The Executive Edition (12/19/2021)

The UAE’s new work week

Colin here. I’m back in Dubai after finishing out the year in the states. The UAE (and many Muslim countries) adhere to a different workweek. Friday and Saturday are the weekends, with the start of the week coming on Sunday. It’s a slightly off-kilter schedule that sets the region apart from the other countries that make up that corporate acronym EMEA. As of January 1, The Gulf nation is transitioning to a 4.5-day work week, with weekends to consist of Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday, making it the first country in the world to introduce a national workweek shorter than the global five-day week.

According to NPR:

That's significant for two reasons: It likely makes the UAE the first nation to formalize a workweek shorter than five days, and it also brings the country more in line with Western schedules. Up until now, the UAE has had a Friday-Saturday weekend, which is the standard in many predominantly Muslim countries.

There’s also the issue of competitiveness: aligning with European and African work weeks means that business is a bit more efficient. The country is now aligned with “global real-time trading and communications transactions that drive things such as stock markets, banks and financial institutions.”

It’s worth noting that this is being applied to government workers, but the private sector is expected to follow suit. It also means the country is now out of sync with neighbors such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait.

ICMYI

Monday saw an off the wall MMD from musician Rare DM
Tuesday saw me explore the mysteries of the Psoas muscle
We revisited the magic of departure boards on Wednesday
Noah wrote on Log4j on Thursday
And Anita took us home with a WITI on LA’s oil fields on Friday.

Deathbed books

WITI contributor Chris P (author of the essential Go Bag edition) sends us this dispatch:

My father’s best friend is dying. He’s called every morning for the past week, shocked to still be alive. I asked some of my friends – most of them former Green Berets, and fathers – what book they’d pass off to their son if they were on their death bed. C.S. Lewis and Kurt Vonnegut seemed to be a favorite, as are self-help and religious books. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations was the most recommended.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
On Moral Duties by Cicero
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Speak like Churchill stand like Lincoln by James C. Humes
The Ranger Handbook (U.S. Army)
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Wild at Heart by John Eldredge
12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
The New Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism, No.1 (Various)
Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and the Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Coming Apart by Charles Murray
Grit by Angela Duckworth
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Dune by Frank Herbert
Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Heretics and Orthodoxy, both by G.K. Chesterton
I Ching (Various)
The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
Zero to ONE by Peter Thiel
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Random links

Sign up for Sam Valenti’s excellent Herb Sundays Substack
Great Balenciaga profile in GQ
Substack profiles BBSP as does the New Yorker
Me on Outlier’s best pair of pants in New York Mag
The 25 essential NY Dishes

Thanks for reading.

-Colin and Noah