Three days a week, Annie spends two hours commuting to her public relations job outside of Denver. Her company changed its office policy last year from remote to hybrid, prompting her to rent a car and get back on the road. So on Fridays – without telling her colleagues – Annie usually doesn’t work.
On the last day of the work week, Annie watches TV, goes to the gym, goes for a walk or sometimes goes skiing. She keeps her phone or computer nearby so it’s available for texting in case something unexpected happens, but she puts off her easiest work until Friday, finishes it quickly, and starts her long weekend as soon as as soon as possible.
When Annie is on the mountain instead of at her desk, she has “zero regrets,” she tells me — in a phone call she had scheduled for Friday afternoon — even if she’s a little worried about getting caught. (She asked that I change her name for this story for fear of retribution from her employer.)
Annie says term of return to office it has drained her social battery and made her less productive than when she was working from home full time. She was recently diagnosed as autistic, she says, and working from home has allowed her to focus better without interrupting colleagues. “If they expect me to come to the office and be fully present and sacrifice a lot of really important things that have improved the quality of my life,” she says, “then Fridays are the least I can do for myself mine to pass it.”
What used to be the last push for the weekend is becoming a personal day of humiliation for some remote workers. The trend has been called “quiet Fridays” or “on soft fridays” — a clandestine progression of Casual Fridays or Summer Fridays from the pre-pandemic era.
Some companies are creating policies to stop scheduling meetings on Fridays and discourage emailing. Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation last year requiring them shorten the work week up to 32 hours. In Tokyo, government workers will soon have the option of four-day work weeks, a move intended to give people more time to prioritize family as Japan’s fertility rates have fallen and some have overworked themselves to death.
OpenTable saw 44% more customer reservations between noon and 5pm on Fridays than on other days of the week.
But the dream of an official four working days a week lies largely beyond the reach of many. Greece last year passed a law allowing for a six-day work week in certain industries, a measure to combat a shrinking population and shortage of skilled workers. The workers are revolting against the unpopular Mandates of the RTO. Now, fed-up remote workers are sometimes reclaiming the day for themselves, especially as the 2010s girl mentality has been eclipsed by the rise of anti-labor movement. Since the pandemic, burning has increased, loyalty in the workplace is shrinking as companies conduct mass layoffs and people prioritize self-care over impressing the boss with long hours. Attendance at the office may be increasing, but Friday remains the least popular day to travel, far away. And as I discovered, for many workers at the end of the week, the W in WFH is in scare quotes.
A search through Reddit and TikTok will reveal a number of viral hacks to trick your boss into thinking you’re actively online. There are mice and apps that keep screens on, but also tips like turning off the phone’s auto-capture settings so that Slack messages look like they’re sent from a computer rather than a phone. More deceptive hacks include putting PowerPoint into presentation mode to keep the screen on, entering a Zoom meeting with yourself, or connecting your mouse to an oscillating fan.
While workers may appear to their employers to be online and away, evidence suggests that many have closed their laptops and stepped out into the world. In 2024, for example, OpenTable saw 44% more customer reservations made between noon and 5pm on Fridays than on other days of the week. “Changes in work culture are definitely affecting dining habits,” Debby Soo, CEO of OpenTable, told me via email. Similarly, at Resy, 28% of weekday-afternoon bookings were on Fridays, more than any other day of the week. Zocdoc shared with me booking data showing that booking appointments on Fridays has increased slightly since 2021 and that certain types of appointments are more common on Fridays, including acupuncture, IUD procedures and annual physicals.
ActivTrak, a workforce productivity and analytics software company, has found that people are actually calling it quits earlier on Fridays. In an analysis of 71,000 workers at more than 800 companies that are ActivTrak customers, the company found that at the end of 2024, workers worked about an hour earlier each weekday than at the beginning of 2021. The biggest drop was on fridays. with workers leaving at 3:42 p.m., about 80 minutes earlier than four years ago.
A Friday morning Costco run is magical.
