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AMY PORTERFIELD: Blank stares and looks of absolute confusion. That's what I got when I told my leadership team, “We are going to move to a four-day workweek.” And here I thought they would say, “Oh, my gosh, Amy! You're the best boss ever! Thank you so much!” Well, not a single person on my leadership team actually said that. And to be honest, I was a little offended. I mean, here I was telling them that I wanted to move our entire team of twenty full-time employees to a three-day weekend permanently. Wouldn't you be excited about that? However, once they started to share their concerns with me, I could see where this was going to take a little planning. And that's exactly what we did.
Well, here we are, closing in on our sixty-day mark of what we decided to be a ninety-day experiment of a four-day workweek, and I thought it would be a good time to share with you how it's going. But not just that; I want to share all the work and the processes that went into planning and implementing this experiment. My hope is that you can take what we've done here and apply it to your own business and your work schedule. After all, being an entrepreneur should have its perks, like setting intentional margin in your life so that you can live it to the fullest.
INTRO: I'm Amy Porterfield, and this is Online Marketing Made Easy.
AMY: There are three reasons that I wanted my team to try this ninety-day, four-day-workweek experiment, in hopes that we can make it permanent. I think it's important I share those with you before we even get started.
One, I wanted more intentional work margins for my team and for myself so that we could spend more time with the people we love, doing the things we love. Two, for many years as an entrepreneur, I didn't even know it was possible to not work seven days a week. I hate to even admit that, but it's true. I don't want that for you. I don't want that for my students. And so I want to go first and be an example that you can have a thriving, very profitable business without working your life away, and in this case, with just working four days a week. And with anything I do, like I said, I want to go first, work out the kinks, and teach you how to make it possible in your business. And then my third reason is I wanted myself and my team to be more productive, strategic, and efficient in all that we do across my business. You know how when you're ready to go on a two-week vacation, that day before, when you're working that final day before you take off, you are insanely productive because you know you've got to get it done? Well, there's something to be said about that kind of energy and ability to get it done. When you're more focused, when you put your head down and you get the work done, you'll be amazed as to how much you can get done in a very short period of time, and I wanted to be proof of that, and I wanted my team to be proof of that as well.
And so in this episode, I want to deliver on my second reason, to be an example of what's possible for you. I'm going to share all the work that went into planning this ninety-day trial, which we hope to make permanent. I'll share it all in detail. I'll also share questions that you must ask yourself if you're serious about trying or committing to a shorter week. And lastly, I'm going to share how, at sixty days, our experiment is going. Is it working? Is it not? Stick around to find out. Here we go.
After the initial shock of my suggestion, the leadership team and I knew this was going to take some work and heavy lifting, so we decided to buckle down and do the necessary research and prep to see if we could make this work before implementing it 100 percent full time. And that is how we landed on doing a ninety-day, four-day-workweek trial.
Now, let me start by clarifying what a four-day workweek means. I'm not talking about extending our four eight-hour days to ten-hour days. No. We work our regular eight-hour workday for the four days and take Friday to ourselves with no work—of course, with the exception of launch time.
Now, this is the cool thing about being an entrepreneur. It's my business. I get to make the rules with my team's well-being in mind and my students’ well-being in mind as well. So with that, if we are in a launch, then we have very clear PTO blocks limiting time off. That's “paid time off” blocks. And that means that when we're in launch mode—the team knows way in advance because I plan out my promos way in advance—when we're going to have a hard time if a bunch of people take off. It's not a no, but it's suggested to take time off in other periods of the year or other times of year. So we will be working Fridays when we are in launch mode. The great thing is with my new launch schedule, we're only in launch mode two to three times a year, so it won't be that different than most of the forty workweeks. Okay. But again, it’s all about communication and setting expectations, so we communicated this early on.
But here's what we decided from the get-go. If this doesn't work for one member of our team, it doesn't work for anyone on the team. We are either all in or all out. We are a family. So that was really important, too. No woman, no man left behind.
All right. So the very first thing we did, and I recommend you do this as well, is that we read the book Shorter by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. And as you're reading through this book, write down things that come up for you. Like, okay, but if I did this, what about this, or what about that? Or what are the pros of going to a shorter workweek? What are the cons? As you read this book—and it's a really quick read—you'll start to think about all these things that won't work, or what about this or what about that? Write it down because you do not want to forget them, and you want to come back to look over all those thoughts and troubleshoot through some of those pros and cons.
