So you want to switch to a four-day workweek. 

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We get it. After all, there are a lot of well-documented reasons that a four-day workweek is better for everyone and can be just as productive (if not more) than a five-day workweek (heck, just look at Parkinson’s law). We've looked at these reasons before in our other post about how we work a four-day week, but for the sake of a good start to this blog post, let’s cover those benefits again. 

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Having a four-day workweek has been proven to:

• Improve mental and physical health
• Increase work/life balance
• Increase productivity
• Improve employees’ skillsets
• Increase community engagement and volunteerism
• Reduce employee turnover
• Reduce sick days
• Reduce a company’s carbon footprint
• Have a positive impact on the bottom line

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Just look at the results from our wellbeing survey. 

Not bad, right? 

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But preaching the benefits and results of a four-day week is one thing. Learning how you actually, you know, work a four-day week is another. And we don’t mean the practicalities and logistics of it all, like the legal ramifications, contracts and which day you’ll have off, we mean how you fit five days of work into four*. 

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You’ve got to get that extra eight hours of work in there somewhere, the question is how? Do you work really, really hard for the four days? Do you work longer hours each day? Do you stick to your usual ways of working? Do you abandon all breaks? Do you eat lunch at your desk?

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The answer to all of these is – drum roll – hell, no. Let’s dig into a little more detail. 

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Everything you’re about to read is based on first-hand experience from the team at comundo and the insights we’ve been so lucky to glean from Pernille Garde Abilgaard, the Nordic’s leading authority on the four-day working week, and Bo Kønskov Hansen, CEO of The Institute for a 4-day Workweek and partner at Abtion, a company that has been working with a four-day week since 2019. 

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*We work a four-day workweek but receive a five-day week salary. 

It’s more work. Just not that kind of work

When we tell people about our setup, we’re often asked if we exhaust ourselves by working harder for less time or if we work longer hours each day and whether that cancels out the possible benefits of a four-day week. 

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The answer is, well, yes and no. We work hard, we work intensively – but we work differently. And, most importantly, we do not exhaust ourselves. To succeed with a four-day week the most important thing you must do is realise that the way you’re (probably) working now, won’t work for the four-day workweek. 

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We had to unlearn everything we knew about our typical working day and learn an entirely new routine. One that would help us work more efficiently and effectively than we ever had done before. This includes learning how to truly focus; how to unwind; how to prioritise; and how to delegate. We had to learn new norms around meetings, emails (who needs CC anyway) and our day-to-day working environment.

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Let’s look at how we do that. 

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You’re not as efficient as you think you are

Key to a successful four-day workweek is realising (and accepting) that what you think makes you efficient, probably doesn’t. There are five common myths about efficiency. These are:

• I am efficient when I solve multiple tasks at once
• I need to be available on email (and other platforms) all day long
• Meetings are an effective work tool
• All working hours are equally valuable
• Breaks are useless

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Unfortunately, these ways of working have become engrained in us and it’s hard to press reset and adopt a completely different way of working. But it can be done. 

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Don’t multitask

Instead of multitasking, we take one task, and break it down into smaller, more specific tasks, e.g. ‘Work on the project’ becomes ‘Write the introduction to the project’, and ‘Send assets for approval’, etc. This gives us a sense of accomplishment and allows us to focus on one larger task, albeit in smaller chunks. It’s about minimising energy wasted on task switching, and instead dedicating time to each task and being strict about the task’s allotted time. 

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Rethink emails

It’s pretty much automatic for all of us, in and out of work. Just a quick check to see if Paul from procurement replied to your request. It’s almost a break in itself. But it needs to stop. Studies have shown that scheduling time for email checking and limiting it to a few times a day reduces stress and can increase productivity. 

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On top of this, forget about CC. This can be tricky, depending on your company, but nine times of out ten, CC’ing someone on an email is pointless. If they’re needed? Include them. If they’re not? Don’t. And, whatever you do, do not email your colleagues outside of working hours. Schedule them, draft them, write a reminder to do it the next day – just don’t send them outside of the working day. 

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This meeting could have … you know the rest

Meetings. God only knows we’ve all been in too many of them. Some of them we needed to be in, but a lot of them we didn’t. Let’s look at some stats. 

• 65% of people said meetings keep them from completing their own work 
• 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient
• 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking
• 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together

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Ugh.

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At comundo, we’ve limited our meeting lengths to 20 or 45 minutes (and we’re even talking about trialling a 10-minute max). We keep participants to a minimum, make sure there is a very clear description that includes the expected outcome, and we don’t swap weekend plans before we get down to the actual work.  Yes, there are times we need longer, like workshops or company-wide presentations, but most of the time, it’s key people, cut to the chase and then get back out and work. 

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Define – and stick to – your working hours

A little contentious, maybe, as individually we might be more productive at different times of the day, but if you want to work a four-day week successfully, the whole company should agree on and stick to regular working hours. Of course, if you need to pick up kids you can work in the evening to catch up – but you do not email, Slack, book meetings or do anything else that might disturb your colleagues during their downtime. 

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Have a break

Sometimes it can be hard to stop what you’re doing and take a step back, but you can’t refute the science. 

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Image from Microsoft's Human Factor Lab (which sounds dystopian but really isn't)

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Taking a break – a real break – helps your brain recover and recharge ready for the next task. When do we take breaks? Well, that’s a great segue into the mother of the four-day week … time management. 

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Pomodoro time, aka time management

Ah, Pomodoro. Pomodoro time, or Pomodoro technique, is a time management method from the late 1980s. 

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The gist is that you break work into 30-minute intervals; spend 25 minutes focusing on a task and spend five minutes on a break. Not just a lean-back-and-sigh break, but a get-up-and-do-something-else break. Stretch. Chat. Make a cup of tea. Go for a (short) walk. Then do another 30-minute interval. And repeat. 

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We find this method of time management crucial for a successful four-day workweek. It provides the framework we need in order to bust all the aforementioned myths about efficiency. We started with one hour of Pomodoro time but upped that to two (from 9.30 to 11.30) after a couple of months. It gives us 100 minutes of intense focus time, during which we are far more productive than we would be without it. No meetings, no calls, no chit-chat. Just hard work. 

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After lunch, we open up for meetings and a more flexible schedule that your particular role might need. 

Is that it?

Nearly, but not quite. A 25-minute Pomodoro interval needs structure, and that structure comes in the shape of defining and prioritising tasks. We use five basic rules for prioritisation. These are: 

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Be specific

Avoid generalisations and be more concrete. 

Do: Write copy needed for campaign assets

Don’t: Work on the campaign

Begin tasks with a verb

This helps give you direction. 

Do: Add new campaigns to the prioritisation sheet

Don’t: Campaign prioritisation sheet

Break down large tasks

Making things manageable makes them easy to approach – and conquer. 

Do: Create two slides covering campaign results

Don’t: Prepare presentation 

Stay realistic

Don’t overestimate yourself – it’s better to build a shorter achievable list you can accomplish than a long overwhelming one that looks good, but will only spill into the next day, and the next and the next

‍Set priorities

That’s right; prioritise your priorities. Put critical tasks at the top, no matter how boring they are. That way you can spend your peak Pomodoro time getting them over and done with. 

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Using these rules allows us to create a to-do list we can manage, and sticking to that list, in the order in which it’s made, allows us to work efficiently and effectively as a team. 

And that’s how we do it

It takes time and it takes effort, but it’s absolutely worth it.

We meet targets, we achieve our goals, we work well together as a team and the extra day off that we earn gives us the time we need to recharge and recuperate.  

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Would we change it? Hell, no.