BROKEN PROMISES

work hours fit the productivity rate rather than the whims of profit-addicted managers or workaholics with a fetish for consumer goods and a matching stomach for credit-card debt.

"People just accept 30 years of eight-hour days with no question at all," the 51-yearold Sinclair says. "I heard on the radio the other day that our productivity had gone up 4 percent.

Part of publishing the book is the notion that we should have a measure of our prosperity [besides wealth], which would be working less. Right now, there is no measure."

But to get to his idea of a shorter workday, we have to take a trip into the hardly workaday mind of Gabe Sinclair.

The idea for the book might have been formed back in Sinclair's 1960s teenhood in suburban Northern Virginia, when he read "crappy utopian novels" such as behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner's Walden Two and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. "Skinner mentioned the prospect of a four-hour workday. It kind of stuck with me," Sinclair says.