Thursday is the New Friday with Joe Sanok

Joe Sanok is an entrepreneur, keynote and TEDx speaker, business consultant, and podcaster. He has the #1 podcast for counselors, The Practice of the Practice Podcast. With interviews with Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas, and Lewis Howes.

He is a writer for PsychCentral and has been featured on the Huffington Post, Forbes, GOOD Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Yahoo News. He is also an author of five books. His newly released book is called Thursday is the New Friday.

“If I give myself one fewer day per week, what naturally happens is I do the best work with the best tasks.” – Joe Sanok

Episode Highlights:

The history of the seven-day week and 40-hour workweek
Tips in implementing a productive four-day workweek
How to optimize your weekend to help your brain rejuvenate for the coming week
Three questions to your employees that will help them evolve within the business
What are Sprint Types (And the two different factors of it)
Examples of case studies in neuroscience that shows how slowing down unlocks hidden creativity and productivity

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I am Jaime Masters, and today on the show we have my very good friend Joe Sanok. You can check him out at practiceofthepractice.com, or joesanok.com. His new book is called Thursday Is The New Friday, we should all agree with. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Joe.

Joe: Oh, Jaime, it's like the highlight of my day. Every time I hang out with you, it's so much fun.

Jaime: And when you call them at the host at the beginning, it always works better. So, thank you. He runs a podcast, too, guys, so that might be why he knows this. So, I love how much you care about the non-hustle culture. You always have. And so, I'm assuming that's the premise of the book, but tell me it in your own words.

Joe: Yeah. I think hustle culture is so dangerous and dumb, because we see people that are bragging about how they worked every Saturday since they were 14, or "I worked 60 hours." It's like, "You're putting your energy into things that just don’t matter." And if you preserve that energy, we know from the brain research that it actually will help you get more done faster, and you're going to be working on the correct things, rather than just kind of spinning your wheels and having all these things that, really, you shouldn't be doing.

Jaime: Well, you said something about where we came from, the 40-hour work week. Tell me about that, because we weren't meant to be sitting down for eight hours straight, like trying to think. It sucks.

Joe: Yeah. When I was first writing this book, I started with just a whiteboard. So, I had the general premise. You know, you're putting your book proposal and all that. And I said, "If I was just starting with new eyes, what would I want to know, if we're talking about the four-day work week?"
And I thought, well, "Where does time as we know it even come from? Where does the 40-hour work week come from?" And so, I went down this whole historical wormhole, and we have to go back thousands of years to the Babylonians to actually understand this.
And the Babylonians, they looked up into the sky. They saw the sun, the moon. They saw Earth below them. They saw Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. So, they saw seven different celestial things, and they said, "We should have a seven-day week." The Romans, they had a 10-day week. The Egyptians had an eight-day week. There's literally nothing in nature that points to a seven-day week. We could just as easily have a five-day week and have 73 of those in a year.
So, let's just start with the seven-day week. It was the power brokers of Babylon thousands of years ago that just completely made it up. A year makes sense; a month loosely makes sense, with the lunar cycles; a day makes sense; but a week doesn’t.
So, fast-forward to the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. It was the farmer's schedule, whether or not you were a farmer. And people were just working all the time. So, our great grandparents or great-great grandparents, they were working all the time.
So, then, in 1926, when Henry Ford started the 40-hour work week, to sell more cars, it took off. It was a big step up for evolution. But his whole goal was to sell more cars to Ford employees, because his idea was people aren't going to buy a car to get to Ford faster, but if they have a weekend, they're going to want to get out of there. They're going to want to do fun things. And it worked.
And so, this thing that we think is so engrained was brand-new for our grandparents. Our parents were then being raised by the "greatest generation." That was the first generation of kids to be raised by 40-hour-work-week people. So, we're like two generations into this experiment. Even the Russians in the late 1800s switched to a 5-day week. And so, it's like these things that we just think are normal are completely not.
So, in the 1980s and '90s, we start to see the rise of casual Fridays; we see TGIF on ABC with Erkel and Full House, and it becomes part of our norm. And Fridays really become the slacker days at work. We see that instead of having a birthday party, or wedding shower, or baby shower outside of work, people start doing it on Fridays. It's when we do cheesy teambuilding activities, or vision quests within our teams. And Friday has just become way more the weekend than throughout the week.
And then, the pandemic hits, and all of this gets disrupted, and we see that the way we thought we had to work, we don’t have to. This whole idea that it's this way, it has to stay this way, completely shifts. And now, we're seeing this great resignation of people who realize that they've been working for industrialists that just see them as butts on a chair. They're just part of the assembly line. They are a machine to be plugged in. And people are saying, "No longer. I'm not going to do that anymore."

