IDL39 Season 1: Lessons from Thursday is the new Friday with Joe Sanok
How do empathetic leaders differ from industrialists in the quality of care that they provide to their employees? Why are feedback and adaptation vital aspects for effective leadership? How can a company properly incorporate a holistic yet successful workflow that gets the work done while making space for rest?
Joe Sanok and I have been friends for a few years now and it's so exciting to see him release his book, Thursday is the New Friday. In our conversation, Joe breaks down the ideology of how we ended up with a 40-hour workweek.
Meet Joe Sanok
Joe Sanok is the author of Thursday is the New Friday (HarperCollins), a TEDx speaker, consultant, and top podcaster. With over 600 interviews he has expertise in brain optimization, slowing down to spark innovation and the four-day workweek.
Visit Joe's Website and listen to his podcast, Practice of the Practice. Pre-order Thursday is the New Friday.
Also, make sure to listen to the Thursday Is The New Friday Podcast.
IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
Consider letting go of the industrialist mindset
Trial and error
Slowing down
Different sprint types
Consider letting go of the industrialist mindset
Some people associate work with office hours only, and it is important to know that this way of work is not the only way of working. It is made up and a product of humanity’s cumulative history.
The Babylonians four thousand years ago created the seven-day workweek based on seven astrological objects: the sun, moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Mercury. Nothing in nature specifically points to having to have seven days in a week, it was essentially made up.
“We made this up. It’s totally random, and that helps us to say “Woah, let’s step back a bit, do we want this to continue?” ”
Human beings find comfort in what is known, and because the seven-day workweek is what we are used to, it seems almost obvious that it should stay the same, but it does not have to.
The post-pandemic generation has a window of opportunity now to make a global shift away from trudging along what we have always done, even if it no longer works, and create a system that can serve us better in modern times.
“Again we see, just like with the seven-day week, the 40-hour workweek less than one hundred years ago was handed to us and is completely arbitrary. ”
Trial and error
Empathetic leaders understand the value of trial and error and they know that the success of the business is dependent on the happiness and overall well-being of their staff.
Therefore, they use trial and error methods to keep adjusting their business to work around the needs and wants of its staff, because maintaining employee satisfaction is key to keeping the business moving.
Effective and empathetic leaders start with their internal inclinations:
Curiosity
An outsider perspective
The ability to move on it
“With most of what we do in business and in leadership, speed is going to trump accuracy nine times out of ten, because then we get that information, we’re not paralyzed by perfection, and we’re not overthinking things and feeling like an impostor. ”
Feedback, adaptation, and conversations are vital factors and the real bloodlines of business success.
Slowing Down
When business owners want to incorporate slowing down effectively into their companies, they need to create environments where the staff can come together and have discussions around hard and soft boundaries.
Which schedules can staff workaround so that the work gets done and everyone gets some genuine downtime?
What are your KPI’s? Can they be structured to be asynchronous?
Different sprint types
Time block sprinter: They work on one particular task for a longer period.
Task-switch sprinter: They work on different tasks every 20 to 30-minutes.
An automated sprinter: They work on their tasks in the same place every week, day, or month until the task is complete.
An intensive sprinter: They need to move to a different location to work on their tasks, like a coffee shop, library, or even an AirB&B.
Take at least a one-minute break between every 20-minutes that you spend completing a task.
Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:
BOOK | Joe Sanok – Thursday is the New Friday: How to Work Fewer Hours, Make More Money, and Spend Time Doing What You Want
BOOK | Megan Hyatt Miller and Michael S. Hyatt – Win at Work and Succeed at Life: 5 Principles to Free Yourself from the Cult of Overwork
BOOK | Adam Grant – Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
BOOK | Chad Veach – Help! I Work with People: Getting Good at Influence, Leadership, and People Skills
Visit Joe's Website and listen to his podcast, Practice of the Practice
Pre-order Thursday is the New Friday. Purchase 10 books and submit the receipt to gain access to Masterclass
Listen to the Thursday Is The New Friday Podcast
The Impact Driven Leader YouTube Channel
Join the Impact Driven Leader Community
Connect with Tyler on Instagram and LinkedIn
Email Tyler: tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com
About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast
The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.
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We are the post-pandemic generation, and we get to decide what happens moving forward. We really have a window of time to [ask] “what do we want?”
Joe Sanok
Podcast Transcription
[TYLER DICKERHOOF]
Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This is your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. Glad you're listening in today. Glad to share with you this message, this conversation from my friend, Joe Sanok. Joe and I have been friends for a couple years now. We met through a group called Front Row Dads, which was started by John Roman and we were part of what's called a band. So we would meet together monthly, discuss life, talk about life and time in my life that was so grateful to get to know Joe, but he was in the process of finishing this book, looking for were publishers and got to help him through that process a little bit. So it's so exciting to see him now release this book, Thursday is the New Friday where Joe breaks down kind of this ideology of how did we end up with this 40-hour work week? Where did we even start with the seven day week?