So that's exactly what my leadership team and I did first. We ended up having a four-hour meeting where we discussed everyone's pros-and-cons list of experimenting with the four-day workweek.
So action item number one, read the book Shorter, and keep track of things that come up for you as you read through this.
Next step, share this exciting news with your team if you have one. So you could do this as a one-woman or one-man show because imagine if you nailed this and then you hired your first hire and you got to say, “Well, I'm going to pay you the full salary, but we only work four days a week here.” You just became incredibly competitive in the workspace.
We just hired a brand-new senior marketing manager, and when we told her we do a four-day workweek, I felt so proud. Well, we said we are experimenting with one, with the goal of going full time with it. But I was so proud to think, like, that's the kind of culture I'm creating. So, again, if you're a one-woman or one-man show, you can do this. But if you have a team, then I want you to announce your ninety-day experiment.
So we did this over a quarter before we actually kicked off the ninety-day trial, meaning we have a whole quarter before we actually kicked it off. And that's because we did have some tasks and prepping and some research that we wanted to do before we started it. Now, I don't think you need to announce it a whole quarter in advance. But remember, I've got twenty full-time employees, so I needed to make sure I did everything I could to not mess this up. But if I had a team of, like, five people, I think I'd give myself a month and then kick it off as an experiment.
Now, as you can imagine, this went over very similar to when I first pitched the idea to my leadership team. The rest of our team kind of looked at us with questionable gazes. Some people kind of had a nervous laugh, like, “Wow, okay.” And then we explained our vision, and they started to see how this could work and the benefits of it, and they got on board. We also encouraged all team members to read the book. First, it started with my leadership team, and then I had everyone read the book Shorter, which helped them with our very next step, which I'll tell you about in a second.
But I actually want to tell you, in the book, Alex, the author, actually addresses this idea that you think your team is going to be so excited and think you're the best boss in the world. But in their mind, they're like, “Wait a second. This feels stressful. I'm already working crazy hours. How am I going to get all that work done in less hours?” You can't just do business as usual and go to a four-day workweek. You literally have to change the way you do business, which is why I did this experiment.
At one point I thought, “Okay. Maybe it's not a good idea.” Yeah. During the planning phase, before I announced it to the team, actually I might have already announced it, but I was talking to Chloe, who's my CMO on the team, and I said, “Maybe we don't do this. This feels like it's scary. And there are some things we have to change around how we're working, and I don't want it to affect our revenue.” And she said, “Listen. We all want to have more intentional margin in our lives.” And to us, intentional margin is actually a value in my company. It's a new value, where we work hard and play hard, and we actually take time to rest.
Shout out to Michael Hyatt. He really instilled this in me for many years now, and I just started to implement it in this idea of rest is so important. Funny enough, the author of the book Shorter also has a book called Rest. So, if you want to look into that as well.
But Chloe was saying, “Look, we need something drastic to shake it up. We don't want to just, like, put a Band-Aid on this fact that we're working way too many hours. Let's really shake it up and say, ‘What if we got it done in four? Four days? What would it look like?” So I like shaking things up and just kind of—it's almost like forcing us to figure things out in new ways, and I love that.
Okay. So moving on. We announced it to our team, then we let them sit with it, and everyone read the book.
Next, I suggest sending out a document to share their comments and concerns and questions and solutions or ideas for a four-day-workweek experiment. So we found this extremely helpful because they were able, my team members, were able to point out things we as a leadership team may have overlooked simply because we don't have our hands in everything in the day to day. So this allows us to zoom out, look deeper at all the moving parts of our company, see where this might benefit and where it might interfere with how something is currently functioning within the company, and then just address it. So we got a ton of great insight from my team.
And within the document, here are the categories that we included for our team members to write about. We said identify challenges. Write any notes that you want to share about those challenges and any proposed solutions. So challenges, notes about the challenges to give some context, and proposed solutions. So they could write a challenge that they see is likely going to arise with the shorter workweek, such as responding to emails when they come on a Friday; and they can propose a solution, such as having a part-time virtual assistant checking the emails and responding on Fridays, or setting an autoresponder email stating our new hours and when they can expect to hear back from us.