Jaime: Okay, this was a magnificent history lesson. I really appreciate that. I did not know that it was only two generations back, at all. And like you said, it wasn’t even meant for that same type of work. Like when you're in the farm, you have to work that much, because they need you to. But when you're doing, especially, the thought process that we're doing for most of our work nowadays, I'm assuming it's super not conducive to trying to sit down and work a certain number of hours, right?

Joe: Yeah. I even just had a realization. When I left my full-time job to go do the world of business and podcasting, my own parents were like, "What are you doing? You're leaving a full-time job with a state pension?" They're like, "You are crazy. You have a family."
I'm thinking about that first generation in 1926. What their parents said when they started a 40-hour work week. They're like, "You're not going to work 10 to 14 hours a day, you 40-hour slackers." So, we've dealt with these shifts before, and we're dealing with one of those shifts again, out of that industrialist era into what I would name the evolutionary era. The business world is now all about evolving, adapting, and becoming something new over and over again.

Jaime: Thank goodness. Embrace change, right? Well, the pandemic has sort of made us – I mean, half the people working from home weren't getting crap done anyway, right? And we realized, "Hey, it's still going pretty well for some of the businesses." Some of them are not, for sure, but to be able to get the same amount of work done in the less amount of time is kind of a big deal. But you've always been kind of like that, haven't you?

Joe: Yeah. What's interesting is to think back. Where did the germination for this book come from? Sometimes it's in upward trajectory, and you kind of build over time. For me, it was really a return home. I remember I was at my freshman orientation at college.
And so, I'm a high-schooler about to go into college, and we go off for this weekend. I'm meeting with the academic advisor, with a small group of students, and they say, "Okay. It's time to make your schedule for this coming fall." And I raised my hand, and I said, "So, do I have to take classes on Friday?" and they're like, "No, this is college. Do whatever you want." So, throughout all of undergraduate and graduate school, I never had a Friday class except for one semester, when there was a mandatory class.
So, then, when I had my first job, I went into it and said, "I'd like to work four days a week instead of five," when they offered it to me. And they said okay. And then, it took off within that business, where other people started doing a four-day week.
But then, I entered into my regular career, and had a private practice, or the podcast; was quickly working 50 plus hours a week. And it really wasn’t until 2015 when I left that full-time job, and had full autonomy of my schedule, that that first summer I said, "You know what, I'm going to try that four-day work week again."
And June of 2015 was the best financial month I had ever had. July was better than June. August was better than July. So, then, when I reflected back on that three-month experiment, that then became a permanent part of how I ran things.
And so, I then began teaching other people how do you do a four-day work week, or fewer; get more effective; using the neuroscience; actually get more done when you are working, but then have slowing down be the one thing that actually makes your brain optimized, going into that week.

Jaime: Yes. Okay, so, one of my friends literally just did this. He did it last summer, and then this summer, because of the pandemic, to a four-day work week, with all of his employees. He has about 30. And he literally just posted the other day on Facebook, going, "I'm going to continue this," because nobody would assume that when you did your test, you would be making more money. Usually, they have to try and go, "Well, it's worth making less money." How did you make more money during that time?

Joe: Yeah, I think one of the factors that we know – so, Parkinson's Law says that work expands to the time given. And we also know that the other side of Parkinson's Law is the natural bloating of a company. And so, when you are reigning things in, you're doing some really important things. First and foremost, you're dropping the ball.
A lot of us perfectionists, achiever types, go-getters, big ideas people, we want to go after every single idea that we have. But the reality is our businesses are not our baby. They are not our children. They're not this thing that we've fostered over the years. Sometimes we need to kill our child – not our actual child, our business. And so, by actually cutting back, it makes us cut the fat. So often, we've been putting time into things that we just shouldn't be putting time into.
So, if I give myself one fewer day per week, what naturally happens is I do the best work with the best tasks. So, maybe my trash starts to overflow. Maybe I forget to vacuum my office. Maybe there's other things like blogging, that I don’t do as much. And that reveals to me something, that maybe that's not the highest calling for me within this role. Maybe there's people that would love to clean my office, that would like to get paid for it. Maybe there's people that love copywriting, and would love to write those blog posts, and I just give the inspiration.
You, then, week after week, preserve your best energy for your best tasks. So, then, that allows you to do that highest-level work, and then create a team that's supporting you, so you can still do the other work, but at a much lower cost. So, you're multiplying your time across an entire team.

Jaime: Yes. You grow your business also, because it doesn’t always have to be – I actually have a lot of my clients test Fridays off, or even if it's every other week, or once a month, or just something. That way, it sort of gives them a bit of a challenge. Give us some tips on how we actually do that, because it's one thing to say, and it's another thing to actually start moving things around and saying no, and all that stuff.