We talk about that in this conversation, stuff that that just blew my mind that I had no idea. And I'm going to guess, unless you've done some deep work studying this, you had no idea either. I think it really challenges our status quo in life to say, why are we doing what we're doing? If you've been with us long and part of our podcast is reading the book, Think Again by Adam Grant, that was a podcast back in April. Really in that book, Adam goes through a lot of these same challenges, Joe and I talked about, why are where we are? Can we challenge those and say, does it need to be like that, not from an aggressive point of view, but just thinking newly. And I think as we're just finishing up 2021 going into 2022 and this idea of in-person work, remote work, what does your schedule look like?
I've had the luxury of, for most of my career, not really being tied to an office. However, at the same point, that can be a curse too, because it's really hard to get away from work. So whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you're a leader, an executive who has a lot of responsibility, taking time to slow down can be one of the hardest things you can do. I have a guest coming up in a couple weeks. We're going to talk more about that. If you've listened to the podcast with Michael Hyatt, we talk about that when it works, succeed at life. Well, Joe's book Thursday is the New Friday is right along those lines.
So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I got a tremendous amount of value out of it. I'll catch up with you at the end to kind of go through some of those and let you know where you can find out more information from Joe, but also about the Impact Driven Leader podcast, book club, round table, all those things you're listening in. So thanks for being here.
Joe, it's good to see you, man. It's been too long. I know you've been, had a lot going on, excited for your book, excited for the opportunity to chat with you today. Thanks for being here, man.
[JOE SANOK]
I am so excited to hang out with you. You're just such an awesome person to hang out with. Every time we hang out, we have a good time.
[TYLER]
Yes. For those listening in Joe and I got to know each other through a group that we're a part of called Front Row Dads. It's got a litany of just really amazing guys and that's how we've got to know each other over the last couple years. I will say this as well, just a little plug to Practice of the Practice. Joe and his organization they produce, and his team produces all of these podcasts. So if you enjoy listening in, it is because of them, Sam, Elizabeth, and the whole rest of the crew that makes it happen. And thank you for that. But let's talk about your book, man. I'm excited. It's fun. As we started building a relationship, you were kind of on the heels of really selling the book and then kind of had all the framework and everything built out.
I know a big part of writing it. So I kind of feel like I've walked with you through a certain part of this book and it's exciting that it's finally coming out, excited for people to see it, but one of the things we were just mentioning as we were catching up is how timely this idea that Thursday is the New Friday, this altering of the work week per se. So yes, I'd just love to know kind of in your mind how it's kind of framing again, just like, holy cow, here we are in 2021, what work life culture means and your book is coming out and how you really feel you can help people.
[JOE]
I mean, I really feel like there should be an asterisk that says this book is sponsored by COVID because it's like there could not have been a better time to say let's rethink how we work even though I started writing this and kind of bringing it together in 2018 and really it's been work that I've been doing for over 20 years. But the idea of we are the post pandemic generation and we get to decide what happens moving forward? And we really have a window of time to say, what do we want? I know you want to dig into the history. I love the history of kind of the work week and time and all of that, but just start with, we just went through a global experiment in 2020 to say, do we need to work the way that we've been working?
Or might there be other paths we could take that are healthier, that make us happier, that maybe we see that how we were judging productivity wasn't even right and that maybe there might be different ways to do it? You just hear of all these different stories from the pandemic coming out, of people that worked two full-time jobs and were able to do that in 40 or 50 hours a week because of how many inefficiencies there were in each of these full-time jobs. And just things like that where these global experiments were happening out of need, not because companies were saying, we need to experiment with the work week, but because we are in lockdown. So it's really timely to see this book coming out now to say, there's actually a framework and there's actually research that supports a lot of the things we intuitively experienced over the last 18 months.
[TYLER]
I mean, just to get into that, I think it's, so you were in this, it is really truly diabolical. It's what I would call the description of it because we have people that are like, no, we have to be back into the office because that's the only thing that's going to create normalcy as opposed to others like, well, we made it work. Our business either or thrive in a lot of cases. So why do we have to now go back to what we were doing before? Let's really look at that from an experimentation, a trial and error point of view, and let's see all those inefficiencies that were there. And it's these two diabolical camps and leadership and management. And to me, and I wrote down this post pandemic leadership generation is how are we going to embrace that? As this is a podcast for leaders and leadership, dude, that's spot on. So yes, go with it.
[JOE]
To me, let's just name this idea of going back to work, how it was. I mean, that is the industrialist mindset. So if we just go back a little bit in history to understand how did we get here because whenever I talk to leaders and I'm saying, here's where your organization wants to go, we have to understand where that organization has been. Where has that industry been? How did we even get here? So if we're talking about time and the construction of work within that time. We really have to understand how did we get here to where we had the 40-hour work week, that we were told that you need to sit in chairs, that that's the biggest KPI productivity measure.
So let's go back a little bit. So let's go back 4,000 years to the Babylonians [crosstalk]. So let's go back to the baby. When they looked up in the sky, they saw seven major astrological things. They saw the sun, the moon Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter. So they said we should have a seven day week. When the Jews were in exile, in Babylon that's when the Torah was written down. And as a way to say the early myths of the Babylonians, which were very violent, let's write down the way that we see creation. So a seven day week following that Babylonian framework, but then saying that it's good, it's interesting, all these things that we see in Genesis.
