Read this and take the rest 
of the day off

Mr Carlos Slim is a pretty successful guy: Either the world’s richest or the second-richest, depending on which measure you use and how much he spent on lunch that day. So it is worth taking note when he has something to say about work and productivity.

At a conference recently in Paraguay, Mr Slim, who controls America Movil, the largest mobile phone operator in the Americas, pitched a radical overhaul of the nine-to-five grind: People would work three days a week, though they would put in longer days (11 hours) and retire later in life (at around 70).

The extra days off would give people more time to relax and invent things, he said.

On the other side of the world, the Seoul city government was singing a similar tune — a lullaby, actually: Workers will soon have permission to take afternoon naps, though the nap experiment is restricted to the summer months. Perhaps city officials realise what sleep science has been saying for a while: Napping helps improve cognitive performance, especially if the nap is in the 10- to 25-minute range.

SHOULD WORKWEEK GO?

This work less, nap more ethos is not new. But its primary advocates have tended to be from the squishier end of the work spectrum, places such as Sweden or Google. Now it is gaining support from a hard-charging billionaire and public officials in the largest city of a nation famous for gruelling workdays, soju-fuelled work nights and chronic sleep deprivation.

Their ideas will still have a tough time catching on, to state the obvious. The pressure on the workweek, enabled by personal technology and abetted by employment anxiety, is all the other way: To expand, not contract.

The genius of Mr Slim and Seoul’s ideas is that they accept the malleability of the 21st-century workweek but ask why the change is in only one direction.

Just because the workplace is always on, the workweek does not have to be. The five-day week, after all, was established in a time when we had dry goods, steam engines and lamplighters. Hasn’t the workplace become more efficient since then? Shouldn’t the workweek go?

Some groggy bureaucrats in Seoul and an industrious billionaire in Mexico City are saying it should. (As is, we realise, the editorial board of an organisation famous for its first-in, last-out work ethic and open-office seating plan, which is convivial, but makes it really hard to nap.)

The question is how to get from here to there. There may well be no one-size-sleeps-all solution, or it may take a year’s worth of 18-hour days to figure it out. But at least people are finally waking up to the problem. BLOOMBERG