So we also included a little area where they could share new ideas, such as maybe we close Slack down so we can focus more. So, Slack is a channel that I believe has allowed us to be so successful, but I also believe it's a big time suck. So someone proposed, like, maybe we don't use Slack anymore, which actually led us to deciding to use Slack differently. I'll get into that later. But this feedback was really valuable. So my leadership team then reviewed all of their team's notes and addressed any departmental concerns directly with their team members. So that was really helpful, to get the team's input.
I want to address something. I'm kind of saying more than I had planned, but I just had mentioned getting a part-time VA to help on Fridays. And to be clear, a four-day workweek is only for our full-time employees, meaning that our contractors aren't on our schedule. I don't tell my contractors when they can work and when they can't work. That's actually illegal in some states. And so our contractors, they tell us when they're going to work, and we say if it's going to work for us. So I'm not telling them don't work on Friday; I'm just telling them we're not available on Friday. They could get all their work done on Friday, and then when we're back on Monday, they can communicate with us. So this is just for my full-time employees, which means if we hire a part-time person to help when the team is out, that is great, which we did. So our customer support has a part-time customer-support person in there on Fridays and even cleaning some stuff up over the weekends so that when my team gets back on Monday, we don't have, like, a hundred emails or more to get through because we weren't there on Friday. So that’s another thing. It's not like we want work to pile up. So there's things you got to think through.
Okay. Next, you want to sit down with your team, and you just want to pull everyone into the discussion and talk about any high-level, maybe cross-departmental company-wide issues that came up from the survey. And then what we did is we created the four-day-workweek guidelines document. I suggest that you do something similar, where, basically, you take all the information you've collected and say, “Okay. What are some of the rules and guidelines and policies we're going to follow in order to do work differently?” Like I said, you do have to change the way you do work. That is the point of this. So if you're thinking about implementing a four-day workweek in your business, I highly suggest you put together some guidelines.
Our four-day-workweek guidelines include a new meeting criteria. So an example of that is usually the default meeting’s an hour. So our default meetings are now thirty minutes. If you need longer, you can request longer, but you need to say why you need a longer meeting. And also every meeting you request has to have a short agenda. Before we go into any meeting, we need to know that there's an agenda so you don't get on a meeting, like have you ever gone on a meeting, you guys are chit chatting in the beginning of the meeting, and then someone's like, “Okay. So who's running this meeting? What is this about?” No, no, and no. That's, like, the biggest waste of time. And I hate that feeling, when I don't know who's running a meeting or what it's about. So now thirty-minute meetings; there's an agenda; you can get a longer meeting, but you’ve got to have a reason for it. If an hour meeting is always the default, then you're always going to fill up that time. We don't have as much time anymore, so we had to be more precise with our meetings.
So again, this guidelines, it had new meeting criteria; communication standards, meaning we don't want everyone spending ten hours a day—well, we're not even working ten hours now—but eight hours a day in Slack, direct messaging people all day. So we said get out of Slack. You spend a few hours a day in Slack if you need to communicate with other people, but you need to get out of Slack for hours a day to get your work done.
And then we updated some of our systems and processes. So that's the thing. We actually have really good systems and processes in the business already, so we were able to take what we already had, which made us successful, and then tweaked them to allow us to get to a four-day workweek.
So these systems and processes—I'm actually if, at the time of this recording, it’s I don't think going to be out yet, but we have a program that we're actually going to be selling soon called Systems That Scale. And we redid it from the ground up. It's totally brand new, and it's all the systems and processes that literally allowed us to get to this place to consider a four-day workweek and what that might look like. So if you ever wanted to know what the back end of my business looks like, whether you're brand new in an online business, or you've been at it for a while and it feels messy on the back end, that’s one thing I’ve got down, so you might want to look into Systems That Scale. In the show notes, if it's available, I'll link you to it. And if it's not available yet, I'll link you to a wait list if you're interested. So just go to amyporterfield.com/378, amyporterfield.com/378. I’ll link you to the details of Systems That Scale. I'm really excited about—we used to give it away as a bonus when we promoted B-School, and so we've actually taken it, like I said, redid the entire program, added templates and swipe files and behind the scenes, redid the whole program from the ground up. So excited. So now you can get your hands on it.
