Is freelance work, or the four-day week, the best way to reclaim our time?
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Many workers choose to work as freelancers to avoid intense and long work hours. But that is not always what they get. See Pok Loa finds that many freelance workers feel intense pressure to be busy both at work and at leisure. He describes how our perceptions of time are shaped by our emotions and looks at the arguments for a shorter working week instead.
Researchers describe the feeling when we don’t have enough time, have too much on our plate or are constantly rushed as being under time pressure . This has long been a feature of work in modern society. But from factory work in industrial times to your office desk job in modern corporations, we tend to think of our managers as the biggest threat to our free time. They are the ones who command when we work, for how long and how intensely.[1][2]
In recent years, many workers find doing freelance jobs in the online freelancing labour market using platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr – also known as the “gig economy”– an appealing way to work because of the autonomy it offers. Workers see freelance work as an exit from the culture of overwork and burnout in the corporate world.
Freelance work lets people “be your own boss”. Workers find their clients, select their jobs on platforms and, most importantly, control their own time. But is this really the case?
Freelance “free” time is not so free
My research , based on the experiences of a group of high skilled Chinese freelance workers, proved counterintuitive. Freelance workers are far more susceptible to time pressure than we had expected.[3]
These workers work in graphic design, illustration, consulting, tech and engineering, marketing and research. Workers in my study forced themselves to stay busy, rushed and productive, even when there is nobody there to supervise them. Often they compelled themselves to overwork.
One reason for that lies in the feelings we have about time. Our emotions lock us in the pursuit of busyness, speed and productivity.
Anxiety is built into the rules of the game and set-up of freelancing platforms. When every job transaction is a one-off, workers have no guarantee about their future job prospects .[4]
Many of the workers I spoke to were anxious about the presence of free time. If you are not busy enough right now, you might not be the most employable person. And that might bring insecurity in the future. Many of them tried to fill up the empty blocks in their schedules by spending their free time trying to “upgrade” themselves or to hunt for the next job.
The consequence was a pervasive sense of time shortage. Even when workers had no job tasks scheduled, many of them felt it hard to relax and switch off from work. In other words, they felt “unfree” in their free time.
When being busy feels good
But it’s more than that. It’s not just about anxiety about personal success or failure.
Being busy and quick can be a “ badge of honour ”. It defines our sense of pride and status. This feeling can be particularly strong in online job-matching platforms, where the matching of jobs can resemble a “game”. Researchers call this “ gamified competition ”.[5][6]
In this part of the economy workers are absorbed in the game of bidding for jobs, outperforming their peers and chasing positive reviews from clients. Being busy and fast is part of this game. It means you are more competent than your competition, that you own skills which are in demand and that you are more likely to impress clients. These feelings of pride are emotional rewards for workers.
For some, being busy can bring about feelings of gratification and contentment that are more enduring. Being busy tells us reflects our moral character and sense of self. It can be a sign of being a disciplined person.
Many of the freelancers I spoke to had highly regularised routines that covered both their work time and their leisure. In their leisure time, they often arranged a densely packed schedule of workouts, volunteering and creative hobbies that would in turn boost their productivity at work.
The global work-time reduction debate
Let us return to an office setting. Concerns about workers’ time and wellbeing are heatedly debated globally among policymakers.
Legally Chinese workers are entitled to overtime pay. And bosses are limited to the overtime they can ask employee to do, to 36 hours per month. But the 9-9-6 work time culture (slang for working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week) has ignited a debate about workers’ wellbeing and the toxic culture of overworking. In many Western countries, including Britain, legislators and the public have been debating the prospect of reducing our working time to four days. Some companies have already started experimenting with it.[7][8][9][10]
Advocates for workers argue that shorter working weeks can potentially improve our quality of life and reduce anxiety and stress. While supporters among organisations argue that it can reduce staff turnover and even improve productivity. So is the four-day work week our silver bullet for tackling our toxic work culture? Not exactly.
It is our feelings about time that lock us into self-regulating our own time. What if, like the freelance workers reported in my study, workers on a reduced-time arrangement feel anxious and uncomfortable about not being busy? What if they fear about falling out of place in the company? What if they drive themselves to take on more tasks during their days off?
The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence complicates this debate. In corporate firms, tech giants are making claims that AI may effectively reduce working hours . But tech workers who are active in using AI tools are instead pushed to work longer hours, under volatile schedules and at faster pace, as companies spend more effort implementing the use of AI tools, developing guidelines and standard procedures and evaluating their use.[11]
Whereas in the freelancing world, there has been a growing demand for clients to hire freelance workers to repetitively “clean up” sloppy mistakes generated by AI . But clients often underestimate the time cost of these jobs, requesting unreasonable quick turnarounds from freelance workers.[12]
The experiences of freelance workers tell us that, even without managerial supervision, claiming autonomy in controlling our time remains challenging. If our time pressure lies in our subjective perceptions about time, it is the feelings about time that we should perhaps start questioning. It’s time to turn our focus to the quality of time, on top of quantity.
This blog post is based on Affective Order of Time Discipline: The Emotional Foundation of Time Pressure in the Online Gig Economy , published in Work, Employment and Society in 2026.[3]
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