So the idea of the seven day week starts in Babylon. The Egyptians, they had an eight day week, the Romans had a 10 day. It wasn't until the Roman emperor in around 300 converted to Christianity that the seven day week spread across the Roman empire and really took off as the type of week across the globe. We could just as easily have a five day week with 73 weeks in a year. So, I mean, if we just start with, we made this up, it's totally random, that helps to say, whoa, let's step back a bit. Do we want this to continue? And when we really think about it the seven day week does not make sense.
[TYLER]
Wow, wait a second. You just moved my Gs. And hopefully you guys listening, and a joke, I hope you're not offended by that because I want to dig deeper there. We have enough relationship where you can call me out and it's just kind of like, wait a second. We can create whatever we want to. Like you can't do that for people. We have to mimic what was before because that's where we only find comfort, right?
[JOE]
Well, I think it is where we often find comfort, that our brain wants to do what we've always done. But when we slow down, that's where we can do new things. That's where we can understand new things, that when we're stressed out and maxed out our brains don't do new things. One thing I talk about in the book was when I was in Nepal. It was between my undergraduate and my graduate work. I'm at the edge of the Chitwan Jungle with my friend Todd and our guide says to us, if we get chased by a wild rhinoceros, run up a tree. Now in life, there's lots of times you should ask follow up questions, which I did not ask. I didn't say, what kind of tree, how often does this happen? Is this once a year? Is it every week? Like how often are you getting chased by rhinos? Can we practice a little bit?
So it didn't do any of that. So we enter the jungle, we we're in there for about an hour and then we see a rhino. This is 2001. I don't have a digital camera. I have one of those film cameras. You take a picture, you have no idea. You got to send it in to see the pictures. I have no idea if this turns out. So I take a step towards the rhino, take another picture. And this is the point that I should have said, this is good enough, but I did not because I'm Joe Sanok. So I take another step towards the rhino. This rhino charges our group. It's me, my friend, Todd, our guides and a couple Peace Corps volunteers. I take off running because I know, because I was in track with Todd that I can outrun him for about 200 yards.
But he's a long distance runner. So he's got me past that. So for 200 yards, I have him as a human shield and two other people. So we run, don't hear the rhino anymore, come back, our guide comes down the tree and yells at us, "Why didn't you run up the tree?" So why didn't I run up the tree? Because my brain was stressed out and maxed out. I'm not going to try something new when I'm freaking out. I'm going to go with the old. I'm going to go with what's been handed to me. I know I can outrun Todd and the Peace Corps volunteers. So I'm going to do that even if it's the dumber decision compared to climbing a tree.
So we see that over and over. We just accept what's inherited. We just accept what people have given us. And we go to that as a default because we're stressed out and maxed out. So if we then fast forward from those Babylonians, the late 1800s, early 1900s, it's crazy what we look at the work week being back then. It was 10 to 14 hour days, six to seven days a week. I mean it was a farmer's schedule. I mean, you know farming Tyler. You're working all the time. You don't take any breaks. I mean, you can't just be like, sorry, cows, you don't get to eat today. You've got to actually keep working.
So when Henry Ford in 1926, then institutes the 40-hour work week, it's a huge step for the evolution of business and the evolution of humanity in so many ways. But honestly it was a selfish decision. He's been quoted numerous times saying that he knew people would not buy a car to get to work faster. But if they had a weekend, if they had something fun to go do, they would buy a car to do more of that on the weekend. So it was to sell more cars to his own people. So again, we see that just like the seven-day week that the 40-hour work week, less than a hundred years ago was handed to us. And it's completely arbitrary by a power broker.
[TYLER]
I mean that's, what I wanted to stop and think about is you mentioned this idea of work, pre-industrial where it was like again, you have horses, you have animals. You're doing that seven days a week. As a parent, you're doing that seven days a week. However I know from being on a farm, there are days that yes, we had to do the necessities, but we didn't do extras. We found out, hey, how can we in some ways rest, because there was nothing that you could ever get away from it. It was constant. But when we get into these situations where it starts to take a toll, how does that kind of fit into this idea of Thursday is the New Friday, this idea of let's look at how we work? Where is it taking the toll and how does all of a sudden that that production is no longer linear? Meaning if I put in one-hour work, I yield this. If I put in two hours of work, well I must yield two X. That doesn't happen. Kind of walk us through in the research, what you've seen in your professional law life, as a therapist, how you've seen that toll take and where that breaking point is.
[JOE]
I think intuitively we know this. Like if I said, are you more productive on a Friday afternoon at three or a Monday morning at eight, most people would say, if they're in a traditional job, yes, Friday, afternoon's a blow off. It's a half lived day. We don't get as much done. But the reason which actually supports that when we are burned out that you're right, that working twice as many hours does not mean twice as much productivity. That actually when we slow down, we can find that we can unleash some different things. So a couple factors around just the data in the science, there's a 30-year study that I talk about in the book where they looked at health and every single year, they're looking at these people from the study of if they're happier than the year before, if they're healthier over and over.
We see that right now, people are under slept. They're more unhealthy. They have less time outside. They feel like their life is not headed in a positive direction. It's an all-time high in all of these different outcomes. Actually, within the pandemic there was a research study that was done. They found that people were actually happier during the pandemic because they didn't feel like there was this much work pressure. They were more satisfied with their jobs overall. Now, of course, there were people that had very tough jobs, frontline workers, all of those. But if we just look at the data, overall, people were actually happier because they didn't have that commute. They were able to just make their lunch and eat with their kids. They were able to manage their own schedule in a way that was much different than often the micromanaging we see of the industrialists.