Joe: Yeah. So, the big shift in how we think, and even how books are written now is: The old industrialist way was, "Here's the five productivity tips for blah, blah, blah, and it's a blueprint, and you're either in or you're out," whereas the new evolutionary way of thinking is, "We want to experiment. We want to test. We want to pull out from a menu, and then learn over time."
And so, a handful of the tips that we can talk about is, first, if you have a traditional type of business, you want to get together some small teams of three to six people that have the same job role. And so, you don’t want to have someone from marketing and from sales and from other things on this team. You want to try to have a handful of people that are similar in their job role.
Then, you want to look at what are the KPIs that you already are judging them on. We're not starting from scratch. We're saying, "How do you judge their performance right now? What's a key performance indicator? Is it sales? Is it money in? Is it customer satisfaction? Is it the amount of Instagram posts they're putting out there? How are we judging if those are effective?" So, you're then doing that work.
Then, that team is going to have the conversation around boundaries. So, what are the boundaries that are going to be on this team? Because it's going to all fall apart if Jim from accounting sends an email on Wednesday night at 9:00 and half the team reads it, and half the team shows up Thursday morning feeling out of the loop. Everyone's going to go back to the old way if we don’t have some clear boundaries.
So, we want to have some hard boundaries. These are the things that we say we are not going to do this as a team, and then we're going to have some soft boundaries, that we're going to say, "This is sort of aspirational."
So, then, we're going to go through our experiment. We want a minimum of two months, so that we have some time to go through to iterate and to see trends, because if you just do a week or two, it doesn’t give you enough data to actually say is this working. You want to do a maximum of three months. So, two to three months that you're doing the experiment.
Every Monday morning or whatever your first day of the week is, that team is going to sit down together without the supervisor to first talk openly about how did the boundaries go. Did someone send an email at 9:00 on Wednesday? Was that inappropriate?
Maybe that person gets really important data every Wednesday at 8:30 p.m., and the team needs that for Thursday morning. Well, then, we just need to adjust our boundaries to say, "Everybody check your email at 9:00 on Wednesdays from 9:00 to 9:15 on Wednesdays, we all need to check our email." So, we're just realigning our boundaries to make them smarter over time.
And then, we also want to get some qualitative data. What are some of the things you got to do because you didn’t work Fridays? "Oh, I went to my son's baseball practice for the first time in two years. It just made him so happy, and we went out for ice cream." We want to gather those stories, so that we can speak to both the data, but also the heart side of what is happening.
And then, we want to look at those KPIs on a weekly basis. So, say it's sales. Are sales up two percent? Are they down five percent? Where are they for this last week? If they're up, how do we sustain that? If they're down, what are a couple action items we're taking this week to try to pull those back up?
So, then, after the first month, we're going to do a 360 review of this; get all of that head and hear together, where we have some of those stories, what happened; we also have some of the data to show what's been happening. So, we're making the case for a four-day work week.
And then, at the end, we're going to bring all of those 360 reviews together into one mega report that we can give to our supervisor so that they can defend that to the owner, or to you, or whoever, wherever you fall in that chain.
And so, by doing this, what you're doing is you're experimenting. You're saying, "Honestly, this is what worked. These are the things that don’t work. People need access to their passwords 14/7. We need to have someone on our team giving access to passwords." Or, "We need to shift in this way, so that people aren't logging in, in the middle of the night, and needing access to their passwords."
So, you're then revealing a lot of the problems within the business, as well, because you're shortening things up.

Jaime: Okay. And it's all in the book, so in case anybody didn’t take notes for that, that's awesome. A lot of companies will come back and talk about culture, but what you're saying is, "If we can make people just happier in general, right, by not missing the kids' game and doing things that are really important to them, along with keeping up with the KPIs, because of course that's what they business owner cares about," then, you can sort of get the best of both worlds, and everybody can be kinda happy.
So, what about for, especially, owners or habitual overachievers that are like, "I don’t feel good about myself unless I am busy," you know what I mean? That restless, "Oh, at least I'm checking my emails. I'm doing something, or writing one email." All that fragmented stuff to make us feel better, I'm sure you have thoughts on that.

