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?