So there's so much opportunity here when we look at the data to say, we're really doing a poor job at making life, just happy for ourselves, satisfactory doing work that we feel really contributes to the world. Let's just pause for a second and say, do we want to keep doing this? Because we have this opportunity post pandemic to then say, how am I going to run my business? Or how am I going to lead this business that I've been called into to lead? Is it going to be the old way or do we need to do some experiments and walk through some particular steps to say, how do we then enact change as leaders with research, with experiments that actually is shown to help people get more done and be more creative?
[TYLER]
It's really embracing. I'm just finishing up the book Help! I Work with People by Chad Veach. He talks about this of reframing failure as just trial and error. We all love trial and error. It's like we can accept trial and error. So as a leader, I'm looking at it and saying, okay, well, let's go into this post pandemic work period and we have this information that Joe is sharing with us and we've seen what's happened. Well, let's just trial and error. We'll one day a week that we're back together and then it's a free schedule. Otherwise, however, that may be for whatever works in your place and trial and error. And one of the things that, you know previous this year, one of the authors I had, which I love it because it coincides with your book is Michael Hyatt's, Win at Work and Succeed at Life. And this idea that, hey they went to a 30-hour work week and they said let's measure productivity and they never saw any dip.
A lot of that instituted kind of this pandemic that we recognized families had higher responsibilities. So to kind of segue into that, this whole trial and error, we talk about that. If we're an empathetic leader and we understand that the conditions of the workplace have changed, don't we need to be more empathetic to the people there at the office, and understand that maybe they aren't able to be here from seven to five, with zero other family obligations? Maybe it's shared parenting, maybe they're involved in their kids' lives. Otherwise, they need to leave at three to be able to pick up their kids. How much do all those things fit into really differences now compared to what it was a hundred years ago?
[JOE]
I think what you're tapping into is really the shift from the industrialists who thought about people as parts of a machine, to really an evolutionary model where we're looking at our staff and saying that they have a lot of responsibilities, there's nuance. We want still this bottom line productivity, but also we understand that's not going to come in doing it the old way. So this global shift towards an evolutionary model of business is really what we're talking about, that compared to this old model of the industrialists. So effective leaders are doing a number of things. They're start starting with their internal inclinations. So there's three inclinations that research shows that natural leaders have.
Now within the book, I have an assessment to just figure out your baseline. This doesn't mean if you don't have it, that you're not going to be a good leader. It just means that you recognize, okay, this area needs some development and here's some skills that I'm going to give you that the research support will actually help you be a better leader. So the first one is curiosity, and that's similar to what you're talking about, that effective leaders start with being curious that. They say, "Well, that's really interesting what just happened," instead of, "Oh, we're such a failure." Or they wait for a Eureka moment. They just keep saying, well, that's interesting, that's interesting. We just did this huge Facebook ads campaign and we spent all this money and nothing happened. What is going on there? Let's get some data. Let's pull that, let's see what we did wrong and what we can learn from.
The second one is having an outsider's perspective. And sometimes leaders allow themselves to be too internal than they should be. There's actually a really interesting study. It was called the color study. So they brought together groups of people, around eight or so people. They would show a color, it was either green or it was blue and the people would say that's green, that's blue, that's blue, that's green. There were some colors that were a little closer, some were more pronounced. For the most part in the first part of the study, people agreed. In the second part of the study, they brought in two outsiders that were participating with the researchers and there were specific colors that they would say that's green when it was clearly blue or blue, when that's clearly green.
They were able to show that outsiders actually statistically had more influence over the group than they should have, that they should not have had the influence that they had. And study after study have different variations showing that outsiders actually have more ways that they can influence the group than the insiders. So even if you think about, when you've come in as a new leader to a new organization and you're like, why do they have these systems? Why do they do things this way? And people are like, I've never thought of that. We just do it. We have this random way that we do it. That outsider actually comes in and can point things out that an insider often can't. So developing those skills as a leader is so important.
Then the third area is an ability to move on it. If we think about a spectrum of speed on one side and accuracy on the other, so there are lots of times in life that I want accuracy. If I go into surgery and my doctor puts me under, she can take as long as she wants. Be accurate with whenever you're cutting me open. But most of what we do in business and leadership speed is going to trump accuracy nine times out of 10, because then we get that information, then we get things out there. We're not paralyzed by perfection. We're also not overthinking things and feeling like an imposter. So effective leaders will then move into that inclination of having that speed over accuracy and the ability to move on it.
[TYLER]
Well, I think that last part, as I think about that, it's as leaders, we have to be willing to be wrong and that shouldn't be an indictment on our character. To me, I believe it's an indictment on our character if we don't admit when we're wrong, but if we're willing to try something and then be wrong and say, "Hey, well, the reason we made that decision is we made the decision with the best information we had possible." So if we're talking about culturally as a leader, I'm leading this organization, I'm leading others and I'm like, I want you to live a fuller life. I want you to be able to enjoy what you have going on, because I know if you do that, you're going to bring those ideas into our company, that outsider's perspective, because you're invested in as opposed to blinders and you can't see anything. But then be willing to say, hey, some of that's going to work some is not going to work.
