The days of grinding at your desk from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. are officially numbered. Imagine clocking off an hour earlier every single day and still taking home the same salary. Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban says artificial intelligence is about to make it happen.
He added that working from home already “dilutes” people’s start and finish time, but that forward-thinking companies will put an official policy in place that cuts the workweek down by at least 5 hours. “It’s a step that sets the tone in a company,” he added.
“Reward people doing the daily with more time.”
And his argument is that the smartest companies will give that time back to their workers.
The standard 9-to-5 schedule hasn’t had an overhaul since Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Henry Ford brought the 40-hour workweek to the Western world a century ago, in 1926—eight hours of labor, for eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. At the time, it was a 19th-century worker’s dream.
However, between commutes, school runs, and last-minute holdbacks in the office, it took the world shutting down to realize that 8-8-8 had slowly morphed back to something more like 12-6-6. Working from home briefly allowed workers to claw back some of that time. Families ate breakfast together again. Parents walked their children to school. That mismatch between productivity and presenteeism became impossible to ignore, and post-pandemic workers simply refused to go back “to normal”.
