An alternative workweek for founders

While recovering from a shoulder injury last year, I fell into a schedule of working for two days, followed by a day of rest.

I didn’t have much of a choice: anything more would worsen the pain and lead to a mandatory break from computers altogether.

But to my surprise, I noticed some key benefits over the 5-day workweek I was used to:

• My energy for work (and life) skyrocketed.
• I stopped wasting time distracted by “busy” work.
• And, I haven’t burned out a single time since.

Using the 2-day workweek, I was able to build Probe in 2 weeks — a tool that automates customer discovery interviews for founders. Today, I’m able to ship multiple features within each 2-day “week," and I’ve never felt so consistently motivated to work on anything in my life.

I figured I might be onto something.

A Brief History of the 5-Day Workweek

The 5-day workweek isn’t rooted in optimizing human productivity. Yet, most of us with control over our work schedules still live by its rules.

Here’s a summary of how it came to be:

• In hunter-gatherer times, the average working day was less than 5 hours long.
• During the industrial revolution (~1760–1900), the typical factory worker might work for 16 hours a day, 6 days a week.
• In the early 1900s, Henry Ford popularized the idea of the modern 5-day, 40-hour workweek as a way to improve worker’s lives and increase their productivity.

In other words, a schedule of 8-hour days, 5 days a week was introduced to increase the productivity of physical laborers. It wasn't designed with knowledge work in mind.

What You Work On > Hours Worked

For modern workers with control over their workdays, it doesn’t make sense to inherit this unsupported, outdated work schedule.

This is especially true when you consider that – for most modern workers – time put in doesn’t scale linearly to their output.

For example, two engineers can put in the same 100 hours into building a new feature, yet:

• The first gets used by only a handful of users.
• The second produces millions of dollars in value over its lifetime.

Given that what you work on is much more important than hours worked, it makes better sense to optimize for decision-making and clarity of thought. Otherwise, you risk grinding out more hours on the wrong thing.

The 2-Day Workweek

Instead of inheriting an outdated work schedule, find the one that maximizes your output, cognitive abilities and well-being.

And out of any I’ve tried, my favorite schedule is the 2-day workweek.

Using it, you work for 2 days, then take a day off from work completely. Rinse and repeat.

It still amounts to about 37 hours of work a week — a hardly noticeable dip from the typical 40 we’re used to. But it leads to a massive boost in output, focus, well-being, clarity of thought, and a host of other key benefits.

The Benefits of a 2-Day Workweek

I fell into the 2-day work-week as a way to deal with my shoulder injury. But I was pleasantly surprised by all the other benefits that came along with it:

1. Clarity of thought. Frequent 1-day weekends let me “zoom out” and find higher-impact ways to spend the coming days than I was otherwise planning. Each day off easily pays itself back in hours saved avoiding tasks that should have never been a priority.
2. Focus. With the old schedule, I was rarely able to engage in deeply focused work. Now, it’s my default. As soon as I sit down, my eyes and mind are glued to the screen. It’s pretty rare that I’ll open YouTube or social media on workdays, because I know I have a limited time to work.
3. Life fulfillment and happiness. When you work 5 days or more in a row, work becomes your life. When work is frustrating or unfulfilling, life as a whole seems to darken too. Taking frequent rest days creates a regular reminder of all the other fulfilling aspects in life, and helps you become less dependent on work for happiness.

If you have control over your schedule, you may be doing yourself a disservice by sticking to a 5-day workweek. Instead, experiment with different approaches to find the one that maximizes your energy, clarity of mind and productivity.

As founders, we're so comfortable experimenting with our products. Why not experiment with our working traditions too?

If you liked this article, I think you’ll like Probe. You can use it to find and interview people in your target market, with just 10 minutes of setup. → www.heyprobe.com

(I use it each week to make sure I'm spending my 37 hours building the right features.)