Thursday is the New Friday

How to Work Fewer Hours, Make More Money, and Spend Time Doing What You Want

Joe Sanok

• Editorial: HarperCollins Leadership
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400226047
• Categoría: Desarrollo personal
• Categoría: Superación personal

Create your own schedule, maximize your leisure time, and work less while making more by following the revolutionary—yet realistic—four-day work week outlined in this groundbreaking book.

In Thursday is the New Friday, author Joe Sanok offers the exercises, tools, and training that have helped thousands of professionals—from authors and scholars to business leaders and innovators—create the schedule they want, resulting in less work, greater income, and more time for what they most desire.

Outlining the exact same strategies Joe used to go from working 60-hour weeks in the beginning of his career to now working 4 or less days a week, Thursday is the New Friday will help you:

• Understand how you too can apply these principles and customize them for your own situation to be more productive at work while enjoying more leisure time.
• Discard unnecessary tasks and learn efficiencies that would not have been discovered otherwise.
• Find inspiration in the stories and testimonials from Joe's clients and colleagues who have implemented his methodology into their own work lives with incredible results.
• Understand the psychological research behind the principles of the four-day workweek and why we are actually more productive with one less workday.

Most importantly, Thursday is the New Fridayempowers you with a practical, evidence-based methodology to create your own work schedule and dedicate more of your precious personal time to pursuing your hobbies and spending time with your family and friends.

1

WORKING LESS IS DANGEROUS

The forty-hour (or more) workweek that spans five days has become an established aspect of society. Out of seven days, we work five and take two off—that’s always been the case, right? In fact, the five-day workweek became the norm only after Henry Ford established it in his factories in May 1926. The seven-day week or the five-day workweek are arbitrary and changeable, and so is how we run our businesses. It’s “the way it is” for almost no good reason. It is how it is because it is how it has been.

WE MADE IT UP

Bosses, supervisors, and CEOs may say, “You want a four-day workweek because you don’t want to work so hard.”

Workers may say, “This pace is unsustainable. There’s no way I can do everything I need to do as an adult on Saturday and Sunday alone. Plus, I know I could do this more efficiently and work less.”

Can this conflict be resolved? It feels like an eternal battle between workers and owners. Even among solopreneurs, overwork is commonplace. It takes the form of emails in the evening, just that one phone call on Saturday, or a never-ending “to-do” list.

We made this all up.

To be sure, discussing labor, work conditions, and progress is dangerous work. In our world, we see our schedules through the lens of our domestic lives: soccer practice, meetings, groceries, and (if we have any time left) life goals.

There are two predominant positions when people approach success. On one side we have the woo-woo folks who say that if we just “will it to the universe” it will happen. This side promotes vision boards, manifesting abundance, and tapping into energy. On the other side, we’re told to just “hustle harder.” This side pushes working more, fighting against all odds, and steamrolling others.

So, which is it? Does the universe care about how I spend my time? Do I just need to hustle harder? Seriously, most of the time, all I care about is when I’m going to find time to go buy more groceries and maybe watch a movie with my kids.

Is this the best imaginable version of human work-life? How did we get here? What is our system based on? Without a sense of history, we won’t have a context for the kind of dangerous work we’re discussing. Or why business leaders in the 1800s found this discussion so threatening.

Let’s back up a few thousand years to the origin of the seven-day week. The Babylonians who at that time ruled modern-day Iraq could only see seven celestial bodies: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

The length of a year is based on the orbit of the earth around the sun. Months are based on moon cycles, but the length of a week is random. Witold Rybczynski wrote in the Atlantic, “Seven days is not natural because no natural phenomenon occurs every seven days.”¹ We could just as easily have seventy-three weeks a year that are five days. If we still wanted thirty-day months, we would have six five-day weeks in each month. The Babylonians invented the seven-day week. Others followed their example.

Most biblical scholars believe that most of the Jewish Torah (the first five books of the Bible) was brought together from various sources and assembled while the Jews were in exile in Babylon. The book of Genesis, which enshrines the seven-day week, was written while the Jews lived in Babylon.² Other cultures had different ways of expressing a “week.” In fact, Egyptians had a ten-day week, and Romans had one that lasted eight days. In early history, the number of days in a week didn’t matter.

