Last summer, Microsoft's Japan office tried an experiment. For one month, the office closed on Fridays, giving workers an extra day off, while paying them a full-time salary. Management also decided that no meetings would last more than 30 minutes and urged employees to cut down the amount of time they spent responding to emails. Called the "Work Life Choice Challenge," the experiment was wildly successful.

Measured by sales per employee, productivity reportedly went up 40 percent compared to the same time period the year before. The company also used 23 percent less electricity. This is especially striking in Japan, a country so prone to overworking that they developed a new word, karōshi, for literally working oneself to death. The results were so promising that the company is planning another round of the experiment some time this winter.

In many ways, the results aren't surprising. Companies in other parts of the world that have tried cutting down the length of the work week or work day—while, crucially, not cutting employee pay—have seen similar gains. In New Zealand, the trust management company Perpetual Guardian cut down to four days per week and reported a 20 percent gain in employee productivity and a 45% gain in employee work-life balance. The company has since made the policy permanent. In Germany, the tech consulting firm Rheingans Digital Enabler cut the work day down to five hours from the traditional eight. In the year since it's been implemented, the company has remained profitable and has become a bigger draw in Germany's tight labor market. Workers are more efficient and enthusiastic, on top of having more energy and time to devote to their hobbies and personal lives.

Managing director Lasse Rheingans told the Wall Street Journal, "We have all experienced that: We sit in the office, out of energy, reading newspapers online or Facebook, just in need of the little pauses to recharge, but you don’t really recharge. My idea is focusing on the first five hours and then just leave, and have a proper break."

On Tuesday, the People's Policy Project unveiled a "Leisure Agenda," a suite of policy proposals aimed at giving Americans back free time without leaving them more economically at risk. Americans work more hours than people in more other advanced nations, the PPP reports. In 2017, Americans worked 270 billion hours, an average of 1,739 per worker—even more than in famously overworked Japan—but overworked people produce diminishing returns. American workers also have less support than their counterparts in their countries do, whether that's in the form of unemployment insurance from the government or family benefits from their employers. And workers aren't even getting properly compensated for working those unnecessarily long hours. The Economic Policy Institute found that since 1979 American productivity has increased a staggering 69 percent. But hourly wages have only gone up 11 percent, meaning that Americans are working their hardest in decades and getting paid less than ever for it.

The 40-hour work week has been the norm in the U.S. since the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1940—although it's often longer for many. But as labor historians Priscilla Murolo and A. B. Chitty explain in From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend, the activists who helped make the 40-hour week a reality hoped that it would be a starting point to fight for even more free time for workers. They didn't believe that working oneself to death was something to aspire to. It's almost 60 years later, but some businesses are finally coming around to the same idea.