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- Hello, hello.
Hey there, hey there.
Welcome into another edition of Between the Lines,
where we go inside the pages of SUCCESS magazine.
I'm Josh Ellis, editor-in-chief of SUCCESS,
and I'm joined today by Joe Sanok.
He is a TEDx speaker, keynote speaker,
podcaster, and the author of the new book,
"Thursday is the New Friday,"
which we excerpt in the November/December edition
of the magazine.
Joe, excited to have you here to talk about the excerpt
and the book and this movement.
- Yeah, I'm so excited to be here.
Thanks so much for having me.
- So we don't get into it too much,
if people have only seen the magazine,
but you have an interesting background
that sort of led you to really be a believer
in this new paradigm.
- Yeah, the four-day workweek,
for me, is something that, even I remember
my freshman orientation at college,
when the advisor said, "All right, make your schedule."
I was like, wait, what?
I don't have to have class on Friday?
And when we go into our career,
we kinda sway away from a lot of that,
and I got busy.
And in 2012, had a really tough time.
My daughter had open-heart surgery that year,
I had cancer that year, and a lot of things
just made me shift to say, why am I living this way?
And a lot of it was going back to my roots
of working less but really being
really efficient during my time.
And so a number of years ago,
I started doing some experiments
around working fewer days to just see what would happen,
and started with myself and a bunch of consulting clients.
And what happened was, every month was better
than the month before.
Financially, I was happier.
I was around the people I wanted to be around.
And then, over time, I realized
that that was a bit of a super power,
that not everybody was thinking that way.
And so it's great to start to help
other people do that and just see what unfolded for them.
- So many of the people watching us now,
and the readers of SUCCESS,
are just like you were when you started your consultancy.
They're solopreneurs who, they just wanna live
and work on their own terms.
But for a lot of people, that can be just
as limiting and trapping as having a job,
because you have to be deliberate about it.
And so what are some of the steps
that you learned along the way
to make work work for you?
- Yeah, I think one of the big problems
in most self-help books or teachings or keynotes is
that you usually fall into one of two categories.
On one side, you've got the productivity,
here's to all the five steps to do
whatever the pain is that you wanna overcome,
or on the other side, there's kind
of the woo-woo vision board,
just manifest it and don't do any work,
and it'll all come to you side.
But no one really brings that together,
and each one of those things actually taps
into what the neuroscience is showing us,
and that's that, when you actually slow down,
that you do better work.
And we know this intuitively.
When do we have our best ideas?
We have these shower moments,
where we're not serving the kids,
we're not running at work.
It's like, oh, I just made this amazing connection
while I was taking a shower,
or I was on a long drive without the radio on,
or maybe on a hike, that our brains
actually are more efficient and more creative
when we slow down.
And so we often have this kinda hustle culture mentality,
where we work, work, work, and that often comes
from the, if we're a solopreneur,
we probably like the work that we're doing,
because we have that choice.
And so if you're passionate about it,
it's really hard to say
I should stop being passionate about this.
But when you start to see that setting
really firm boundaries in some areas
and soft boundaries in other areas
actually unlocks more creativity
and more success, that's where those two worlds
finally come together, where the slowing down
actually helps you to speed up.
- We work the way we do because
it seems that's just the way it's always been.
Our parents worked this way,
our grandparents worked this way,
but as we start off the excerpt,
we talk about, as you lay out in the book,
the five-day workweek comes from Henry Ford.
He put it in place, one of the first major companies,
anyway, in the US, to put it into place.
But that was, it was nice,
but it was only an improvement
from the way things were then,
which was like six days a week
and you worked 12 hours a day,
which was an improvement at one point in time,
from when you just worked every day,
and be glad that, serve, be glad
that the nobles are letting you
even live on their land.
Are we headed for a time where work is optional?
I don't know.
What is the end result of maybe this evolution?
- Yeah, I think the end result,
I think in our generation,
we will see the four-day workweek be
more the norm, and that's looking
at the historical context.
Whenever I look at something, I wanna understand,
how did we get here?
Several thousand years ago, the Babylonians made
up the seven-day week.
There's nothing in nature that says
it should be seven days.
The Egyptians had an eight-day week.
The Romans had a ten-day week.
It wasn't even until
around the year 300 the emperor Constantine made
it the seven-day week,
and that was a religion decision for him.
And so then fast-forward to the 1800s,
you're exactly right, that it was a big step
forward for people to work only 10 to 14 hours a day,
six to seven days a week.
