Arise2Live Podcast
Transcript for Episode #142 ‘Thursday is the New Friday’
Host: Scott Weaver
Guest: Joe Sanok Link to his website
Date Sept 22, 2021
Intro: Welcome to the Arise2Live podcast. The podcast for business owners and entrepreneurs who are looking for the clarity and perspective to have freedom in both their business and family life. Arise2Live is hosted by Scott Weaver, a professional business coach and consultant who can walk the talk.
Let’s get started with today’s episode.
Scott Weaver: Welcome to the Arise2Live podcast. I will let everybody know that we are onsite at the Podcast Movement Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. We are not in the studio. So the sound might sound a little differently, but this is a real podcast.
You guys are in for a big treat today. I am with author Joe Sonic–Sanok.
Joe Sanok: ‘San’ like San Francisco, ‘nok’ like knocking on the door.
Scott: He is publishing a book coming this fall. That would be October 5th of 2021 and I’m really excited about that. Yeah. Joe’s book is called, “Thursday is the New Friday.” We’re talking about the four-day workweek. Specifically, the title is “Thursday is the New Friday: How to Work Fewer Hours, Make More Money and Spend Time Doing What You Want.” Welcome, Joe!
Joe: Oh, thank you so much! I’m really excited to be here.
Scott: The main topic is a four-day week. Why people are considering it, especially in Europe. Yeah, the concept is about productivity. You can get the same amount of work done in four days instead of five and there’s a lot of science behind that.
There’s research coming out of Iceland about it. My friends in Ireland have already mentioned it. A lot of positive things coming out of it. But as business owners who are not in corporate America, should we make the transition or not?
So, with that to say a little bit about your journey, your background, and get to know you.
Joe: Yeah, yeah. You know, I’m trained as a psychologist and I had a counseling private practice for a number of years. Sold that in 2019 and I was able to exit that. I’ve been doing some podcasting and consulting over a number of years through my website practice of the practice where we help counselors start growing scale their private practices.
My big ‘why’ is that I have two daughters and they’re six and 10, and I want to be around for them. I don’t want to be an absent dad. I want to go paddle boarding and in the winter, build snow forts because we live in Michigan and go skiing and have the time to raise them and to really be the best father that I can be and not lose my mind, too. I want to be able have fun in my own hobbies.
Scott: OK, so part of the inspiration is how to have work life balance, because you still have to make money to pay the bills, but you also have a family to take care of.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, when I reflect back and think about my own journey, it’s interesting how sometimes the way we lived in our 20s, like there are things that we did that we forget and then we come back to.
So I remember my first day of orientation at college, the economic advisor said, “You can make whatever schedule you want for this fall,” and (you know, I mean) coming from high school, it was like, “wait, what?”
Scott: Great freedom!
Joe: So I didn’t work on Fridays or I didn’t go to classes on Fridays for my whole schooling, except for one semester that the only class they had was a Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So I had that one time.
Scott: So you were way ahead of your time with the four day week!
Joe: Yeah! I mean, it’s crazy because my first job, when they offered the job to me, I had negotiated a four-day workweek. So, fresh out of grad school, I’m only going to work four days and they said, “OK.”
So, I didn’t even realize that was something that other people weren’t doing. I just assumed they were negotiating, that they were trying to figure out ways to kind of work the system. Then your career starts to take off.
I was working a full time job and then I had a side counseling practice. I was working 50, 60 hours a week and things really shifted in a lot of ways for me in 2012, in particular, when I was diagnosed with cancer.
My youngest had open heart surgery that year.
Scott: That was a tough year.
Joe: It was terrible. I mean, my grandma died. Everyone has their 2012, where just everything hits the fan. After that, I just knew that long term I couldn’t work a full-time job and a side practice.
I had to restructure my time. In a lot of ways, it was coming back to how I had restructured my time early in my 20s.
Scott: Got to ask this question, because I heard a three-day weekend and four-day workweek for 10, 15 years like this pie in the sky dream that’s almost borderline laziness. So, is this a fad that’s going on?
Joe: Yeah, (I mean) I think right now it’s getting a lot of national and international attention, especially with the new Iceland study that came out with 2500 people that did the four-day workweek. I do think that we’re seeing a major shift happen and so, if we just look at the 40-hour workweek, where did that come from?
