[coldacid]

My experience is that the burnout and wasted time comes from all the crap that distracts from real work -- the meetings, emails, bug boards, etc. When I don't have all these things getting between me and the IDE, I'm far more productive and get a lot more enjoyment from my work. Of course, if all the crap were cut out, I'd probably be looking at two days of work per week, never mind four.

[Sharlin]

In the past several years most of the burnout and wasted time I’ve experienced has come from libraries, frameworks, build/CI systems, architectural patterns, and so on that simply suck, or at the very least fail to properly work together. Unfortunately, they’re all mainstream technologies that people seem to think are perfectly okay, and that fighting against your tools simply in order to develop good solutions to the actual domain problems is just what coding is supposed to be.

[mindv0rtex]

I'm genuinely curious which of those items you consider as sucky and why. I am asking because I've recently been moved from a C++ to a JS team at my current workplace, and now I am exposed to this wide range of new tools which are all alien to me.

[throwaway1777]

But moving to a 4 day week doesn’t eliminate any of that, it simply means you’d get less done.