Five days weekend?

Just came across this interesting idea of five day weekends (who wouldn't like it?) and their sales pitch has a compelling argument.

Since world war II, Americans have worked more each year then the previous one. I am sure things are not better in many other countries, in fact in many developing countries it will be worse. So much so that employees are not even able to take the basic number of entitled holidays. And even on the weekends, how many of us don't work at all?

So, have things gone too far? Is it not surprising that with so much of technological advance to bring in efficiency in our workplace, we feel more inefficient year after year. Its like supporting the Moore's law which predicted that each year the number of transistor will double on a chip while its size gets halved. And this might have increased the efficiency and productivity in absolute terms, we are getting unhappier, more stressed with each milestone towards achieving efficiency.

One reason of the mounting stress level, as famous productivity guru David Allen describes is that the actual nature of our job has changed dramatically then have our training for and our ability to deal with the work.

Talking about nature of work, from working in the farms where the work could be quantifiable (e.g. how much land to plowed, cows to be milked etc) to manufacturing work where we still had control over the quantity of work, the current nature of work for most has been shifted towards being knowledge worker which, due to its vary nature, allows us to filling any amount of time available to one.

This unique nature of knowledge work has led to many process oriented standards evolving to ensure quality of the work (CMM, ISO, BS, ITIL, etc etc). However, though we have done a lot to ensure the quality of this new kind of work, there has not been much, if any, effort to regulate or standardised the knowledge worker's work environment and working hours.
So a 5 day weekend might sound absurd, but I think, it at least forces you us to look at the way we are getting detached from everything else than work. Think about it and start making a noise, not about a 5 day weekend if you don't like the idea, but at least about making things better at work and bringing some sanity in the ever increasing work hours.