How we dated our calendars varied from culture to culture. In Dr. Vera Rossovskaja’s 1936 book, The Remote Past of the Calendar, she discussed how Russians began their year on March 1 until the fifteenth century. Their count began at the creation of the world in 5509 BCE. Peter the Great introduced January 1 as the beginning of the year in 1700. Until then, it had been September 1. During that time, they followed the Julian calendar, which has 365-day years and 366-day years. In 1918, the Russians switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar has three fewer days over a four-hundred-year period, whereas the Gregorian calendar has an added day every four years on February 29. So, when the Russians adopted this calendar, they had to cancel thirteen days to align with the new calendar.³

In the summer of 1929, Russia implemented a five-day week. Natasha Frost writes for the History channel, “The ordinary seven-day week now had a new bedfellow: the nepreryvka, or ‘continuous working week.’” It was five days long, with days of rest staggered across the week. “Now,” the Soviet economist and politician Yuri Larin proposed, “the machines need never be idle.”⁴

The history of calendars, workweeks, and how we organize our time is not as universal as we might expect. Yes, our way of doing things feels like the only way, but the reality is: We made all of this up! And nothing prevents us from unmaking it.

Once the seven-day week was widely established, numerous manifestations of the workweek morphed. Let’s look at a few examples of how cultures and religions have viewed time.

Throughout history people have segregated time for religious observance from ordinary work time. For Judeo-Christians this is a Sabbath, often on Saturday or Sunday. In Islam, this is usually Friday prayers. Theravada Buddhists observe an uposatha, which is a day of cleansing the mind. The Cherokee have a rest day, which begins at sunrise the first day of the new moon. Fasting, reflection, and prayer is encouraged for up to four days. In the Bahá’í Faith, Friday is the rest and reflection day.

Having gone to college in west Michigan, I saw this firsthand. West Michigan is home to some of the strongest Dutch Reformed versions of Christianity. Early settlers left the Netherlands because of their liberal leanings. They founded Holland, Michigan, and Calvin College, Christian Reformed Church strongholds. Even today, numerous businesses are closed on Sundays in observance.

What is it about slowing down that is part of every world religion and culture? And what are the implications of a day of rest on how we work? Recent science confirms what humans have intuited for thousands of years: slowing down and reflecting returns dividends. Our DNA said, “This is valuable; we need to keep this.”

So, we know certain things are true of our nature. They’re a given. Other things we create. A seven-day week is one of those things. We created that. Yes, historically, we inherited it, but humans created it. One day off a week was the standard. Then two days . . . and now maybe three? It’s one thing to look backward and define our behavior by evolution, but it’s another to look forward to a possible revolution or re-evolution.

Through the stories and research in this book, I will explore three main ideas. The first is the question of how we organize our time. Our schedules, weekly decisions, and ways we choose to work are relatively recent inventions. If we view these schedules as tools, are they serving us? Is the tool doing the job? Or was that tool useful in a past time and place, but now needs to be reconfigured?

The second idea concerns the internal inclinations that drive the most successful people, and how we can develop those within ourselves. What does research show us regarding those inclinations, habits, and actions that can lead to reinventing a new type of schedule and life that is best for us?

The last idea: slowing down leads to innovative businesses that contribute to the world. How can we use the best brain research and apply it to creating a new schedule that builds income, innovation, and impact?

Now some historical context regarding how we got to this point.

THE RISE OF THE FIVE-DAY WORKWEEK

To understand why this is such a charged issue, we must revisit 1886. We often credit Henry Ford with inventing the five-day workweek, but his innovation evolved—slowly—from an explosion in Chicago, Illinois, on May 4, 1886.

On May 3, a large group of workers that included socialists, anarchists, unionists, and reformers gathered in Chicago to support a strike for the eight-hour workday. Nineteenth-century workers were poorly paid and conditions were oppressive. Historical documentation shows that factory workers had at least ten-hour days and worked a minimum of six days a week. Conditions were poor and there was job instability.