Okay. Let's get back to what we were talking about. So these guidelines are really a living document. That means that we'll make changes to it over the course of this ninety-day experiment. And it's important that we at least start somewhere and then tweak as we get going. So it's not like we created it as we were in the experiment. We did our research, we pulled our team together, we got the feedback, we created the guidelines, we started the experiment, and now we update the guidelines as we realize what works and doesn't work.
Okay. So after we solidified these guidelines, I announced them to the team, along with the vision for the four-day workweek, and I simply did this through a video in one of our Slack channels. So I got on video, off the cuff, and said, “Okay, guys. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's the guidelines. Let's do this.” So I kind of had to do a pep talk for the whole team.
Now, let's dive a little bit deeper into those guidelines. So we broke it into three sections: Tools, Meetings, and Calendar Management. So first up, tools. We listed out the main tools that we use. So we use Slack, Asana (A-S-A-N-A. That's our project-management tool), Loom, Timekeeping, and text. So we laid out the specific rules around each of those tools: how each should be used; what's permitted, what's not; instructions around laying out a task; and of course, we put guidelines around using text or cell phones for emergency uses.
So that's one thing. We don't typically do a lot of communicating through our cell phones. I don't pay for my employees to have cell phones, so it's not a tool that I say has to be used. However, people wanted to use those in case an emergency came up. Let's say on Friday our part-time virtual assistant noticed there's something wrong. We keep getting emails about a tech challenge. She'll need to know who to text to say, “Hey, heads up. We got a problem.” So that's where it came into play.
Now, the next category, meetings. So I already talked about meetings were way too long. We made the thirty-minute default, and that has been really awesome so far.
And then for the calendar-management category, we laid out how to manage your calendar on a weekly basis and a quarterly basis, including looking ahead and allotting the necessary time in your schedule for any meetings, to make sure you can still get your work done. So you really do need to change around your work days and how you work in order for this to work.
So on Friday, April 2, 2021, we kicked off the very first four-day workweek, and everyone had that Friday off. So our next plan is to reconvene at our quarter-three leadership-planning retreat, which is—what we're going to do is we're going to bring notes and feedback and comments from each of our teams and come together as a leadership team, and we are going to talk about what worked and what didn't work.
And because I'm the leader of this team, ultimately, I'm going to do everything I can to turn this ninety-day experiment into a full-time thing, minus launch dates. If that's the case, then I'm going to have to hear some tough news, probably, like, “Look. I started working late into the night, and this is why I was doing that.” And then someone else might say, “Yeah. And Saturdays, I noticed I was checking in,” stuff that I don't want to happen, but I know some people are dealing with that. We've got to figure it out. This is an experiment. So if you do it, let the experiment—it's made for things not to work out so that you can brainstorm and troubleshoot to get them to work out.
So it's important that you set a date and time that you'll meet with yourself or your small team if you have one to really look at what happened over the ninety days and troubleshoot so that you can make this permanent.
So those are all the actions we took, and, really, just I wanted to show you how you could start to put this into play in your own business. And in the back of my mind, I keep thinking, “Those of you who haven't been with me for a long time might be thinking, like, ‘Who's on this leadership team of yours?’” Many of you, my OGs, have heard me talk about my leadership team. But remember, I have a bigger team, but I wish, oh, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish that I did a four-day workweek when I started my business. It would have felt insane and crazy, and maybe that's a little lofty to say. So let's say this. If I didn't do it right when I started—because I feel like in the first year or two you're hustling. You're saying yes to most things. You're figuring it out—but into, let's say, year two, year three, you could definitely do a four-day workweek.
Now, hold on. You could do a four-day workweek from the get-go in year one. But if you feel like you're not called to do so, you're like, “I don't need a four-day workweek. Five days is fine,” by year two or three you might be saying something different. I wish I did it in the beginning because then I would have gotten out of that hustle mentality that is all I know. It's all I know. But I refuse for that to be my story. So I want to teach all of you how to build these beautiful, thriving businesses without a lot of hustle.
