Short weeks

A phenomenon I’ve observed across multiple organizations is that short weeks are not as awesome as I expect. A nice Monday holiday turns a four day week into a stressful compression of five days worth of things to do.

At USDR, we came up with a couple of techniques that I thought made it a lot better. The approach isn’t hard, but it does require cross-org coordination:

Don’t reschedule your meetings from the day off (w/ a few exceptions)
Shorten 45 minute or longer meetings by ~15 minutes for the rest of the week
Make sure it’s really obvious that leadership is doing those two things

I think the first bullet is the most challenging in practice because staff meetings or other organizational meetings feel important, but it helps the most because it avoids packing the rest of the week.

There are some exceptions–for example, if you have a monthly meeting, it probably makes sense to reschedule it instead of letting it go eight weeks before you have the next one. Generally, I’d suggest canceling meetings that will happen at least once in the next two weeks or thereabouts–anything weekly would be canceled.

You might ask: what about 1:1s? I think there are a few ways you can go here, but the easiest is to avoid scheduling a lot of 1:1s on Mondays or Fridays.

The second bullet is pretty straightforward, but a few remarks. First, it helps a lot with any meetings that do need to get rescheduled later in the week by reducing the overall burden. Second, by adjusting other non-rescheduled meetings, it also creates a little bit of breathing room to fit in the extra non-meeting work that may be incompressible.

One thing that both the first two bullets have in common is that they show that the organization is taking seriously the idea of making a four-day week have a proportional amount of work, rather than just piling the same effort into less time. Shortening meetings on other days was particularly effective as a signal at USDR because we had a couple of regular team or team lead wide meetings, and so everyone could see we took it seriously when they got shortened. (We also would post the principles in Slack every time we had a four day week, which also helped a lot in creating awareness–but the key to it sticking in the culture is doing visible things.)

I’m not sure how easily this can be imported into an existing organization since so much work is cross-team at larger orgs, but for a smaller org, I think getting it seeded into the culture early seems like a net quality of life win. It was for us at USDR for sure–it made my four day weeks significantly less stressful!