Henry Ford, in 1926, to sell more cars said, “You know, if my people don’t have a weekend, they’re not going to buy a car from me.” So he started the 40-hour workweek, and that’s less than 100 years ago. This thing that we feel is an institution of America is less than a hundred years old.
Scott: I didn’t know that because Henry Ford, he did a lot of things, (you know) the affordable cars, the assembly line, (you know) working in manufacturing. I didn’t realize that he put in the weekends so people would buy his cars.
It was May 1926 and what’s really interesting is, you look at the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, what people’s schedules were, they’re working 10 to 14 hour days, six to seven days a week. So, for the business evolution for workers, this was a huge step forward. It was needed. People were (you know) almost like farmers where they’re working nonstop every single day.
Scott: Without the benefit of being outside.
Joe: Right! Of course, a 40-hour workweek sounds amazing compared to (you know) six or seven days a week. But do we still think like the industrialists? Do we view people just as machines that get things done?
Scott: Well, that implies that the times that we’re living in has changed. Are we in the information age or are we into something else?
Joe: Yeah, I would actually say if you look especially like in the 1980s, early 90s, I mean, there was the ABC, TGIF with Neil Erkel and Full House and all that, that you really start to see Friday start to kind of fade out of the workweek.
It’s when we have birthday parties. It’s when we have (you know) baby showers, team building activity where you do trust falls with your coworkers, and just like it’s not a full workday. I mean, joking with a number of friends saying, “You know, Fridays been having an affair with the weekend for a long time. Let’s just call it what it is, you know, and get rid of it.”
Scott: So how did the Iceland survey? What was some of the key things that came out of it?
Joe: Yeah, what’s really interesting is they looked at health outcomes. They looked at happiness outcomes. They looked at productivity and not surprisingly, people that worked four days got the same amount or more done in four days than they did in five.
Also, Microsoft Japan did a study. A number of other larger corporations have been moving towards four-day workweeks to at least test it and I think that’s something that we can dive into. No company is just going to say, “All right, stop working Fridays.” They’ll want to test it. They’re going to experiment.
There’s a lot of ways that you can do that to see if it works for your company. And so, for example, there’s a great community college in southwest Michigan called Kalamazoo Valley Community College, which is a small community college, two-year school.
There is an HVAC instructor there who he started running the numbers in the summer and the way that, you know, the furnaces and air conditioning work at larger buildings is it’s either on or off. It’s not like our house where, you know, you can go back and forth between AC and heat.
It’s just either the AC was on or was off. And so he was looking at every Friday, he would go up on the roof and take a picture of the parking lot. And there was like nobody there.
Scott: They’re all taken off for the weekend.
Joe: All taken off or there are no students there. Then he started to run the numbers of how much it cost to have that AC turned off on Friday evening for the weekend versus Thursday evening and he presented those findings to the board, the Board of Regents and all that. They ended up switching to the four-day workweek in the summertime and saved millions of dollars just in air conditioning costs. Then you look at health care costs, you look at happiness and retention of staff.
It’s expensive, if someone leaves for another job and rehiring them and retraining them. Most studies say that it takes six to 12 months for someone to be up to the same productivity as that previous person that just left.
So if you get a person to stay for, you know, an extra couple of years because they get Fridays off in the summer, I mean, that pays for itself. So people often have this myth in regards to thinking, if we cut out Fridays, we’re cutting out 20 percent of the productivity.
That’s just not true. I mean, if you think about most people on a Friday, maybe they’re at 60 percent of their capacity of a Monday, if that. Then as we look at a lot of the research, we look at a lot of the studies, we’re seeing that it’s actually supported by science that the brain works better with a four day week.
Scott: So for a business owner, let’s say the employees working five days a week. What would be some of the positive things for switching over to a four day week? The underlying assumption is you’re still paying the same amount of money, five days, but they’re only working for days now.
You know, there are some initial red flags that seem to go in there. I think the science, what you’re saying is seeing something different.
Joe: Yeah. So I think a lot of that pushback is looking at it from the industrialist model that the industrialists said, “We’re paying people for butts in the chair or on the assembly line a certain amount of time.”