Joe: Yeah, I have a whole section about the inappropriate overvaluing of work and undervaluing of fun in our lives. A lot of times, we use work to overcompensate for things that we should be working out personally. So, "I can't be with myself. I get bored with myself. I don't know what to do with my life. I have no life. I don't know how to have conversations with people." There's all these things that we then default to work because we just don’t have a life.
And so, one of the biggest things you can do as an achiever type is to schedule things into your life that you know are going to help you have fun, help you have new experiences, because these things aren't for the purpose of helping the business, but they will. If you are a more creative person; if you are a more grounded person; if you're more whole and centered in who you are, where you feel like you have less to prove to the world, so you're not going to just achieve, achieve, achieve, that's going to actually be better for your business.
And so, figuring out a few of those non-negotiables that you can schedule in – so, for example, every Wednesday night I have an improv troupe that I'm a part of, and I laugh harder than any other part of the week. I do not need to do much of an ab workout because of how much I laugh. It's ridiculous to make other people that are ridiculous laugh. I just love it. It lights me up in a way that very few things do.
That's in my schedule, and that's one of those hard boundaries. My parents, every week, come watch my kids. It's in their schedule. I make sure it happens. I show up for my team. And then, I'm going to do it, because it's in my schedule.
So, I think one thing that we can do is to do some experiments for our weekends. And so, to add one thing, and to remove one thing. So, first, we want to add something into our weekend that is going to give us more life than maybe it should. So, there might be a novel on your nightstand that's sat there for months, and you know you just want to read it, but you can't give yourself the emotional permission to do that on the weekend. This weekend, schedule two hours to do it.
Tell your kids, "Listen, I want to read this book. It's going to make me so happy. Make yourself some green tea or just go sit wherever you're comfortable to read it." Maybe it's that you schedule with that friend that every time you see them, you say, "We should get together," but then you never get together with them. Or maybe it's just a hike by yourself, or with your family. Trying something new that adds to your weekend then gives you some data.
Then, the other thing is removing one thing from your weekend. And so, maybe you do have a coffee date with a friend for Saturday morning, and every time you leave that conversation, you feel like trash. You know that person is toxic. I give you permission to not hang out with toxic friends. You're allowed to say, "I don’t want to hang out with this person. They don’t make me feel good." You're allowed to say to the neighbor kid, "Hey, this weekend, would you mind helping out with my yard?" or getting groceries delivered, so you get half of a Saturday back.
Figuring these things out from an experimental mindset helps you figure out what, for you, you enjoy. So, maybe you think that having the neighbor kid mow your lawn is going to be mind-blowing, but you're like, "Wait, that was kind of meditative, and I didn’t have to talk to my kids for two hours. That was awesome. I missed doing that this weekend." So, then, you learn, "Okay, taking that off my plate isn't that big a deal, but that groceries, I did not have to go get groceries. That was amazing. I'm going to give myself permission to do that."
So, over time, you're then figuring out whether or not you have the three-day weekend. How do you optimize your weekend to help your brain actually rejuvenate for that coming week?

Jaime: You and I think very similarly. I'm like, "Oh, let's try this. Let's do this. Oh, that sucked. Oh, this is better." I have mom dates once a week when I get to do – and kids are not allowed to talk to me. They already know that. I'm allowed to pick whatever I want. But what I've found, especially in the experimental mode on the stuff that I do like, like networking or have – I plan in every week.
I either have a coffee or go on a walk with a friend, or try and do stuff like that. Then, I started putting too many of those. So, I wasn’t working very much at all, but I was definitely overfilling my schedule with fun stuff. So, where is that line of when, "Now I feel overworked in my fun time"?

Joe: Yeah. I think so often we've been given that industrialist message that at some point as an adult, you're going to feel like you made it. You're going to know what you're doing. You're going to know the perfect method.
The thing is, Jaime, is who are today is probably completely different than who you were six months, a year, five years ago. And so, your personal needs in regards to how much you socialize, how much you do business, are going to change, and that's where we want to just maintain that awareness for ourselves, to say, "How do I know if things are off a little bit?"
So, even with my daughters, I'll say to them, like yesterday, Tuesday night, "All right, we have nothing on the agenda at all. Here's some ideas I have. We can go for a hike. We can go for a bike ride. We can go bike down and get ice cream. We can just hang out here and play Mario Cart. We can play music." And so, they just said, "We just want a night in," and so, we played some Mario Cart. I got out the guitar and hand drums, and we just played music together. And then, they were like, "We're sick of this. We want to go play with our toys." It's like, "Okay."
So, even being in tune on a daily basis for what you as an adult need and what your kids need, to me, that's something that we're learning over time, rather than saying, "I've achieved this perfect schedule. Now I don’t have to do anything." And that just reeks of industrialism.

Jaime: That is how my brain has worked for a long period of – yeah, I feel like I'm just learning how to get over that, because I was like, "Solve the problem and then it's good. Solve the problem, right?" and you're like, "Wait, it stopped," or listening to myself and going, "Oh, that's too much fun." We have big problems. But it does. It starts to be like, "Ooh, I'm serving this for another way, and it's not serving me, and now I have to shift that, either," which means that we're never actually solving our problems, or just sort of like shifting.
And new things sort of pop up as you start going with the flow, which for an analytical brain, is kind of difficult sometimes. I feel like you have to get in your body more than just your brain, because as soon as I'm here, then I'm like, "Well, then I do this, and then I do this, and then I do this," right? And I get in that mode, instead of paying attention to how I'm feeling around it. Your kids are probably good at this. I'm not so much. You got any tips?