And that willingness, I think you just really described, to your point earlier, this healthy organization, this healthy leadership. And I believe in this, kind of my purpose is to help other leaders get healthy too. That's my desire in this podcast. It's something we're never going to fully accomplish. I realize that we're always going to have to have every day, this idea that we're going to have to be healthy. And I think if, from a leadership perspective, we think about a business that if we create this work structure and we can just create it and today is, when we're recording it September 1st and if we record it today, if we set that structure today, it's going to be great for millennia. Well, no, it's no. If some new information comes tomorrow and it's like, oh, well we need to adjust as a being as opposed to being so held into it. And I think that's what you're kind of really alerting to people as like, historically it hasn't always been this way. So why do we feel today as a leader we'd be wrong if we were to adjust and change it?
[JOE]
I mean, even just thinking about that idea of, I want to have a process that I can set it and forget it, that is such an industrialist way of thinking about it. That we're going to just set up this machine, it's going to keep kicking out model and the people are just going to be parts of that machine. Think about evolution. We see less kids having wisdom teeth over, even just five generations. Five generations ago people had two wisdom teeth. It was just filling their mouth. We don't need that level of teeth in our mouth. Does that mean that nature or our bodies were wrong five generations ago? No. It means that people needed more teeth back then.
My daughter who's getting orthodontic work doesn't need that many teeth. She just doesn't need them. For what? Our diets are now and the way that we cook and all these different things. Does that mean that because we change that we're wrong? No, it means that there's an evolutionary model. So when we go back to that evolutionary model versus that industrialist in business, what does that look like on a practical level? Well, it means that feedback and change and adaptation is the primary conversation on an ongoing basis. So for example, if there's something that goes wrong, like just the other day, I had a podcaster who booked two different times for me, one at 10:00 AM and one 12:30. At 10:00 AM, I'm texting the guy, "Hey, it's 10:05, just making sure you're not having any login problems. He had got two messages that said, we're meeting at 10:00 and one at 12:30 and he just didn't check.
So I then after that show, texted my assistant. She's my director of details and I just said, "Hey, Jess, I just wanted to let you know that I noticed that this guy did this twice. There was confusion. We didn't have as long of an interview because of it." She knows that when I give that feedback, it doesn't mean that she did anything wrong. It means I'm observing the fact that this messed up my schedule and that we could have had another podcaster in there at the 12:30 mark, but a couple hours before, we're not going to get somebody in there. So let's then change. On Sundays when you look at my calendar for the week, if you see any double bookings, will you just clarify with people that they need two bookings instead of just the one that they probably should have? So then over time we're getting smarter.
She checks my emails. So if BCC her on a reply, she knows that that means that she could have replied to that. She needs to add that reply to the reply library. So over time, she's getting feedback to do her job better and it's not that annual review when I sit down and I dump all this stuff that she needs to change on her. It's this week, here's a small step. And if you do five or so small pieces of feedback every single week for 50 weeks a year, I mean that's 250 pieces of feedback that have adjusted and changed over time instead of just once a year, doing this big drop of all the feedback that that person's supposed to get.
[TYLER]
It's the 1% rule actually played out in life in business and the fact that you're making that 1% incremental change. My opinion there is that's how you find those efficiencies. My wife and I, we were visiting with some friends and this friend was telling me, had somebody new join their office and it was like a Thursday afternoon. It was two o'clock and they'd really cleaned out a lot of things in his onboarding process. He's like, "Well I'm not really sure what to do. I'm new here." And he is like, "Go home. You have a daughter that'd probably love to see you. Go play with her. It's a beautiful day." The guy was just like, "How could I do that? I haven't put in my hours." He's like, "It doesn't matter."
As he and I were talking about that, and this idea that I've learned is he's going to go home with his daughter and he's going to enjoy that time. Also he's going to start thinking about new creative ways to do his new job, because now he's freed up to think as opposed to being in an office in these four walls and just be like, well, I'm staring up my computer screen. Something magically has to appear. And I think as you bring that up with your experience with Jess of leading people to see that, that's a leadership opportunity that comes of it. What other leadership opportunities are you seeing that if as a leader, I embrace this idea of really shifting the work week to what fits our schedule, what challenges do they need to be aware of that they need to help people start to process through?
[JOE]
I think naturally the average person, they want to do a good job but they need that coaching and that leadership to do that job well. They also need that leader to say, please go take a break. Here are the hard boundaries and soft boundaries. So when we think about effective teams that are implementing this four-day work week oftentimes it's a small team that has the support of a supervisor. They read through the book, they understand kind of the concepts that really slowing down is the first step. So one of the key things that most people miss when they want to do these productivity items is they start with the productivity instead of starting with the slowing down.
So for a team to even say, what is the culture within our six to eight person team? So are we going to expect people to catch up on email after their kids go to bed? Are we going to expect people to catch up on their email on Friday, Saturday and Sunday? If people are on vacation, do they need to be on call? So saying, what are our cultural norms within this small group within the company? Because it only takes one person to send an email on Wednesday night at 10 o'clock and then someone else replies and then everyone else feels like they're out of the loop the next morning. And then people are like, "Oh, I guess I'm supposed to be checking my email again." We don't want to look bad in front of our peers. So I having that cultural norm of how we slow down is the conversation we rarely have in the office.