In a lot of ways, we have to challenge that and say, “Well, do we really want people to only just work a certain amount of hours and then they get paid for it? Or are we looking at some outcomes?” Now, of course, every job is going to have to look at that a little bit differently.
So I think that’s one place to start to start there.
Scott: So in that case, a business owner would have to have some kind of metrics measuring their productivity,
Joe: Which they should have anyway.
Scott: Yeah, honestly, I would say, a lot of business owners don’t. So if you’re listening, you need to get some metrics on your employee productivity because you could actually be getting motivated people by switching to a four day week.
Joe: Well, and I think what’s interesting to see business owners doing now is they’re putting that on their staff. They’re saying, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to do a four-day week for you if you want to do this. I want you to come up with the three or five key performance indicators of your role.”
There’s no reason the owner or even top management should be making that. Like let the people say, “Here’s how I think I should be judged,” and then have a set period of time that you’re going to do an experiment. Are we going to do this for four weeks? Are we going to do it for a quarter? Are we going to have two different teams that try different things?
Scott: Definitely longer than two weeks.
Joe: Right, are we going to survey our customers? Each business is going to have to figure out what’s most important to them for what the outcomes that they want. So if you have an ambulance company, of course, you need have 24/7 people and you’re not just going to say, “We’re taking Fridays off!”
Every business has its own unique DNA but when we really look at it, when people are burned out and maxed out, they don’t do their best, most creative work now, and the customers suffer.
Scott: Then when customers suffer, they go somewhere else and revenues decrease. So there’s definitely a profitability aspect to this. One idea is it could be seasonal, too. Around the Christmas season, it’s really busy or if you’re in agriculture or in your school, any of those. So you may switch to a four day, but during the off season, you can decrease and still have the same productivity and so there are some ideas on how you do it.
Joe: I think that, you know, one of the big findings of the book was that we do our best work when we slow down and when we have these really kind of hard and soft boundaries around our free time.
For example, I’m never going to take on a consulting client that wants to work with me on a Friday. I wrote a book about the four-day week. I can’t have someone texting me on a Friday and really needy and needs some help with their business.
So I’m never going to do that. That’s a hard boundary, whereas there are soft boundaries, where occasionally I might check some email on a Friday morning, or if I know that we have like a big launch on a Monday. If my assistant texted me and says, “We just had a bunch of emails come through, I don’t know what to do with this.” Am I just going to not reply to my assistant on a Friday because it’s Friday morning? Probably not –
Scott: You need to take care of what needs to be done, but it’s not a habit.
Joe: Right. Right. So I think that’s where the way that most people live is – It’s not a season. It’s not a chapter in a book. It’s how they live their life. They’re working 50, 60 hours. The kids go to bed at eight thirty and then they’re on email till 10 or 11. Then they’ve set an expectation for themselves that they’re going to overwork when that’s not how the brain works.
The brain needs to rest. It needs to slow down and then you’re more creative. We’ve all had those moments when you have some big idea in the shower or on a long drive when you’re not listening to music and you just let your mind wander. Like that happens because the brain is not stressed out and the brain is able to actually make those neural connections in a way that it just can’t when you’re stressed.
Scott: Well, that’s a good segue way into the next difficult question and I don’t know if there’s a real answer for that. Business owners running their own business, (I’m going to go on aside here and basically say) “If your company is in the mature stage, you should be only working three days four at the most because you should have delegated and you’re in the cash cow part. If not, talk to me. I got a program that will fix that. But for the rest of you, if you’re in the startup, in the fast growth area, trying to get to break even, whatever, Joe, can an owner afford to take a three day weekend when it weighs their passion and they’re really trying to accomplish something?
Joe: Sure. There are times in any business that you have to hustle. You know, when you have a big launch, when you have a new product, there may be times that is just for this season. We’re going to sprint for this quarter.
It’s going to be crazy and there are many businesses that have seasonal variability. You know, you got to make hay while the sun is shining kind of thing. But I would say that most people aren’t being as efficient as they could be. The owner is still checking every single email. You should outsource that. You should have an assistant check your email and sign a confidentiality clause.