Now, let me tell you, I know it can be done because I've seen so many success stories around that. Just because that's not how I started, doesn’t mean that's not how I can transition into that, and that's why it's so important to me. I also think you're going to actually be better and more profitable in your business when you have more rest. So I want that for you. I want you to have a better experience thriving in your business than I did as I was getting this going.
Okay. So if you’re multitasking, come back to me on this one, because this part is really important. I want you to have some questions that you ask yourself or your team to really figure out if a four-day workweek is something you want to explore and if you want to get into this ninety-day trial.
So there's three questions you must ask yourself. Number one, how will you professionally benefit from a four-day workweek? How will you professionally benefit from a four-day workweek? Number two, how will you personally benefit from a four-day workweek? How will you personally benefit? And number three, what would it mean for you if you didn't make a four-day workweek happen? In other words, how could continuing to work five, six, seven days a week, late into the night, most weekends, how could that negatively impact you or your business? I think that's the most important question. I want you to talk about why you want to do it and all the beautiful things it could do for your business in your personal life. But then if you don't ever do this, depending on where you're at in your journey right now and how you feel about your workload and the time you spend in your business, what could be the negative impact if you don't do it?
So ask yourself these questions, then ask anyone on your team these questions, and ask them to share with you their answers so you can really understand where their head is around this. I think these questions are the most important part of the process.
Okay. So, next, I'm going to share a little bit about how it's going now that we are sixty days in. Okay. I am actually doing this segment of audio you're listening to right now at a separate time than when I recorded the podcast. I wanted to separate this audio and do it at a time where I could really reflect on answering some questions now that we’re sixty days in about what's working and what hasn't been working and where we're struggling, possibly, and how to negate those struggles and any pivots we've had to make and anything like that.
I just wanted to share with you. We're sixty days in and I'm talking about how we got here, how we got prepared to do this, but I just want to give you a quick, off-the-cuff, real rundown of how I'm feeling as the owner of the business, doing a four-day workweek with a team. And I have to tell you that I feel pressure to make this work, but it's really good pressure, and I mean that. I am hellbent in making this work, even if that means that I have to make some really hard decisions in terms of how we run the business.
And here's why. Number one—I've already said this—I want to spend more time with Hobie. And now that he's retired, he's available more. You know, being married to a firefighter, where twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, or, God forbid, forest fires happen, and he's gone for a long period of time, being a firefighter family, you don't see your loved ones as much as usual. My dad was a firefighter, and I feel like he was never home because he had two jobs. So he's a firefighter, and he did air conditioning and heating; I feel like I never saw him. And for a while, with me working so much and Hobie having this firefighter job, I felt like sometimes we were like—we’d look at each other and we’d joke sometimes, like, “Hey, who are you?” And I don't want to do that. So now that he's retired and we live in Nashville, I want to spend more time with that man. So selfishly, I want this extra day a week to do so.
But I've already said this, that I want my team to rest more. I want them to put just as much energy and focus into their personal lives as they do this business. There are some employees on my team, more than one, that literally treat this business as though it were their own. They talk about it as though they're responsible for it. They think about it nonstop. They care deeply about all of you. And it weighs heavy on their minds when, let's say, things aren't going well or we're up against a big deadline or a big goal. And I love that, and I want them not to have to carry that all the time. And so with that, I want them to be able to let it go and rest and quiet their minds. And then when they come back in, they're their best selves, and they're loving the work. And that to me is everything. I'm very fortunate to have a team that treats my business like their own, but I also want them to be able to quiet their minds. I think an extra day allows that. I'm going to actually read you a little bit about what some of them have said at the sixty-day mark.
And then, again, I've mentioned this already, but I feel pressure, good pressure, to make this work because I want you to know that it's possible. Now, I can't be proof to you that it's possible from day one of starting your business. I'm not on day one. However, I believe that the way I teach you to run a business and the way I teach you how to create digital courses and put systems together and build your list, I believe you can do that on a shorter workweek when you get dialed in and you get really deliberate about your calendar and your processes and how you spend your time and the projects you choose to work on. So, although I didn’t do a four-day workweek when I started or even five years ago, I believe I could have done this way sooner. Maybe not in my first two years of business. I believe, and I will always stand by this, there's some hustle that has to happen in the early years. But after two years, three years, four years into business, I believe this is possible. Now, it could be possible year one or two. I just don't have a great strong feeling about that. Anyway, that's not why I'm making this little off-the-cuff audio.