Jenna, a sales professional in Philadelphia
Some people may be out more on Fridays because their companies encourage them to go out. Buffer, a social media management software company, switched to a four-day work week in 2020. It started as an experiment, but proved so positive for morale that the company has kept it in place, says Hailley Griffis, head of of communication and content. After the initial adjustment of cramming more appointments into the first four days of the week, the schedule now “really helps reduce the amount of stress and anxiety,” she says. “It would be very difficult for me to go back to work five days a week, in terms of energy management.”
Stok, a sustainability consulting company, began offering “Quiet Fridays” every other week in 2020. The goal is to have no emails or meetings that day, and instead allow employees to put their heads down in projects or take the day to themselves, says Madeleine Drake, director of people and culture at Stoke. “Each of us has the awareness, autonomy and collaborative spirit to figure out what’s best every day,” she says, adding that about 90% of the company’s employees typically participate.
But flexible gigs are becoming harder to come by. Job offer four working days a week have fallen 42% since the end of 2022, according to data from Indeed, and those offering flexible Fridays are down 18.5%. Employees are likely to be “more interested than ever” in flexible Fridays and shorter work weeks, says Kyle MK, Indeed’s talent strategy consultant. “But implementation is probably slowing down,” in part because of economic pressures and labor market uncertainty, he adds. There is a disconnect between what employees want and what employers offer, despite growing evidence that shorter work weeks improve employee productivity and satisfaction, and that workers are doing less on Fridays anyway. “I think employers will start to see a decline in their ability to attract top talent and see their turnover increase if they don’t focus on the work-life balance, burnout and stress levels of their employees,” he says.
Some workers feel that there is no reason to stay on Friday if they can get all their work done by Thursday. Jenna, who works in sales in Philadelphia and whose name has also been changed, says she felt burned out in 2020 and would have to leave work at noon due to exhaustion. Almost five years later, she’s taking almost all of Friday off and expects her clients or colleagues to do a little on the last day of the work week, too. Like Annie, she chats with me on Friday afternoons—in between going out to a neighborhood brewery and running errands. It’s a typical Friday for her, which might include appointments with the vet for her dog, trips to the gym, or delicious lunches with a friend. “A run to Costco on a Friday morning is magical,” Jenna tells me.
The trust gap between bosses and workers is widening. A 2024 study by PwC found that 86% of business leaders believe employee trust is high, but only 67% of employees say they have high trust in their employer. About half of business leaders say they have a great deal of trust in senior executives, while only 38% say the same about entry-level workers.
Employment is a contract, where both parties must have clear communication to maintain trust, says Shaun Hansen, a professor of management at Western Oregon University. If you are instructed or implied to work on Friday, then that is the deal. But employers can build trust by better communicating their expectations and moving to more flexible arrangements, Hansen says. This may mean analyzing roles and accepting that not every white-collar job needs to fit a 40-hour, 9-to-5 schedule to be done well. “If you have a job that you can complete on a Thursday night, but your employer is insisting that you be there on Friday, that not only puts you in an ethical pickle, it will also make you look for a better one .work where you have more flexibility”, he tells me.
Of course, Fridays off are a privilege reserved for telecommuters or hybrid workers. The more space they have to free up, the bigger a split we can see work-life balance across industries. “I feel guilty about it from the level of: How privileged I am to have a job that I can even do this,” Jenna tells me. But the guilt of not being completely honest with her employer while she makes the occasional Microsoft Teams call from the bar? Not so much.
One Friday afternoon last summer, a friend and I packed up the car to leave for the weekend. I, taking advantage of my then-employer’s summer Fridays, left the laptop at home. But I watched as my friend connected her laptop to a hotspot, opened it up in the backseat, and started playing a long YouTube fireplace video that would keep the green circle next to her face in Slack. on for the ride. I was given her phone to act not only as a travel DJ but also as her secretary, answering every message from her boss. It took some teamwork, but where there’s a will to work less, there’s a way.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the technology industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
