The 4-day work week plan

IF this plan gets approved and implemented, I hope that we use it to be more productive and fruitful and not just to spend more time doing hardly anything. The shortening of the work week is intended for us to give time to other important duties we have.

One of them is the time we have to spend with our family. How important it is to spend quality time with the children and other members of the family since that would somehow redound to the benefit of the individual persons involved and of society in general!

A strong, healthy family practically determines the vitality of our society. A dysfunctional family leads to a dysfunctional society. We need to do everything to make family life vibrant, a continuing source of constructive and edifying energies for the society.

Let’s be quick to identify areas in family life that still need to be improved. There may even be problems there that need to be resolved. We should try to be concrete and specific in this so that we don’t waste time in doing what ought to be done.

Another set of responsibilities that we have to give attention to is that of our continuing formation and training. Especially these days when the character of the professional work is fast changing due to the rapid developments taking place, we need to see to it that we continue in our studies and training to be able to cope with the changes and the new challenges and opportunities.

We are told that our formation actually never ends. There is always something new to learn. And we should dedicate some time for this purpose. In this regard, it is not really so much of getting as much information and training as of focusing on the area where our talents and potentials can be optimized.

But obviously, we need to be more broad-minded and culturally open and tolerant, and so we need to get exposed to other areas that may not be where we would be directly involved in. We should avoid getting siloed in a particular area or system. We should try our best to be as compatible as possible with all other systems.

But the most important area where we should pay attention to is our continuing spiritual and moral formation. This is like the computer’s operating system that enables us to function in all the other aspects of our life.

We cannot overemphasize the importance of this area. The aim is nothing less than to be “alter Christus, ipse Christus,” another Christ, if not Christ himself. That’s because in Christ we have everything we need to be able to handle all the situations, predicaments, issues, challenges and opportunities in life. It is in Christ where we have the means to get to our ultimate and eternal destination.

The more time we can have to pray and to go deeper into the study of the doctrine of our faith, the development of the many virtues, the recourse of the sacraments, and to indulge in more devotional and pious acts, the better for us.

We should welcome the 4-day work week plan if we use the extra time for these considerations we just made!