Joe: I think there still are methods that will work over time. They're just going to adjust. I mean, the same way that my kids who are 7 and 10 now, I can't treat them like they were when they were 3 and 5, or 3 and 6. There's adjustments, but there's still consistencies. So, even with kids, one thing I think around boundaries is: When they leave childhood, they're going to leave with maybe three major things they really remember from what I taught them. I can't give them a list of, "Here's the 25 things entering into adulthood."
So, if I only had three major things to give these two girls, what would they be? For me, right now, it's like, two girls, I want to understand consent; I want them to understand that they own their bodies; that people don’t get to just touch their bodies when they want to; that they don’t have to be guilted into those things.
So, that teaches me as a dad what I get to do and what I don’t get to do. Just last night, my 7-year-old, I wanted to go give her a hug. She just got home from school. And she goes, "I don’t want a hug right now." That means that I don’t get to guilt her into giving her father a hug, if I want consent to be part of what she learns.
And so, other things like having conversations with anyone. I want them to have the verbal skills to be able to just chat it up with anybody. To me, that's one of the best things to help you be successful in the world. Sure, you got to learn to write, and you got to be able to read, and do basic things like that. But to have a conversation, that's something a lot of people can't do.
And so, the other day, some of my best friends, Paul and Diane, came over. And my 10-year-old, she sat down at the island in the kitchen next to Paul, and said, "So, how was your week? Did you have a nice week?" It was like, "Oh my word. She's just chatting it up with an adult." And so, the behavior that I have, and the boundaries, and the pace, and how stressed I let my kids be, is all based on where do I want them to be when they leave childhood.

Jaime: What's so huge about that, though, is how "intangible and non-KPI-ish" we can see that as, but how impactful and important it is, especially for their growth as a human. Just because, like you said, the industrialness of what we're supposed to do by getting an ROI and achieving as much as possible, and squeezing the energy juice to get whatever we can, we miss so many things that are so much more important in actual life, because we're so used to producing things, which is tiring.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it applies to our businesses, too. So, moving from that industrialist model of people are hired for this one role; they stay in that role, or they become a supervisor they probably hate. That isn't the way that people want to work anymore. And so, for years, with practice of the practice, there's been three questions that I ask my staff and that helps them evolve within the business.
The first is, "What do you love doing right now that you absolutely want to keep doing?" Second, "What do you hate doing right now that you want to get rid of?" And third, "Where are growing, and where do you want more training to do something new?"
And so, thinking about Sam, my chief marketing officer, she started as just doing kind of those Instagram quote cards with some branding, and just finding fancy quotes and putting them out there. Then, she's like, "What if we did a magazine, like a digital magazine?" Like, great. "I don't know how to do that, do you?"
And she's like, "Sort of, but can I get some training in it?" Okay, awesome. She took on the show notes for the podcast, and then, eventually, she said, "I kind of hate doing the show notes." So, then, she hired the person to take it over. She trained the person. She monitored the person until she fully could hand that off, because she knew if that person quit or failed, or left, it was going to come back to her, and she didn’t want that, because she hated it. And so, she was the one that was most vested to take it off of her plate. It's not more work for me to do. It's more work for her to do, to effectively take it off her plate.
But over time, she said, "I want to learn video editing and get better at that," so she learned all those fancy video editing. And then, she realized we're making beautiful videos but not very many people are watching them. And so, I put her through this YouTube for Bosses course, where she could then learn how do you market videos, how do you get them out there.
And so, then people know, "If I hate the job that I'm in, in two years, I know that Joe supports me moving into something else that is within the business, or evolves beyond where the business is now." So, we're an organism that grows and shapes, and grows with our audience and our staff and our interests, rather than "Here's the one thing that we're locked into forever."

Jaime: Evolution. Who knew? We can adapt and change and learn new things. And that's, a lot of times, how we feel better. I mean, your team just seems happy. You're a happy guy anyway, but you know what I mean? Your team just seems like they care and they're happy overall. It emanates from them, which is kind of rare, especially for a 40-hour work week, typical type of mindset which a lot of people have. I know you do not.
But in your book, I know you talked about Sprint Types. What are Sprint Types?

