Most of us will be aware that today is a Friday. Congratulations on having arrived again at the short spell of rest before we return to another five days of hard labour.

I was thinking this morning, who invented weekends? So now I have a few notes to share:

  • Ancient Babylonians observed 7 planets in the sky and so invented the 7 day week. But Ancient Babylonians did not invent the weekend.

  • The Jewish Sabbath on Saturday is a “day of rest” - as is (traditionally) Friday in Islam and Sunday in Christianity. I don’t know why it’s Judahism any more than Islam, but anyway apparently ancient Jewish society is where people first had a day off every week.

    Even today, some societies only take one day off - including Equatorial Guinea, India and some sectors in Hong Kong - but one day off is hardly a weekend so Judahism did not invent the weekend.

  • As we know the Ancient Romans were a bit full on and they only had a day off every 8 days. Be thankful you’re not an ancient Roman.

  • Things began to change during the industrial revolution. In the UK in the early 19th century lots of working people got properly pissed on a Sunday. So the first extension of the weekend into Saturday afternoon was part of a deal with labour unions that people would turn up sober on Monday morning. That didn’t last. But anyway I think we can claim to have half-invented the weekend.

  • It was Henry Ford and other leaders of industry in the United States who first started to give their workforce a proper two-day weekend. One key reason was that Ford had revotionalised productivity in his industry so he was getting so much work done in five days that he could afford to look after his people and give them a proper weekend. So it was America that properly invented the weekend.

As we saw with the industrial revolution, the hours we have to work are closely related to GDP per capita, or in other words, economic output of the nation per person. The advancement of digital technology including data-driven automation and machine learning is sometimes referred to as the fourth industrial revolution. This should be very interesting to people who want to do less work, and so I think we all have to conclude: if you want a three-day weekend, when you get back in on Monday, you have to sell more first-party data projects. Have a good weekend.