I wanted to share with you that probably one of our biggest challenges right now is that—and I've talked to a few members of my team about this—let's say you have your calendar booked for the day. Our days are booked. Monday through Thursday, I usually work until about six p.m. We are booked. And I mean, I have my own projects, my team members have their own projects, and we have a bunch of meetings. And if you miss a deadline, let's say you were supposed to review some website copy. We're redoing our website right now, so I have hours of reading website copy. If I miss that slot because something else took too long, I don't have anywhere else to put it. My days are so packed right now that that's going to next week, which slows things down.
Now, maybe slowing things down isn't a bad thing. So when you're in an experiment like this and things don't go as planned, you're in the experiment. So either you find a solution or you keep going as you are and then say, “Okay. At the ninety days we'll reevaluate.” So I don't really have a solution for that except being in this kind of experiment makes you think, “Well, what could I possibly do?”
And I'm starting to think that I could do less but do the few things I choose to do much better. By better I mean making a bigger impact in the world and making more money. And so that might mean that a project that we've done for a long time might come off the table. Maybe. I don't know yet. But it makes you start to think, “How do I have a leaner business but still be incredibly impactful and profitable?” And so that's what I'm starting to think about, because I've always said I wanted to do just a few things in my business, but with random projects and things added here and there and with a book possibly coming out next year, if all goes well, that's a whole other project in and of itself. So I feel like maybe something's got to give. I don't know what that is yet, but, like, literally don't know, but I'm going to look at everything under a microscope and say, “Is this the project that we keep, or do we change it, or do we stop doing it?” I don't know. But I do believe when you go to a four-day workweek, you have to be more efficient, and you have to be a little bit leaner. Well, for me, it feels like I need to be leaner in terms of all the projects we're working on. Slim those down, but then double down.
I'm not interested in making less revenue. I don't like to go backwards. I know what we're capable of. And I also have a big team. So we are capable of really amazing things. However, an experiment like this makes you start looking at things, and that's honestly what I'm starting to do. I have no answers yet. And I don't have to, which is the great part.
So that's one thing in terms of you miss a deadline, you're kind of screwed and things slow down a little bit. And that’s hard for somebody who I have been in that hustle mentality for so long and I don't want to live there. So this is like a shock to the system, and I love it. I wanted a shock to the system.
So that's, basically, kind of where my head is, but I wanted to share with you, we asked the team members, like, what are they feeling right now, sixty days in? And I wanted to share with you what a few people said. One of my team members in content, she said, “My wins,” so we said, “Share some wins that you've had around the four-day workweek at this period.” And she said, “One of my wins is that my best friend came into town, and I got to see her and spend time with her, and she got to see my baby, who she's only met once. And I was really able to just be focused with her.” And I think that's so important. We've been into weekends where our head is not present with our family and friends, right? And so I love that she said, “I was just present with a good friend that came into town and I had time to do so. Three full days to be with my friend.” I love it.
And then one of my other team members, she talked about the fact that she got to get a lot of her chores done on a Friday so that she genuinely relaxed and was with her husband on Saturday and Sunday, where, she said, “Typically on Saturday, I'm running around, trying to get all the things done.”
And then I love this, Jilly, who is my content team, she said that she finally—and she took a picture and showed all of us. Absolutely beautiful—she finally got to string up these really pretty lights on her back patio. And she says, “I've wanted to do this for over eight years and just never took the time to do so.” So she said, “Last Friday, I went to Home Depot, I bought the lights, I bought some flowers, I strung those babies up on my own, and I absolutely love my special patio space.” It's those moments that you don't slow down for because you're always working, working, working. And these kind of stories from my team is why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's what I live for.
And so, of course, we ask them what's not working, and where can we do better, and what are you struggling with? And we talk about that on the regular right now. But just hearing these little fun moments of time with family and time to breathe and slow down, I just love that. I love that so very much.
