The Boss of You

I’ve made Michelle’s site (The Anti 9-to-5 Guide) a reg­u­lar stop on my blog read­ing round-up these days, which is where I came across this arti­cle, The Four-Day Week Chal­lenge, at A List Apart. I’ll admit I was primed to be a cham­pion of the idea of a four day work week, it being Mon­day morn­ing and all. As is typ­i­cal for many of us I sus­pect, when four o’clock rolled around on Sun­day I found myself get­ting a bit grumpy about how much I hadn’t yet done on the week­end. The big item that hadn’t made it onto my “to-do” list? Relax­ing. There were suc­cess­ful trips to the hard­ware store, gro­ceries were bought, errands done and the house had that “just cleaned” smell, but there hadn’t been much in the way of play time.

Now con­trary to what my 10 year old step-daughter might think — “You’re your own boss! You should take more days off to sleep in!” — it is really hard to jus­tify tak­ing time off for “play” when there is always so much work to do. But as Ryan Car­son so excel­lently points out in his Four Day Week Chal­lenge, there’s always more work to do. Always. And par­tic­u­larly as cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, hav­ing some time off to reju­ve­nate is an impor­tant part of mak­ing sure that a good job gets done when we are at work. Lau­ren and I have used the four day work week in the past to get big projects com­pleted that weren’t work related, in fact that was how we wrote the draft of our book, and prior to that used semi-regular four day weeks as kind of reward sys­tem. But, as Ryan points out in his dis­cus­sion of how to make this work in a ser­vice based busi­ness, we found it hard to bal­ance sta­ble income with a four day work week — we noticed that when we worked four day work weeks for an extended period our rev­enues dropped as our bill­able hours also dropped. And yet, after week­end like this one, I long for reg­u­lar four day weeks. Maybe we need to try a work­ing 9-6pm four days a week and keep our bill­able hours up at a nor­mal week approach? Or start with Fri­day after­noons off? Have any of you suc­cess­fully imple­mented a prac­tice like this? Any tips?