Scott: Let’s dive down a little bit more into that. Let’s say there’s somebody who’s just cash flow positive. Business owner hired a few people, starting to delegate and they’re still working six days a week. If they set a boundary that forces creativity on to be more efficient, more productive, and then it gets into… Well, I’ll let you address that.
Joe: Many of us have heard about Parkinson’s law – work expands to the time given. So, imagine you have 20 big tasks in a week that you can get done in five or six days and you say, “I’m going to shave off a day.”
So you go from six to five or five to four or whatever, and now you think, OK, I can only get 16 done. Are you going to do the worst 16 or the best 16? You’re going to do the best.
You’re going to say, “OK, my top tier thing I need to do is this. This brings in the money and then I’ve got to invoice people and then I’ve got to do some SEO” or whatever the things are.
You’re going to do your best 16 things and that tells you what are the four things that you shouldn’t be doing – that you should eliminate, you should outsource, that you should hand off to somebody. So by doing that, you’re continually making your time most valuable.
So, as the business owner or top leadership, why are you spending the time doing all of these things that you could outsource for 15 or 20 or 25 dollars? If you can have your ROI and your time be hundreds of dollars an hour or thousands or depending on the business.
So it forces people to then say, “For me personally in my role that I have, what’s the very best use of my time for this business and everything else I need to not be touching.”
Scott: You get quite a bit in your book. You go into detail about this case. So this isn’t just us talking on the fly, you know, at a conference. This is research from a book.
Joe: There’s so many kind of neuro hacks that when you are killing it, if you’ve taken the time to slow down and you actually show up and you’re ready, just get a lot of work done, then you can get things done faster.
So, for example, when I was writing this book, I wrote it from April 2020 until September 1st, 2020. So a very short period of time, one day a week. So eighty five thousand words written over that period of time.
So every morning I woke up on a Thursday, I wrote this book on Thursdays, which is…
Scott: Not Friday.
Joe: Not Friday, and I wouldn’t look at my phone. I protected my brain from the news, from text messages, from alerts. I wouldn’t even look at my phone.
I would set up my office in a way that triggered my brain differently. So I had different lighting. I wore headphones. They were noise canceling. I, you know, kissed my girls and said, “You know, daddy’s going into work,” and I would shut the door.
I’d make sure I had, you know, a green smoothie and breakfast and had the same playlist I listen to every time I put my chair in a unique spot. So I’m creating an environment that tells my brain now is writing time, but you are going to hustle. You’re going to write and I wrote a chapter, a chapter and a half every single week. I mean, it just flowed out of me and then at the end of the day, I would whiteboard the next week’s chapter so my subconscious can just kind of be thinking about it.
So when you start to find these things that make you 20 or 30 percent more productive and creative, then it’s really easy to say I shouldn’t be working Friday like that. Not working Friday actually makes me more productive on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, not less productive.
Scott: So this gets into (I guess) a call, a call to action here for our listeners, business owners. We talked a lot of different ideas and stuff. This is unscripted. So we’re just going to go off the handle a little bit and come up with three, maybe five things that you can do now to improve your productivity, as well as increase your time and your downtime. So there’s two things. One, to be more efficient. The other one is to increase your brainpower. So what would you say, maybe two or three?
Joe: Yeah, first and foremost, (I would say) just even for a couple of weeks, take half a Friday off, take Friday off, just experiment with it and see what happens, because the balls that you drop, which you will drop the balls.
Some of us are paralyzed by perfection. We want to do everything right. We want to knock things off the to do list. If you give yourself less time and allow those balls to drop, that’s going to give you so much data in regards to where you need to stop doing things.
So I start there. Secondly, I would really protect the time that you’re not at work. That’s really the key that I think a lot of these productivity books miss is we have productivity books on one side and on the other side we’ve got the woo woo self-help- Chill out, go Zen in the mountains. But no books that really bring the two together and that’s where the brain actually operates best.
So, you know, to not be doing email till 9:00 at night, actually protect your sleep, eat (you know) well for you. What’s just a little healthier that you can be doing? One minute plank a day. Don’t be on your phone all weekend, like schedule things that excite you.
