Have I worked 6 or even 7 days a week? YES!
Have I worked 10, 12, 16 hours a day? YES!
Have I worked 2-3 jobs a day? YES!
Have I been guilty of creating a long day, long week working workplace culture? YES!
Have I, or we as a team found any of this more productive than 7.5 Hr x 4 Day Week? NO!
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Since, beginning my Entrepreneur journey, first as a solopreneur, then a micro-team of 2-3 people and in later years with a much bigger, more global, multi-time zone team – we have experimented with:
- Being 24/7 x 365 days business
- Being 6 Days, 10 Hours a day business
- Working 5 days, 9 Hours per day team
- Working 4 days, 10 Hours per day people
- Working 4 days, 7.5 Hours per day champions*
Any guesses which one turned out to be the most productive and which method have we used the longest among all experiments, and found ourselves returning to it, time and again?
All this much before anyone knew the term damneddemic (ok well you may have known the word but not lived in the world of one!) and the world seemed to grapple with a sudden shift in many changes – some by choice, some forced by the circumstances and some … just happened!
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If you guessed Working 4 Days, 7.5 Hours per day Champions, you guessed it right. Since becoming a full-on Consulting Business we moved to 4 Days/Week and were the most productive ever.
Be it the years when we were a micro team or the years when we expanded many folds – 4 days Week has been part of work-culture more than 80% of the time since our business has been around. As I mentioned, we did experiment longer days, longer weeks and sometimes for certain projects we worked straight 14 days without any day off – worst decision ever.
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In my very experienced opinion (arrogant? Me? NO! Literally experienced this very long term!) in this matter, 4 days week, 7.5 hours a day is much more productive than 5 or 6 days ever will be. It creates happy teams, happy work culture, more focused production, and outstanding results. In fact, I can vouch with confidence, whenever we worked longer hours, longer weeks we struggled with quality, delivery, and consistency. Time and again, we have made this mistake to try and appease needy clients or bully ones or simply the ones who freaked out at the idea of only being able to reach us 4 days a week. But in long term, every client saw the difference and realized 4-day Week works, it really does.
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The world is talking about it now and calling it an The Great 4 Day Week Experiment (saw it on many big publications) but guess what, it is our established, confirmed, successful work-culture for a long time and it is here to stay.
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So, if you got used to accessing our team or me, more than 4 days, outside our work hours, brace yourselves, the joy ride is over and we are reverting back to our beloved, productive, happy 4 Days week and this time for good. No more trials, no more changes!
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I will be writing more about this .. so if you are interested, stay tuned!
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Xoyox – Szebastian
Your ‘Get It Right, Get It Done’ INTENT!ON Strategist Babe!