So then even being able to say, what are the hard boundaries and what are the soft boundaries? So for example, I wrote a book about not working on Friday, so I'm not going to take on a consulting client that wants to meet with me on Friday. That is a hard boundary. If they're talking to Jess and they're like what, "Friday's my only day," Jess is going to say, "you know what? Joe's not your guy." I just don't care. I'm not going to give up a day to do that, unless they're like, I'll give you your annual income to work on Friday. Then I'll make Friday the new Monday and then I'll take six days off.
[TYLER]
Because you can be flexible and change at any given point. There's no information comes along, just be willing to change.
[JOE]
But then there's soft boundaries where, say you have an IT team. If someone gets locked out with their password, they probably need their help getting in. So we have to troubleshoot that ahead of time and say, okay, maybe we need someone on call and every fifth Friday you have to work on that Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Just figuring out those problems ahead of time. And then on the first work day of the week to reflect on how did that slowing down go, to have that conversation of, I think we did a really good job. No one was emailing after hours. No one was emailing on Friday or you know, Jim I got the email on Wednesday and I felt super out of the loop Thursday. I need to give you feedback that if this is going to be our culture we need to all follow that.
Or maybe it's not our culture. Maybe we realized that Jim did need to send that email on Wednesday evening. And that was essential and we need to now change our soft boundaries. So then again, it's moving, it's changing as you go. Then looking at the key performance indicators, so how are you judging this team to know if four-days is as effective as five days? So what are the two, maybe three different indicators that you can look at weekly and say, this is up 2%. This is down 1%. What are we going to do to change this and to know that we're going to run full tilt in this experiment for two to three months, and then at the end of it, do a 360 review and just say, Hey, how did this go? Do we like this experiment? Were we happier? What's the qualitative data that we can say I started going out on dates with my wife on a Thursday night again and honestly my life just feels happier because of not having to work on Friday.
To be able to report out that as well as the data from the KPIs, then you have some things to point to when the higher ups or when other leaders are saying, why are you doing a four-day week, to really say, here's the effectiveness. We are actually a better team because of this. We had these creative things that came out of it and our staff are saying they want to stay here forever. Just the retention standpoint could be a game changer for most organizations.
[TYLER]
Yes, and I think that starts into this conversation of virtual compared to in-person workplaces and like, how do you flow that with some virtual. It's funny for me because only a short period of my career did I actually had an office that I had to report to. For the greater majority of my career, I've made my office times. I've managed that. So this idea that I have to be in office is more foreign than it is similar. And I think when you start to talk to people that have worked in sales, have worked in remote offices, they're like, I can manage this. Judge me based upon am I meeting the expectations, but let's have that daily and not yearly so I can guide me through that.
And everything you were saying, this idea of how that leader is guiding people through it. It's an active leadership. It's an active guiding to say, you know calling people out on Monday. It's not aggressive. It's just like, "Hey, we saw an email that came through at 10 o'clock on Wednesday. Was that something that was urgent at the moment?" Or like, "Hey, Ben, guess what, dude, I don't want you doing that. It's not because I don't want you to handle the work. It's I want you to be resting. I want you to be thinking about your family and not worrying about it. If it was life or death, great, thank you for handling it. If it's not life or death let's handle it in the morning."
And I think some of that encouragement from a leadership perspective is displaying healthy empathy to say, I care more about you and your holistic person than I do you filling in the boxes of what industrial work you need to do. Because at the end of the day, if you're not healthy as a leader, then you're not going to be here long. And that's going to cost us more as an organization than if we start to have these guiding principles and values that are important to us long-term.
[JOE]
A hundred percent. And I would actually say that when we look at the challenge of people like you and myself, that are entrepreneurs, that we've made our own schedule for so long, the challenge for us is a little different than the typical kind of structured organization. We're doing work that for the most part we really enjoy. So to turn that brain off and to really say I need to set some hard boundaries for myself because how am I going to capture these good ideas when I'm playing Barbies with my daughters? It's like, well, okay, I need to find a way that I can capture that idea quickly and then get back into the time that I'm spending with my family.
So that could be a note on my phone. That could be putting a reminder on my calendar. It could just be saying Siri, remind me of this later. Because we do have those ideas as entrepreneurs that are really good ideas that come at really unfortunate times. But often, what we do is we're there playing with our kids and we're hashing through an entire e-Course or a whole new podcast. And we need to actually take that idea, set it aside, say there is an appropriate time for that. We will have time to come and kill it and just go after that but right now it's not that time. So how do we capture that, given enough information for our future self to look at that note and say, okay, I remember that. Now let's go. You're then going to be more refreshed and more creative going into that than if you're playing with your kids and thinking about all these other things and you're on cloud nine away from them.
