour declines sharply when a person works more than 50 hours a week; meanwhile, analysing employees who worked 70 hours, they found that workers accomplished the same amount as those who worked 55 hours. This chimes with Parkinson’s law: the notion that work seems to expand to fill the time available.

Conversely, in pilot schemes where reduced hours have been trialled, the results are consistently positive.

In Iceland, more than 2,500 workers in a variety of career settings had their hours reduced from 40 to 35 or 36 hours a week, with no cut in salary, between 2015 and 2017. “Service provision and productivity either stayed within expected levels of variation, or rose during the period of the trials,” the study said. It was so successful that now almost 90 per cent of the country’s working population do shorter hours or have the right to shorten their working week.

“Instead of pushing for more hours, workplaces can focus on creating an environment that prioritises employee wellbeing and work-life balance,” says Vicky Walker, group director of people, at Westfield Health. Want to attract and retain talent? Flexible benefits and reduced working hours could be the key, she adds, leading to greater efficiency and focus.

The UK government already seems to be on board; under Labour’s new Employee Rights Bill, the right to request flexible working has been “beefed up”, says Fahy. “It’s now described as being the ‘default’, where it’s practical – any refusal will have to be ‘reasonable’ and a written explanation is required.”

Some businesses are starting to embrace the idea too. The push for the four-day week has been much publicised, but there’s also a different movement currently gaining traction: the campaign for the six-hour day. Proponents argue that it makes more sense in terms of improving life for parents, particularly working mothers, who would have time to drop their kids off and pick them up from school.

In Sweden, a six-hour day pilot scheme, run over the course of two years at the Svartedalens retirement home, was so successful that it was adopted by companies in other industries. The Toyota plant in Gothenburg, for example, switched to a six-hour day – and recorded a 25 per cent profit gain, in addition to improvements in employees’ health.

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Stephan Aarsol, an American entrepreneur, went a step further. He experimented by implementing a five-hour workday for his employees from 2015 to 2017, and authored the book The Five-Hour Workday: Live Differently, Unlock Productivity, and Find Happiness based on his experience.

“When you squeeze people for time, they’ve basically got to find faster ways to do things,” he says. “We became a company where we optimised every little thing. We looked at: is there software that can make this better? Is this something we just don’t even need to do?”

In his experience, although there were downsides that came from staff decentring work, reducing hours really did make them more productive. “We became a team that could do twice as much work in the same amount of time,” he says, adding that staff found “magical ways” to complete tasks more efficiently via streamlining processes and automation.

Forget 9 to 5; maybe we should be working 9 to 2. Now that’s a way to make a living!