So when I asked my team, “What are some of your wins?”, most all of them had to do with slowing down, time with family, getting the necessary things done earlier in the weekend so they could be with family or do nothing or just sit, and I'm all about it.
So there you have it. I just wanted to share with you where we are struggling a bit in terms of our days are way too jam-packed. But we are feeling so many benefits and rewards from a three-day weekend that we have that drive to fix the problems that aren't working so that we can continue this beyond the ninety days. So that is my hope, my prayer, that this actually continues, and I'll keep you all updated.
All right. Let's get back to the episode.
All right. Time for some action steps. Now, I know I gave you a full look at what we did to prepare for our ninety-day trial, and I fully stand behind all of those actions. If you're serious about making this transition, and I 100 percent believe it's possible for you, by the way, I want you to take yourself and your team through what we discussed in this episode.
But first, you absolutely have to start with those three questions. I want you to just set some time aside, take ten, fifteen minutes and just answer them in the next day or two. Remember, how will this professionally benefit you? How will it personally benefit you to go to a four-day workweek? And number three, what would it mean if you didn't move to a four-day workweek? What does that mean? What does that look like? What does your future look like? Once you're clear on those questions, you can start by doing step one and moving through everything else one by one, starting with reading the book Shorter.
I have full confidence that this will set you up to successfully implement at least a ninety-day trial, and you likely don't have a team of twenty, and believe me, a team of twenty is stressful, so that's great that you might have just yourself or just a few people. Enjoy wherever you are in the process is what I'm saying. I love my team. I love every single one of them. But there comes a lot of stress with having a bigger team. So when I say I have a team of twenty, I hope you're not thinking, “Oh, well, these things aren't going to work for me. My team's not that big. I'm not making as much money.” Oh, my goodness. What I teach on this podcast is for that one-woman show. You're one woman. You've got maybe a tiny bit of help. But at the end of the day, it's pretty much all you? You could go to a four-day workweek. Or maybe you recently left corporate. You’re in your two day or two—not two days—two years into starting your business, although it still feels so recent that you just left corporate, that's why I said it that way. But you’re two years in, and you have a part-time employee, you have a few contractors, you're making things happen, so you've got support, but you don't have full-time employees? You can make a four-day workweek happen.
I think it comes down to boundaries. But it's not just like, I don't work late nights, or I don't work weekends. Can you imagine—I guess I'll just leave you with this—can you imagine having Fridays off? Can you imagine? And you might wonder, like, what I do with my Fridays. So now I have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. Well, one of my goals of moving to Nashville is to pull back a little bit on all the hours that I'm working. I don't mean I want to make less revenue or slow down. I just mean I personally don't want to work that many hours. And I couldn't feel good about taking Fridays off and have my whole team still working. My brain just doesn't work that way. So I wanted it for them just as much as I wanted it for me. But on Fridays, you might be surprised or not surprised to hear I do a lot of chores kind of thing.
Now, chores. I use that word loosely, my friends, because yes, I might go grocery shopping. I might run to the cleaners. I don't have a personal assistant anymore like I had in California, so I might go do errands. That's what the word I was—I was like, chores sounds like I'm in high school. I'll go run errands. But then maybe I'll get a pedicure or manicure or get my hair done or anything like that. But I do things around the house, and I run errands on Friday mostly, because on Saturday, then I don't have to do anything. Sunday, I can be with Hobie and Scout. I could be present. I don't have to think, “Oh, I've got to get all this stuff done.” So it allows me to enjoy my weekends because I can get my personal errands done on Friday.
Now, if it doesn't work out that way and I want to plan something else on Friday, I get to, but it just leaves the weekend for rest because you've got one extra day to get it all done in terms of your personal stuff. And a lot of people on my team talked about that that's the part they loved the most. Or let's say they want to go on a little mini vacation. They've got time now in the weekend to actually leave early Friday morning, come back Sunday night. They just got Friday and Saturday and Sunday to do so. So whatever you want to do with it—I just wanted to share what I do with it—but it has changed, dramatically changed, my weekends. And Hobie is very, very happy with that.
All right, my sweet friends, have a wonderful day. I hope this helped. I hope you found it valuable. I'll see you next week, same time, same place. Bye for now.