[TYLER]
Totally. And it's really practicing intentional presence and it is this idea, and I think that's, where part of this comes down to the more intentionally present we are as leaders, as family members, as everything, the more productive we are. We can accomplish less and more when we're intentionally present. And that's kind of a highlight that I see in here. It's this idea of what is that guiding force? Because this is one of the things that I've learned from a leadership perspective and I believe this is if we don't have these values that we adhere to, then we just run them up. It's kind of like the river that doesn't have hard banks and all of a sudden just dissipates everywhere. But if you put in hard banks, even if that river's narrow, it's going to be way more efficient, way more productive because those hard banks are there and it's like, what are we doing to create those?
[JOE]
Well, and I think that the idea of, so now as we've slowed down, what do we do now? How do we make sure we get the most out of our time? There's a couple concepts that we want to kind of point to. So one of them is called Parkinson's Law. We've heard it a lot in business that work expands to the time given, but let's talk about why that works. So you've got a five-day week you reduced to a four-day. Say you had 20 really important tasks to get done in that week. Are you going to get the worst 15 done or the best 15? You're going to do the best work and you're going to drop the ball on other areas. So it's good to drop the ball, especially early on because that gives you information on, I probably shouldn't be doing that stuff anyway.
I should either just eliminate it from my schedule. I should outsource it to somebody. I should find a software-as-a-service to automate that. Maybe it's time to hire a bookkeeper because you just dread looking at your numbers. Okay, if once every other month your bookkeeper says, here's the trends I see and that's good enough for you, that's good enough for you. So if we do that's really helpful. So then when we're actually doing the work. We want to make sure that we're using the neuroscience to help us get more done. So one example is that on Thursdays, when I would do my sprints for writing this book there's a few things that I would do. First I would protect my brain the morning that I was writing. I wouldn't read the news, wouldn't look at texts, wouldn't look at email.
I would show up with a clean brain as much as I could. I would have my healthy breakfast, I'd have my green tea and some coffee, I would be all set. I would give my kids hugs and say daddy's off to work, which they knew don't open that door. Dad is in monk mode. So they then knew the boundary. So then I did a few things here that triggered my brain to get into a flow state quicker. So I moved the lights around every single time. I had different lighting so my eyes were seeing something different. I physically sat in a different chair. I moved my chair to a different part of the room. I had specific headphones that I only wore during this time while I was writing and listened to a playlist that I only listened to while I was writing.
So all of that allowed my brain to jump quickly back into what I was doing the week before, rather than having this 45 minute or 60 minute startup. It just jumped right back in. Because our brains are really old. They have not caught up to the technology so we can trick the them to do things that is based on evolution instead of just saying like, oh, there's a white screen. I guess I should start typing. No, like let's do some things that actually makes it so you can jump right back into where you were a week ago and your brain is just on fire to get things done.
[TYLER]
It really is a, you know this idea of thinking chair and this thinking place. And it's again, this idea of being productive in less time. It's find those hacks. One of the things that, I can't help but think about this idea of, especially people that want to challenge this high amount of hustle, like it's working 20 hours a day, seven days a week to get ahead. And my point on there is like, where are you getting to? If that's what your desire is for life, then that's not a life I want to sign up for because there's no allotted number of days that I'm going to have that all of a sudden, I know if I maximize in what I'm doing in 5,000 days, I just don't know. So I need to be intentional and take advantage of what I have.
But I also believe by my values and faith that again, this idea of this Parkinson's Law that it's going to accomplish more. And I think of a business like Chick-fil-A, who's been challenged time and time and time again, oh, you need to be open seven days. You'd have 13% more revenue. You'd be so much off. And they're like, no, no, that's not our values. That's not our vision. We're going to hold onto this. And at per location, per square foot, they continue to outpace their competitors the whole time along because they're so rigid with saying, no, this is why we're doing it. This is what we're doing it for. This is what our beliefs are. That again, I think people really are embraced by that. They're like I would rather be a part of something that has those values and standards as opposed to it is kind of all over the place. Getting back to this, I was just going to layer in, getting back to this idea that I'm a person, not just a widget.
[JOE]
Absolutely. And that 20-hour a day person, that hashtag hustle culture bro, are they really getting that much more done in their extra 10 hours? No, they're probably limping along. They're probably daydreaming. They're taking that time off anyway, without realizing they're taking that time off or they're drinking all these energy drinks just to keep going outside the pace of their body. And they're going to burn out within a couple years instead of having something that lasts a lifetime. So that's where, when we really start to look at people's, especially their sprint types similar to personality types, the research is showing that when you're going to sprint a lot of times people don't do it right. They hear batching or sprinting, oh, I should just do a 20 minute sprint but they don't really know what their actual sprint type is for their brains.
And when we can discover your sprint type, it's really helpful to say, okay, I am going to work like crazy right now and here's how I'm going to do it so it matches my brain. So I'd love to walk through those sprint types to just kind of show kind of what that is it. So first it's kind of what you're working on. So for a time block sprinter, this is someone that works on one particular task over a period of time. So when I was writing the book every Thursday, I was a time block sprinter. I was only working on aspects of the book during that time. When I'm doing a bunch of podcast guesting I'm time block sprinting. Now on the other side, we have task switch sprinters. These are people that need more variety. A lot of people that might describe themselves as ADHD.
