The three-day week, advocated recently by the Mexican multimillionaire, Carlos Slim, is such an obviously good thing, like freshly-ground coffee and reading to children, that I can’t be bothered to argue in favour of it.

The real issue is feasibility. Is it possible?

I believe so because I’ve done it myself. As a lecturer, I always tried to get my week’s teaching into three days, by working evenings, so I could have the other two free for writing. The catch is that this was successful only because I took care to let no one know what I was doing. Officially I was still working five days and so there was no offence to the five-day mindset.

The problem is that the five-day week is so long established it seems God given. And in fact this is partly true – it is a consequence of the combined interventions of God and Henry Ford, a formidable partnership. The six-day week was based on the time taken by God to create the world, a fact He should never have revealed (though few can resist bragging about their successful creations). In the early twentieth century, Henry Ford made Saturday a holiday for his workers, introducing the five-day week which quickly caught on. Having been the basic structure of most lives for almost a century, it now feels as inevitable as the cycles of the moon.

How to change this perception? One solution would be for God to admit that He did it all from Tuesday to Thursday, but only claimed it took six days to avoid making it seem too easy. Failing this, the human solution would be to look further back in history. There is a tendency to believe that the five-day convention was an improvement on all previous working hours, but it was an improvement only on the shockingly long hours worked in the aberrant nineteenth century. In pre-industrial Europe peasants often worked for as little as half the year. Harvard economist Juliet Schor has estimated recently that in fourteenth-century England, the average peasant work-year was a mere 150 days, a figure to make any contemporary wage slave envious and any American corporate lawyer suicidal.

The Middle Ages took the pragmatic view that work was a tedious necessity to be given as little time as possible, but in the course of the Industrial Revolution work became more of a duty, even a calling. One explanation of how this came about is Max Weber’s famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For Weber, the change was brought about by the peculiar nature of Reformation Protestantism, which encouraged a view of worldly success as the mark of the saved and worldly failure as the mark of the damned. I find Weber's thesis entirely plausible, though it has been hotly disputed, especially by Protestants and capitalists.

What seems incontestable is that, for whatever reason, work has become for many a sort of substitute religion, a source of the religious reassurances of meaning, purpose and identity.

More recently, work has provided another reassurance that is becoming harder to find in society at large – a sense of community. Astute employers now do everything possible to make the team the new family and the workplace the new village. Hence the frequent team-building activities outside work and the multitude of services offered by the more sophisticated corporations.