Workers were at a breaking point.

Police broke up the demonstration, killing two strikers. On the following day, May 4, the protesters reorganized and returned to Chicago’s Haymarket Square. That evening, after their number had dwindled to some 200 demonstrators, 176 police attacked the protesters as rain came down heavily. Someone, still unknown, threw a bomb that killed eight police officers and injured sixty more. The police killed and injured an unknown number of civilians. On May 5, martial law was declared—not just in Chicago, but nationwide.

Professor William J. Adelman of the University of Illinois-Chicago wrote: “No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today.”⁵

One day off per week was the standard until the twentieth century. In 1908, a New England mill became the first American factory to institute a five-day workweek. Conflict between Jewish and Christian workers, not concerns about productivity or workers’ rights, forced the decision. The Jewish workers wanted Saturday off to observe their Sabbath and to work half a day on Sunday. The Christian workers wanted to work a half day on Saturday and have Sunday off. So began the first two-day weekend.⁶

The most monumental shift came when Henry Ford instituted the five-day workweek. It started within the company with a handful of male workers. In March 1922, the New York Times spoke with Ford’s president and Henry’s son, Edsel Ford: “Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation. . . . The Ford Company always has sought to promote [an] ideal home life for its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more time to spend with his family.”⁷

With the goal of increasing productivity, Henry Ford announced, “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.”⁸ The date was exactly forty years after the walkouts that led to the Haymarket Square bombing: May 1, 1926.

We are experiencing another shift. An unplanned-for, worldwide experiment began in early 2020 when COVID-19 started its spread. Almost overnight, the entire world moved to virtual offices. Local nonprofit boards met online, township boards hosted the public’s comments virtually, and telemedicine took off.

That mandatory experiment, in which states locked down, children left school, and parents juggled online work, provoked a societal realization. Maybe we could do this differently? Parents, small business owners, nonessential employees . . . everyone asked the question: Could a different schedule and lifestyle be possible?

THE INDUSTRIALIST FINGERPRINT AND THE PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC

The Industrial Revolution was an important part of society’s development, and throughout this book I will make frequent reference to the Industrialists’ legacy: productivity and production through optimizing every waking hour. Through the Industrialists’ efforts, almost every aspect of society has been automated, producing the maximum amount of goods and services at the lowest cost. But the Industrialist mindset has not solved world hunger, disease, and war. A mechanized view of the world gets us only so far. We can be productive without purpose, or, as the internet, remote work, the gig economy, and the worldwide COVID-19 work-from-home experiment have shown us, we can live differently.

We are in a transitional time.

Although the Industrialists were mainly systematizing business, their mentality determined how school is taught, churches operate, and communities are organized. In the same way, our transition extends beyond business. We see that traditional schedules for home, life, school, and work were significantly disrupted during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Schools and parents had already been reflecting on the mechanical nature of school, with many parents turning away from traditional public school education. Reports show that homeschooling is growing at 2 to 8 percent per year.⁹

In the workplace, a mass reevaluation occurred as both employees and employers saw some businesses carry on with remote workers, often only putting in a few hours of “real” work per day. Research is emerging from the lockdown showing boosts in productivity from working at home, reduction in commutes, and job satisfaction.¹⁰

I love sleeping in; I’m like a teenager still. I wish I were a morning person, but if I have nothing planned, I could probably sleep in until 11:00 a.m. Recently, our daughters spent the night at my parents’ house. We had absolutely nothing planned, and because we were on quarantine lockdown, there was very little in the world to do. I woke up at 9:30 a.m. and lay with my eyes shut, but my inner Industrialist, the voice of our collective subconscious, was saying, “Dishes could be washed. There’s that book you could read about being a better couple. The yard could use some work.”

That damn inner Industrialis...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Working Less Is Dangerous
• Part One: Developing Inclinations, Habits, and Actions
• Part Two: Launching Into Slowing Down
• Part Three: How the Four-Day Week Works
• The Thursday Is the New Friday Manifesto
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Resources