Earlier this year we officially became a 4 Day Week company, which means we work from Monday to Thursday and get Fridays off. Having a 3 day weekend has greatly improved our work-life balance, and it's been great to see the many different ways Hutchies have been using their extra day off. Here's 3D Artist, Will to share how he's been spending his free Fridays...

What’s your role at Hutch?

Hi! I’m Will. I work as a 3D artist here at Hutch. That means that I make in-game assets, environments and props for our games. I also do a bit of 3D rendering work for our UI.

How do you spend your Fridays?

To begin with I spent a lot of my Fridays going into London and taking photos so that I could improve at my favourite hobby. I also worked on some personal 3D projects for fun. However I’ve recently bought a house and doing it up has kind of taken over my life!

Would you be able to do this without free Fridays?

Having the Fridays off has really sped up the amount of time it’s taken to renovate the house. Having three days in a row where I can focus on a particular room or task really means I get into a good flow with it.

Have your free Fridays affected your health positively?

Anyone who’s gone through the buying process will tell you buying a property is really stressful. And you won’t believe them until you’re actually going through the process yourself. We had quite a tight deadline for getting everything ready for our completion date and I found managing all the admin to be quite a lot more stressful than I could have imagined. I vastly underestimated the amount of paperwork I’d need to read and emails I would have to send. Having this extra day off alleviated some pressure from me as I wasn’t worried as to when I would have the time to do this work, thus in turn this really benefited my mental health.

A bit of that stress has continued onto the renovation process, so having the ability to schedule workmen and deliveries on my day off has really reduced a lot of stress. Having to manage all of this stuff with my day to day work would have been quite stressful!

How did you find adapting to a 4 Day Week? Any challenges or tips / hacks you came across that helped you?

At first I treated my Fridays like they were a day off. I tried to make the most of them and cram as much activity into them as possible. However after a couple of months I got into more of a routine with them and became a lot more relaxed about how I spent my free time. I think not stressing about what you need to do on your Fridays and taking your life as it comes is a much better idea than trying to shovel as much activity into your life as possible.

Any plans for future Fridays?

Well I’m hoping that my renovation will wrap up soon in the next couple of months! If it does I’d love to get back into central London again and take some more photos. I’d love to give fashion photography a go too!

Find out more about the Hutch 4 Day Week here: https://www.hutch.io/careers/the-hutch-4-day-week/

And if you’re a company who’s interested in how the 4 Day Week might work for you, follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates and tips: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hutch-games-ltd