What You'll Need to Give Up to Work a 4-Day Work Week

What are you willing to give up in order to work a 4-Day Work Week?

That might sound like an odd question, but what you're going to find if you haven't already is that in order to get to a higher level of income, a higher level of freedom, a higher level of results, there will  be some things you need to give up.

Now, depending on your particular industry, there might be more than the things I'm going to talk about here. But there are 3 things you will definitely need to give up, whatever your career.

Stop Procrastinating

Firstly, you're going to have to stop avoiding the most important work.

There’s a luxury that we have if we work let's say a 40-hour work week, and especially if we're an employee for somebody else. Somebody else might say, “You need to get these things done.”

And we can keep putting them off, and we can get to them when we get to them. We can avoid the work until eventually we might decide to actually do it.

You'll often see people in the last hour of the day really putting in the work and they finally do what they were supposed to do all day. You'll see them saying "Aah, man, I really worked hard today!"

But they probably only worked for that one or two hours. And maybe if they’d put in that effort earlier in the day, they could have left earlier.

If you're looking to get more results in less time, you don't have time to be avoiding work.

Of course you'll get better at this over time, and it will be easier if you’re more motivated.

Have you ever been in this situation? Maybe you need to make an important phone call. But rather than just doing it, you decide you need to tidy your desk, reorder your files, and alphabetize your phone numbers. No! Make your call!

You just don't have time to mess around!

Stop Playing the Blame Game

The second thing you need to do is to let go of blame. Stop saying somebody else was the reason why you couldn't get something done.

Again, this is very common in situations where people are employees. That’s not to say it happens all for all employees, but it's common simply because in most companies there are people working at different levels.

You’ve got creators or the founders of the company and they're operating at a certain level and they've helped generate a certain amount of income and they're now hiring people to run parts of this business: to work in the service department or cook the hamburgers or whatever it might be.

Then you have the people at the employee level. If they're not mature enough, or if they're not evolving in their work, then when things don't go the way they want, they're going to look for someone to blame.

Blame is one of those things that really wastes your time. Think of it like this. If you’re always looking for someone to blame, then whenever there’s a problem, there are three stages.

1. The problem happens

2. There’s a long period where you feel lost, and you’re trying to figure out who to blame, and you’re spending time on the drama.

3. You come to a solution, or at least a compromise.

However, if you move beyond trying to find someone to blame, you’ll be able to skip step 2, skip all the drama, and get right to working towards the solution. Step 2 doesn’t help you. Step 2 doesn’t make you more money or get you more results, and it certainly doesn’t make your employer more likely to let you work a 4-Day Work Week.

Of course, sometimes there is validity in figuring out why the problem happened so it doesn't happen again. That can be an important part of working towards a solution. But if it’s just blame for the sake of it, then you need to cut it out.

Ultimately though, we need to spend a lot less time on the why and focus on the how instead:

• How do I make that happen?

• How do I get to that solution?

• How do I make those results happen?

Stop Making Excuses

The third thing you’ll need to give up to work a 4-Day Work Week is excuses.

Excuses are similar to blame, but an excuse is a more rational and justified thing. Excuses are not as emotional as drama: they're just a really good explanation why.

They might be really valid and true, but at the end of the day, they don't get you to the result.

For example, maybe you got stuck in a traffic jam, which obviously you couldn't control, so you end up being late. However, after this, you can go one of two ways. Either you just accept it, and most likely it keeps happening, or you choose to make a change.

Maybe you could make some hands-free calls during that time. Maybe you could leave 15 minutes earlier to beat the traffic. Maybe you could even consider moving closer to your place of work.  

If blame is an emotional way of explaining why things aren’t working, then excuses are the more intellectual equivalent. But at the end of the day, you didn't get the result you wanted.

It doesn’t matter how good you are at explaining why something didn’t happen: that doesn’t make it happen by magic. It’s only useful to know why something doesn’t happen if you use it work out how to make it happen in the future.

Moving On

Depending on what industry you’re in, there may well be other specific things that you need to give up to get more results in less time. However, these 3 things we spoke about today will help you no matter where you’re at in your career.

The more you’re able to cut them out, the more you're going to see your income, your impact, your influence and your ability to create the lifestyle you most desire increase.

As always, if you have any questions on this, email me: I’m here to help.

If you need help creating your Game Plan and start creating your 4-Day Work Week, go to 4daygameplan.com, where we have a training video along with a downloadable tool to help you start creating the roadmap of how you're going to create your 4-Day Work Week lifestyle.

The 4-Day Game Plan can help you, whether you're an employee, an entrepreneur, a freelancer, a business owner, or anything else, to map out where you're going and how you're going to start moving in that direction.

As always, I look forward to helping you make more money in less time doing what you do best.