Have you ever wondered what it feels like to work a 4-Day Work Week?

A lot of people wonder this, but they often have a certain picture in their heads of what it will be like, which may or may not be accurate.

I’m going to help you feel what it’s really like to work a 4-Day Work Week, so that you can see whether it’s something you want to create, and, if it is, find a way to move in that direction.

Let me ask you a different question: Have you ever had a 4-Day Work Week? More specifically, have you ever had a Friday off, because a Monday off is a slightly different dynamic.

Have you ever had a week where you know that Friday will be off, maybe for a holiday or something, and you know that you need to get more done than usual? Based on your normal schedule, you’ve had to get 5 days worth of work done in 4 days.

At least initially, that’s what a 4-Day Work Week feels like.

When I started this endeavor, people would ask me why I didn’t focus on the 3-day weekend? After all, that's what everybody wants. When people say they want a 4-Day Work Week, what they're really saying is they want a 3-day weekend.

Well, in my experience, many people see a 3-day weekend as something that is given to them, not something they have control over. It’s the difference between “someone gave me a holiday this week” and earning a 4-Day Work Week on a regular basis through increased productivity.

When you first start out, especially during the first few months, those 3 days are awesome. You’re so happy to have extra time, and the weekend is the part you focus on.

The 4 days start to get a little more difficult because now there's this pressure to perform and a pressure to figure out how to make things happen quicker.

The 4-Day Work Week Game Plan

The key thing is to start by creating a plan. We’ve got a great free tool to help you with this: the 4-Day Work Week Game Plan. When you create your Game Plan, one of the first things you do is look at the things that you’re doing and assess which ones just aren’t getting you results.  

A good way to think of this is like if you’re trying to lose weight. The first 5 to 10 pounds are usually not that difficult to lose, because the strategy is pretty straightforward: stop overeating garbage. Small changes to your diet can, at the beginning, have big effects. After that, it gets more difficult and you have to make bigger changes if you want to see changes.

Bringing it back to the 4-Day Work Week, let’s talk numbers. If you’re looking to get from 40 hours a week down to 32, the first 2 hours of wasted time are pretty easy to identify and eliminate.

You just cut things that aren’t working, and you add a little focus and energy.

Anyone who’s worked in an office as an employee can tell you that if your boss says you can go home once you’ve finished your work, you hustle and you get it done sooner so you can leave.

But after that, it can get more difficult. After we’ve cut the obvious time wasters, we need something new to help us cut down the remaining hours: a new drive or focus. So, that's kind of what it's like to work a 4-Day Work Week: it’s about realizing that we have to do something different, something better, something with more focus, create more value.

The Stress Factor

Going back to the 3-day weekends: they can be really awesome, as long as we make the most of them.

What you start finding is that there's also this feeling of “Wow, I have 3-day weekends now. I can kind of get creative here. This is not just about me being exhausted Friday, sleeping in Saturday, waking up Saturday, partying Saturday, and waking up Sunday just catching my breath to start again Monday. I actually have some time here that I can do some things and get more creative! I need to do so much!

But it doesn’t have to be about fitting in as much as possible. I love playing beach volleyball on Fridays. But that's evolved into beach volleyball, and then more get-togethers with friends, and more family time. Most of the time I enjoy my 3 days as if it were a vacation, as if I had gone somewhere, and I come back on Monday feeling really energized.

I encourage you to look at this as a journey and not romanticize it or think that there's some kind of magic to working 4 days or that all of a sudden, everything becomes awesome or it becomes less stressful.

How you handle stress in 5 days is going to be pretty similar to how you handle stress in 4 days. And in fact in 4 days, there might be a little more stress to perform, to get certain results. But if you study how to get results and you take this as a gradual approach, you can start learning how to get more results in less time.

I think most people would agree if you get more results, its reasonable to think you can get either paid more or the same amount of money.

Judging Success by Results

There are countless studies coming out about the 4-Day Work Week, and most of them confirm what I've seen in so many situations with my clients and with their team members...

If you tell somebody that they can get out of work after 4 days but they still need to get the same results as they've done in 5, most people can do that. Because there's always some time where they're not fully focused because they're pacing themselves.

And we know that happens, because sometimes there's a really stressful situation and people step up to the plate. Well, if they step up to the plate when it's really stressful, what were they doing before? Well they were pacing themselves, and that's okay.

Moving Forward

In all of this, I encourage you to really consider what it is that you'd want to create in those 3 days.

If you can get clear about what you do in those 3 days, it's going to become easier for you to want to create that 4-Day Work Week lifestyle.

And again, in those 4 days, you will be doing some hustling, you will be doing some focusing, you will be doing some rethinking of things and you'll probably make some mistakes. But the payoff for this is the 3 days and the lifestyle that goes along with it, and the ability to have so much more free time.

Think about it this way: if we measure our life by our most meaningful moments, usually these are things that happen outside of work.

If that's the case, and if most of us have 5 days of work and 2 days off per week, that’s not very much time for creating memories and meaningful experiences in life. But if all of a sudden now you have 3 days off, it's like you've got another 50% of life.

That's what it's like. It's not about living longer; it's about creating more free time in the lifespan that you have so that you can enjoy it more.

I hope you find this helpful. If you want to start creating your 4-Day Work Week Game Plan or need help with that, again go to 4daygameplan.com. If you have questions on this, as always, please email me.

I look forward, as I always do, to helping you make more money in less time doing what you do best so you create the lifestyle you most desire to enjoy you, your friends, your family, and your life.