Joe: Yeah, so, similar to different personality types – so, we may have heard of the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs, things like that, where when you learn your personality type, it helps you to be more effective in business and in life, because you're like, "Oh, I'm an Enneagram 3 Achiever, with a 4-wing. I'm going to naturally do things that are achievement-oriented. I got to keep that in check." Well, also say, "Hey, that's awesome."
So, same way like that, we have sprint types. So, oftentimes, we have heard, "Go Sprint, go Batch," and people try it, and they're like, "That just didn’t work for me. I don't know why it didn’t work," and then they feel like they're some sort of bad businessperson. They internalize it. But the reality is, the research that's emerging shows that there's actually different sprint types, and when we compare a sprint type with ourselves, we can actually get more done in a shorter period of time.
So, there's two different factors to your sprint type. The first is what type of work you're doing, and then, the second part is when you're doing it. And so, the first one is the Time Block Sprinter. So, this is a person that over a period of time is working on one particular task. And so, John Lee Dumas, for example, is a great example of this, where he does a billion interviews in one day. He just batches them back-to-back-to-back.
So, that's somebody that they are Time Block Sprinter. They do one task over and over and over. They get into that flow. Whereas there's other people that they need more variety. They are a Task-Switch Sprinter. So, this is not a multi-tasker, where you're doing a bunch of things. That is a myth, that multitasking actually works. So, this is saying, for the next 20 to 30 minutes, "I'm going to work on this task, then the next 20 to 30 minutes I'm going to work on another task." So, then, you know exactly what you're achieving in that time.
For people that have more of a kind of squirrel mindset, they might even want to shorten it to 10-minute sprints, to say, "Okay, for 10 minutes, I'm going to kill it in email. I'm going to go to all of my top-level emails, and I'm going to just rock that out." And so, you're really focusing in on your sprints, but you're having variety throughout it. So, that's the first part.
The second part is when do you do it. So, an Automated Sprinter is someone that puts that on repeat on a specific day of the week or day of the month. It's just on repeat. It's blocked out. That's the day I do interviews. That's the day I write the book. So, for me, every single Thursday, I was working on Thursday Is The New Friday, because I knew on Tuesday and Wednesday I would get all of my big interviews, consulting, all of that done, and I would feel that relief, to have creativity.
I needed that creativity on the tail-end. Other people might want it at the front end of their week. And so, that's where you're having it just repeat itself; nothing else can get in your schedule.
Whereas in Intensive Sprinter is someone that needs to go away for their sprints. And so, I think of like Dr. Jeremy Sharp from the Testing Psychologist podcast. He goes and he gets an Airbnb every few months, and he's a task-switcher. So, he brings a bunch of different types of work. He does some podcast recordings; he looks at his media plan; he looks at all of his numbers; he does all of these things. But you make sure that that spot has some certain factors: That it's walking distance from a vegan restaurant; it has an outdoor space; he doesn’t have to really worry about parking.
So, these things that he says, "These are the factors that I need to have the most effective sprint." So, when we can figure out our sprint type from those two different quadrants, it helps us actually get more done when we're doing that work.

Jaime: It's so helpful, because I work with a lot of clients, and I'm a bit of a Batcher, but also a little ADD. And so, whenever I work with clients, I'll be like, "Oh, you've got to batch all the way through," and they're like, "I can't. I can't do that." You know what I mean? And so, I'll be like, "What sounds good, then?"
"I'll go away for like three days." Great. That sounds good. I had no idea that it was actually scientifically proven that we are – I mean, who knew. Of course we're different. And knowing what you are is kind of hugely important, because you sat me down for longer than 20 minutes, and I can't think unless it's an interview. It's the only thing I can endure that's longer than that. That's crazy.

Joe: There's so much crazy research coming out. So, the University of Illinois did this really interesting study on vigilance decrement. So, vigilance, how well you pay attention to something; decrement, breaking down over time. And so, they were looking at if our energy is like a glass of water, and you pour it out, and then, at the end of it, you just don’t have it; you've got to go to sleep or be done for the day. Again, that just means we can't optimize our day, and they wanted to challenge that.
And so, they brought these students in for this really interesting study, where they gave them a four-digit number. Say, it was 4312. Just a random number. They looked at a computer, and all sorts of different random numbers came up, and then, when their number came up, they had to hit a button.
So, for almost an hour, they're just sitting looking at these boring numbers. "Okay, 4312, there it is. 4312." They experienced vigilance decrement; meaning, at the end, they didn’t pay attention as well as they had at the beginning. Totally expected.
So, then, the second part of the study, they looked at the one-third mark, around the 20-minute mark. They give them a one-minute break. They said, "We put you on the wrong computer. Go hang out in the lobby." They didn’t have their phones. They didn’t have TV. Just one minute, just hang out for a minute. Come back, do the next third of the study.
At the two-thirds mark, they did another one-minute break, and then they finished the study. They experienced zero vigilance decrement, meaning, at the end of that hour, that they were paying attention just as well as they were at the beginning.
So, if we think from an evolutionary perspective, our brains are here to protect us, to keep us safe, to know if there's a tiger or a rhinoceros around the corner. And because of that, when you exit an environment and then you re-enter it, even for a minute, your brain is saying, "Okay, is this safe? Is this good?" and that vigilance is back. And so, you're better able to pay attention. And so, there's all these little kind of micro hacks that we can use to totally combat things like vigilance decrement.