We hear multitasking, that's a myth, but what we're doing is we're saying, okay, I'm going to do a 20 to 30 minute sprint and I'm going to do this one particular task. I'm going to go into it using the sprint structure in the book. I'm going to articulate what I'm going to get done during this time. I'm going to set a timer, I'm going to get it done and then I'm going to do something else. So by doing that, then you get more done in that period of time. And we talk about how even a one minute break between tasks reduces vigilance decrement, vigilance, how well you pay attention, decrement, meaning breaking down over time. So these boring to tasks, you can still be as productive at the end of them if you just take a one minute break between tasks.
So at first we have those two things then we want to look at when do you sprint? So I was an automated sprinter because every Thursday that was automatically in my calendar on repeat. It was blocked out. My assistant didn't put anything in that time. It just was on repeat every Thursday Joe's writing, write, write, write, write. So an automated sprinter puts it in, makes sure that that just repeats over time whereas an intensive sprinter is someone that needs to go away to sprint. They may need to have a two or three day weekend at an Airbnb so that they're not looking at their laundry. They're not thinking about their home office. They're not worrying about their kids.
So I think about Dr. Jeremy Sharp, who has the Testing Psychologist podcast. I talk about his approach in the book to being an intensive sprinter. So what he does is he gets an Airbnb in a different town from where he lives. So he drives and he allows his brain to kind of wander on the way there. He then finds an Airbnb that's close to vegan restaurants because he is vegan and he wants to be able to walk there. He looks at the menu ahead of time so he is not doing any decision making while he's actually doing the sprint. He then walks to get some exercise. He then eats his vegan food, comes back, he wants to have an Airbnb that has an outdoor space for him to work because he knows if he goes back and forth between spaces that can and help him get more done.
Then he's a task switcher. So he brings a lot of different types of work for those intensives. So he might work on his books for part of the morning. He might work on catching up on podcasts for the morning. He might vision out a content calendar for the year. So he is task switching. So when we start to figure out what type of sprinter we are, we can get more done. So I know through and through, I'm an automated sprinter. I need to have that repeat in my calendar and I need to be a time block sprinter where I'm doing one thing for say two to three hours at a time broken up into 20 to 30 minute sprints. That works best for my personality type, my sprint type. For you, Tyler, it might be completely different but when we discover that, then instead of feeling like, oh, I'm not a sprinter, I can't batch you actually get more done in that period of time.
[TYLER]
I love it. I love as you describe that I'm thinking of what I fall into and I have some ideas and thoughts, but I think it's something needs to be practiced out. And I think these are all great examples for us leaders to help others, not only ourselves, but help others through this process, this trial and error process, which I'm thankful again, your book is talking about this because it's so paramount today; s we see this massive fluctuation in workplace, we see this massive fluctuation in leadership style, which then you throw on top of the generations, which is even more cosmic in all the different challenges. So Joe man, I'm thankful that you came and joined us on the Impact Driven Leader podcast. I'm thankful for your relationship, our friendship and I'm excited to be able to share this book even more with others. So thanks for your time, man.
[JOE]
Oh, Tyler, thank you so much for having me.
[TYLER]
So those of you that are listening in, please check out all the information in the show notes to learn more about Joe and the book, Thursday is the New Friday. Can't wait man. Great seeing you. And we'll talk again soon.
[JOE]
Thanks so much.
[TYLER]
So I found it absolutely mesmerizing surprising where the seven day work week compared to the 10 day work week came from. That blew my mind. At the same point I learned and I'd seen the fact of where the 40-hour work week came from Henry Ford. But as we think about today's society, and again, like I mentioned in the intro where we're here in 2020, is that four days a week, 10 hours a day? Is it seven days a week at 14 hours a day? What makes sense? Well, here's the biggest thing that I've learned in life is there's never a person, and this really goes to Steve jobs who says, when they're on their deathbed, man, I wish I had done more work. Now you can also sit here and say, I wish I'd done more with my time, but the question and challenge to say, I wish I'd done more work where I didn't spend as much time with my family and my loved ones. I think the idea really comes down to is be highly productive, be extremely intentional with your time. So you're making the most of it. That's what I learned from Joe. That's what I hope you guys learn during that conversation as well.
I encourage you to go grab the book, grab Thursday is the New Friday. It released today, October 5th. So you can go buy that right now, Amazon, all the links will be here in the podcast's show notes. Thanks for joining in. Got value out of today.
Man, I'd surely appreciate if you did a couple things, one, share this with someone else, two, make sure you're subscribed and then three, give a review, give a rating. Let Joe know how he did. Let me know how he did. I sure appreciate the time that you guys give to listen to this podcast and each of the guests. I hope you guys are getting tremendous value. With that one also make sure that you're aware, part of the Impact Driven Leader podcast is we have a book club where each month we go through a different book. This month, right now in October, we are reading Chad Veach's book, Help: I Work with People. As part of that as well, we have a round table where we get together one time a week where we go through discuss topics from that book, also how we're applying it in our workplace, in our active leadership.
We're getting geared up for an amazing 2022, where the group is going to be expanded. We're going to have more opportunities. We're going to get together. We're going to do some really fun things. So putting the finishing touches on those things. If you're listening to it after the 1st of the year, make sure you go to tylerdickerhoof.com, the impactdrivenleader.com, either one of those websites where you can get more information. Thanks for being here. Until next time have a good one.
