The Third Kind of Time

"The third kind of time" is a term I coined in my book 『第３の時間』 (Diamond Inc., December 2025), which roughly translates as "The Third Kind of Time". The book is written in Japanese. This page explains the idea in English.

What it means

Until I moved to Denmark, I had known only two kinds of time: work, and the rest that let me work again. Denmark taught me there was a third.

In Denmark, where the evening rush hour begins around four, the labour movement's old slogan, "eight hours of work, eight hours of freedom, eight hours of rest", is simply how the day is arranged. The third kind of time is the middle eight: the hours that belong to neither work nor sleep, lived apart from your performance and from the question of whether you are useful.

It is not just a technique for balancing work and life. It is closer to a civic idea. When I asked Søren Bak-Jensen, director of the Workers Museum in Copenhagen, why a culture of overtime never took hold in Denmark, he pointed first to strong unions, then to something larger: valuing those middle eight hours. "Before, a day was work and the rest you needed to work again. Then came a new idea, free time. Hours to educate yourself, to enjoy culture, to be with family, to do as you want. That is how we raised citizens who could think freely and question authority."

Of course, not all eight hours are free, and some people use them to catch up on work. But the line at four is drawn by society as a whole, not by individual discipline. The limit forces you to choose, and in choosing, you define what is enough. Underneath it lies a simple conviction: work is not everything in life.

My argument is that this is what allows a country like Denmark to prosper economically and, at the same time, to be one of the happiest societies in the world. It treats time differently. The day is divided not into two parts but into three. The time affluence that follows reaches almost everything: parenting, friendship, community, even the resilience of a democracy. In the 2023 Legatum Prosperity Index, Denmark ranked first in the world for social capital, the trust and connections that hold a society together, and one of the strongest predictors of people's happiness.

The mechanism is not mysterious. In the hours that belong to no employer, people become more than their jobs: parents, neighbours, choir members, coaches at the local sports club, citizens. A person whose identity rests on more than one foundation is harder to exhaust and harder to intimidate. This is what the director of the Workers Museum meant by citizens who can think freely and question authority.

Where the idea came from

The day I landed in Copenhagen in 2015, my Danish husband drove me towards the city centre and the car slowed to a crawl. "It's rush hour," he said. "It's 4 p.m." Rush hour, at four? "It's 3 p.m. if it's a Friday," he added.

I had spent 17 years as a reporter at the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, where the working day sometimes ran from 3 a.m. until past midnight. To my eyes, Danish working hours were absurd. Picking up my child at kindergarten, I watched fathers arrive at four to do the same. When I asked what they did for a living, I was stunned: doctors, senior government officials, managers at large companies, even the owner of a football club.

Then, in 2022, Denmark ranked first in IMD's World Competitiveness Ranking for the first time. I spent the following years on one question: how can a country where people leave at four outperform nations that glorify overwork? The answer turned out to be only half the story. The other half was what people did with the hours after work.

What the book argues

Drawing on interviews, international data and my own life across Japan, the United States and Denmark, the book shows how a society can prosper on shorter working hours, and how the time affluence that follows becomes the foundation of well-being and of the social capital woven into everyday life.

It is also a personal story. After years of measuring success by how much I accomplished, the radical idea was that not every hour of the present had to serve some future achievement. Living in Denmark forced me to confront not only how I spent my time but who I thought I was: someone who had equated her worth with her work. There is a name for this: workism, the belief that work is not merely a source of income but the core of one's identity and meaning. It took therapy, trial and error and a new definition of success before I could accept, for myself, the sentence that Danish society takes for granted. Work is not everything in life.

Why it matters beyond Denmark

Every gain in productivity raises the same question: what is the time we save for? Most working cultures answer by handing it back to work. Researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business found that employees using AI worked faster, took on more tasks and extended work into more hours of the day. Left to itself, saved time turns into higher expectations. The result is exhaustion.

Denmark's answer has been different. It learned to produce more in fewer hours and then kept the hours, rather than feeding them back into work. The third kind of time is the name for what it kept. As AI takes over more of what we do, the question is no longer how much time it can save us. It is whether we are still able to keep any of it: the hours in which we are something more than productive.

What happened in Japan

Since its publication, the book has been covered widely in the Japanese media, from the national newspapers to magazines, radio, podcasts and the leading business video channels. It has sold more than 11,000 copies, been reprinted, and been licensed for a Traditional Chinese edition. I have spoken about it at the House of Councillors’ office building in Tokyo and at the Keidanren Kaikan, home of the country's largest business federation.

One of the book’s central arguments is that Denmark’s prosperity rests on bringing women fully into the workforce, which remains Japan’s unresolved issue. That argument has taken me to keynotes for large Japanese corporations and to Nikkei’s Gender Gap Conference, hosted by Japan’s leading business daily. The argument in one sentence: "Long working hours don’t just cost women. They cost everyone."

What struck me most, though, was the readers. Many told me, some in tears, that the book had given words to something they had felt for years but could not name.

Coverage and talks, in Japan and in Denmark, are listed on the Books page.

Rights and enquiries

The book is currently available in Japanese, with a Traditional Chinese edition forthcoming. There is no English edition yet, though it is the question I am asked most often. English-language and other translation rights are represented by Susanna Lea Associates, and publishers are welcome to contact them directly. For interviews, talks and everything else, please use the contact page.