That was good for the evolution of humanity.
And then, when Henry Ford, in 1926,
wanted to sell more cars to his people,
he knew that they weren't gonna buy a car
to just get to work faster,
but they needed to have some leisure time.
And so it was more to sell cars
to his own people, and to others.
And so that was a step forward.
But now we're seeing that we've undone
so much that the industrialists gave us.
We don't look at our employees
as just pieces of a machine.
We know that there's more complexity there.
We know, personally, that we want passion in our work.
We want a purpose for the world.
We wanna do things that somehow better society,
while also making money and being successful,
and so we see that even Friday has started
to move away from the workweek anyway.
It's when we host birthday parties,
or we might do a baby shower,
or some team-building activity.
But it's not a fully worked day anyway.
And so I firmly believe that, if we move it
just into the weekend category,
we're gonna see the productivity just go
through the roof for those four days.
There's a great case study I talk about in the book,
Kalamazoo Valley Community College.
So you think community colleges,
that's a pretty strong institutional mindset.
And this HVAC instructor started running numbers
about how much they were spending
on air conditioning in the summer
to air-condition these empty buildings
that very few students were in on Fridays,
and he went to the board and he had taken pictures
every Friday from the roof to show
how few people were there.
He made the case for a four-day workweek,
and they actually found that by eliminating Fridays
in the summer, they've saved millions
of dollars just in air conditioning costs.
And then you look at the healthcare costs,
the happiness, the retention of people,
and you think about, when someone leaves a company,
just how much training it takes
to bring someone back up to that same speed,
you save 1% for an extra year,
and that's hundreds of thousands of dollars
that you're saving.
So the case for it, economically,
is actually strongly made in the research,
when you look at it.
- What sort of dominoes have to fall
for this to be a nation-wide, society-wide type thing?
I mean, I think about it.
Even here in the US, we are so dug
into the hustle culture, as compared
to Europe, where our counterparts over there are
in the middle of a month-long holiday right now.
What has to happen here in the US
for this to be widely embraced?
- Yeah, I think there's enough emerging research
that's coming out.
I mean Iceland's study
of 2,500 people living the four-day workweek,
I think that's helpful.
I think there's a big discussion happening post-COVID
and post-pandemic, where globally,
we all worked different.
And most of us who are smart are saying,
"Why did we work that way?
"Do we wanna go back to that way?
"Is that really the best model for us?"
I do think it's gonna take a number
of influential companies to move forward in that,
and we're seeing that start to happen,
but also, I think it can be a people's movement,
where we question this.
We ask, "Hey, can we do an experiment within our team?
"So we've got a team of five people.
"For two months, can we just try a four-day workweek?"
Talk to the supervisor, say, "What are the KPIs?
"What are the key performance indicators
"that we're gonna analyze?
"How are we gonna look to see if
"this actually helps the company or hurts it?"
And, "Let's just try it."
You know that, for those two months,
the people that have a four-day workweek are gonna bust
it to try to make sure that they can prove
that the four-day workweek works.
And so I think it's gonna be micro-influencers
within companies, but then, also on a macro scale,
we're gonna see larger companies continue
to switch over, or to at least experiment with it.
- The thing that comes to mind is,
it's a change, and so people fear it.
But it doesn't, there's no reason to think,
on top of all of the evidence that you cited,
that it would be worse.
There's some sectors.
Think about travel and hospitality sectors where,
an extra day on the weekend, yeah,
that would be huge for them, that sorta thing.
And me, personally, I love the idea
of a little mini weekend, right in the middle of the week,
Wednesday, just something.
Monday, Tuesday, it makes Monday so much easier,
to know that the mini weekend is
just 48 hours away.
- A lot of people say, "Well, does it have to be Friday?"
And I would say this book, unlike a lot of 'em,
where it's prescriptive, like here's the
one model you have to do,
it's more of a menu, to say, let's have this conversation
and question what life after the industrialists look like.
Yeah, so for you, it might be,
I would love to just work two days,
break, two days.
Awesome.
You're still instilling the concepts
into how you live and how you work.
- Joe, definitely appreciate you joining me today.
I know if folks check this story out
in the November/December issue,
they'll wanna pick up the book.
It's available everywhere, "Thursday is the New Friday."
Check out Joe Sanok's work.
We appreciate you so much, Joe,
and thank all of you for sticking
with us for another edition of Between the Lines.
We'll do it again next week.
So long, everybody.
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