Jaime: I love data. Okay. Like my daughter has ADD. I have ADD also, but it's interesting, because she's like, "I can't think for more than 10 minutes, but she wants a 30-minute break in between." You just said it could be one minute. So, that's really interesting.

Joe: It could be one minute. Yeah, just set a timer for nine minutes instead of ten; have her focus, and set the KPI for, "Okay, we're going to gamify this. How many pieces of homework can we get done? We're going to do nine minutes, and then we're going to take a one-minute break, and then" – yeah. Just gamify it. And not that that's going to solve it, but she may find, "Oh, my gosh, I got this all done in an hour of doing this, and then I can go have the rest of the day to do whatever I want."

Jaime: Well, that's what we did over the summer, because I paid them as a reward when they actually did it, because they were doing summer schoolwork. Yeah, that didn’t go so well, when I stopped paying them. They start school, and I'm like, "We're not going to pay you for the schoolwork you're already going to do." Yeah, that didn’t go over well.

Joe: Well, but what that shows is that there's actually an ability to do it, but that it's just a motivation issue more than a purely genetic issue, and that's –

Jaime: That's exactly what I said.

Joe: – in school and in business, it's like, "If you can't do it whether I give you a thousand dollars or a million dollars, it's just not an ability." But if you can do it, now it's a motivation issue, and figuring out – so, maybe for them, inserting a token economy that they can cash things in, and you and I can talk about all sorts of parenting stuff.

Jaime: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I test so many things, so, yes. I would love to chat about that, because it is. It's one of those things where you – it's the scientific process, where I'm like, "Well, I need to prove that she can do it herself, anyway," and this is for any entrepreneur, right? Like, can you even focus for that long, or is it physically not possible, and then you have to go to the doctor's and figure out what your levels are, just to make sure. When you start looking at some of that stuff.
But we get so – I should say "we" as a whole, but I get – it makes it so easy to be like, "Well, we're in an Instagram/TikTok culture right now." Of course none of us have – like our dopamine is totally messed up from going, "Ooh, it's quick," and to sit down and actually focus for a long period of time seems difficult, especially compared to what it used to be, when I was a kid.

Joe: Yeah. And the danger also, especially in parenting, is yes, you want to use those behavior modification systems at times, to adjust behavior, but cognitive behavioral therapy is something that we want it to be internal motivated at some point, because if an entire childhood it's star charts and things external of you, that then teaches that child that it's the external achievement that really is going to get you to do good behavior, not the internal rewards you feel.
And so, even with my girls, even if I'm doing some sort of system – so, I started a while back, this Dabby Doubloons, because they were into Jake and the Neverland Pirates. So, it was just poker chips. But they were having trouble with bedtime when they were younger. And so, we set some very clear measurables as to what equals what Dabby Doubloons. So, when I say it's quiet time, that means no more talking. If we hear talking or if you get out of bed, you set the rules, and then, in the morning, you can earn up to three Dabby Doubloons.
And then, how many Doubloons equal what? Well, we've got some different menu items, where the Dabby store is open. But once that behavior has changed inappropriate, if they're still always doing it for the Dabby Doubloons instead of, "Doesn’t it feel good to be rested?" Think how clear your brain is. You're not getting in trouble; you're not fighting with your sister. Doesn’t inside that feel good, just to be well-rested? That's where we want to tie it back, because that's going to be the long-term motivation, where it's not just based on some external achievement.

Jaime: Well, it's funny, because I'm like, "You need to gamify, entrepreneur everything, right?" because it's like, "I want to do" – right? Technically, we are working for money, as business owners, usually, and for good, or whatever we're doing in the world, which is awesome. But –

Joe: For good, or whatever.

Jaime: Whatever. Whatever your excited over. But when you look at what you're saying, and making sure that it changes into an inner game, I feel like that's what entrepreneurs are trying to do, too. We're trying to do it to feel good overall, so that way we don’t have to always have external circumstances. I interview millionaires, and they're like, "There's not enough money in the world to make me happy. Crap. Now what?" Right? So, how do we –

Joe: Well, I think that's that overvaluing of work, because we're saying if I – even if it's purely to impact the world, if I help a million people, and I see global issues change, or I provide water to a hundred thousand people, maybe you have some great good-for-the-world business, that's still not going to be enough if you're starting from a place of "I'm not okay with myself," which is why, for me, Michael Singer's work has been so helpful, with The Untethered Soul. He talks a lot about the Buddhist principles of avoidance of attachment.
Here's the butterfly that's the most beautiful butterfly I've ever seen. The rest of my life, I'm going to chase that metaphorical butterfly," or, "Here's a snake that just scared the crap out of me. Anything that looks like a snake, like an extension cord, I'm going to avoid." Those butterflies that we're chasing and those snakes that we're avoiding, that's the internal work to say, "How do I let those feelings move through me? How do I allow those really heavy feelings to go through, to name them," and say, "Yes, there are heavy things there."
When you can work that way, and then say, "I want to do good work in the world, but it's not just to fuel my ego," that's where I feel like there's a big shift for people, where they can actually do their best work, because they're not all wrapped up in it. They're not the blockade.