So for me, every Wednesday, I do improv and I’m in an improv group. I laugh so hard and it’s two hours that I forget that there’s any problem in the world. That’s a non-negotiable. My parents watch my daughters, I go to it. It’s non-negotiable. So, finding those things: it could be a pottery class, it could be, (you know) drinks with friends, some sort of rhythm that forces you to not work.
Obviously, that would be second and then third, (I would say really) on Monday morning or whatever the beginning of your week is, look at what you want to achieve that week. What are the big tasks that if I get these done, I’m going to feel amazing about the big steps forward?
Scott: Okay, I’ll try to summarize a little bit because he said a lot. I mean, this is really good. So the first one is in your weekly schedule: setting up. Start off with Friday afternoons, that includes Saturday, no Saturdays, and just start working off of closing down.
Then as you discover what didn’t get finished, that goes onto a priority list of things that is not important enough – that you should delegate. So I guess that would be a “1a” is to delegate what you discover, what you’re not doing, and the other one is the time protect, time block, your free time, your downtime, so that your brain can actually get a rest and then you can be creative and enjoy your family and enjoy your life better. And the third one…
Joe: Monday morning.
Scott: Monday morning,
Joe: We really look at those things that are going to make the difference for the week. So, you know what? I can give myself permission to be done even if I don’t feel like I’m done at the end of the week.
Scott: About 10 episodes ago, I did a podcast on your ideal week. This is one key reason why you should do that. So passion versus rest. Some thoughts on that.
Joe: Tell me more about your question. Passion versus rest. What do you mean?
Scott: OK, so the business owners have a dream to get the product out there. They really want to help a lot of people. That’s their passion and they just work, work, work, work, and don’t take the time to rest. All through your book and what you’re advocating is you got to take a break to do both well.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a whole section in the book that I talk about the overvaluing of work and the undervaluing of fun and how really evaluating – is this work coming from a place of passion?
It may be. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think for a lot of business leaders, we don’t like to do things that we don’t want to do. You know, that’s why we went into business, (you know) but to say, is this being driven by ego or success or money? We can get addicted to the thrill of launching something, of creating a new product of whatever our business is. There’s not anything inherently wrong with that. But I think that we also miss out on a lot of the enjoyment of life. That enjoyment actually oftentimes can inform our business differently.
It gives us stories or people that we meet or examples in real life that if we’re overworking, we just won’t have. So I wouldn’t say I see rest and overworking being necessarily in opposition to each other or passion and overworking. But I do think we need to set some clear boundaries around our passion in our work so we know when we’re done. When we do that, what’s really interesting is we then are so excited after resting to show up and work, we’re just like a (you know) dog or a horse or like whatever.
Scott: All ready to run and go.
Joe: Right, I hosted an event in the summer called Slow Down School and for two days, we turn off our phones, we go hiking, I bring in yoga teachers and massage therapists, executive chefs, they partner with farmers.
We just rest. And then Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning, we run full tilt and kill it towards their business. And the amount of things that people get done in these 20 minute sprints, they’re just ready to go because, you know, they’ve been resting and I’m just like, “No, we’re not talking business yet. We’re not talking business yet. That’s Wednesday morning. Save it for Wednesday.” By Wednesday morning, they’re ready to go kill it and that’s where I think that if you allow yourself that rest and really protect that, when you’re ready to go, you’re ready to sprint.
Scott: Oh, cool. Good work. That is number four on the list. Don’t overwork.
Joe: Yes, absolutely.
Scott: All right. So where can people get your book and contact you?
Joe: ThursdayisthenewFriday.Com is the best place to go. My website, JoeSanok.com. That’s J O E S A N O K has all sorts of media resources there. Book buys. If people are looking to do a bulk buy, they can contact me directly and we can work out a discount for larger companies.
I’m doing a lot of public speaking with people that are doing bulk book buy. So Nissan, Infiniti, Canada did a bulk book buy and other larger corporations that want to learn about mental health psychology, the four day workweek, all of that.
So, yeah, they can just reach out to me directly through the website.
Scott: I will put that into the show notes and on our webpage. So thank you so much, Joe, for coming on here, taking time away from the conference. I think it’s going to benefit listeners on the Arise2live a lot, as well as get your word out about your wonderful book.
It looks really good.
Joe: Scott, thank you so much.
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