Jaime: I'm obsessed with Michael Singer also. I know, me and you have talked about this before. This other book, The Surrender Experiment, where the fact that he can go through his business living in a way that feels congruent and aligned, instead of going after what we're told we're supposed to go after, which is, again, the industrial approach like you were talking about; but it's so ingrained in us, in our parents.
It's just hard to get out of that, and that book is one of the only ones that I know of – but I need to have everybody read your book also – because the data, right? So, Surrender Experiment, the only reason why I felt that was such a good book is because he built a huge company. It wasn’t somebody that didn’t make any money – no offense to all of those books that are like, "I don’t make any money, but you should do this to feel aligned during your work day," and you're like, "No, I want both."
And so, having the data to be able to go, "Oh, actually enjoying my life invites not only a better business, but potentially even more money, also," is something that we haven't been sold that very much. We've been engrained in so many other things.

Joe: I was just on an interview earlier today, and a question was asked to me. And she said, "As entrepreneurs, we're always checking our emails on the weekend, and we're responding, and we're always working." And I just was like, "That sounds like the industrialist model. That's really strong in your head."
And I'm trying to not insult her, but it's like that is the hustle culture, that people feel like it has to be this way, and it just doesn’t. It doesn’t have to be that way. And actually, when I think about the challenges ahead of us as a society in the next 50 years, we're talking global warming. More pandemics. World issues. Race issues. Access to clean water. Things that have never even happened before. Do we want a burned-out and stressed-out society addressing those issues? Or do we want people to be their most creative, their most productive, their most healthy?
Because when I look back at 2019, pre-pandemic, I don’t think that's the best we can do. I think that we were pretty unhealthy, then. And so, to say, "Do we want to set ourselves up for the best future? Yes, because we have some major challenges ahead of us." And so, how do we do that? Well, we're not stressed out and burned out. We're actually creative and innovative, and able to address these issues from a place of groundedness.

Jaime: You gave me goose bumps. I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, hope is a really important thing, especially in the world that we're living in, and especially for people that feel like they have to check their email. It's a habit. And you can change. It's not like you've changed – especially entrepreneurs have really changed in their life, because they most likely had to.
I love entrepreneurship for smacking you in the face and making you realize things. And this is just another one of those things. It's just the way we were brought up, that can shift, and you can actually enjoy and not burn out, and still achieve things, because it doesn’t have to be an either/or, like you're saying. And that's why it's so important.

Joe: I think it's one of those things that as you experiment and set these hard and soft boundaries, those feel more normal than breaking those. And so, if I had to work on Friday, or if I had to do an evening appointment, as part of this media blitz around the book, there have been some evening appointments. There's been a couple interviews on Fridays. But that feels weird to me, because my boundaries have been such for so long that my regular schedule is the norm. And that's where we want to get to, where you're trying these things.
You're saying, "Okay, what if I didn’t check my email from Friday at 5:00 until Monday at 8:00?" Would the world fall apart? Would your business fall apart? If so, that's some good data that you've got a pretty shaky business going on. You need to figure something out, if that's going to be totally reliant on your presence.

Jaime: Oh, I have a female in my Master Mind who has an amazing, amazing business, but her boundaries are 10 hours a week of working. She's like, "One week I worked 15 hours. It felt like so much." I'm like, "Wow." You know what I mean? She's had this boundary. She's got small kids. She makes a ridiculous amount of money in 10 hours a week. And that's her boundary, and she just sticks with it. And like you said, you can retrain everything and feel like it's incongruent, and not do it, which is what we're going for in the long run.
I know we have to start wrapping up, but I will of course have you back on the show again, because you've already been on, and of course we have way more to talk about in general. But for the last question, besides getting the book, what is one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Joe: Yeah, I would say: Find where you're going to slow down in the coming week. Put it in your schedule. Add one thing, remove one thing from that, whether it's weekend or evening; because the way we typically live our lives is in reaction to the week we just had. We're running full tilt; we're working hard, we're taking the kids to soccer practice. And then, on the weekend, we're just dead. Or, we're running ragged again.
But it's all kind of looking backward in reaction, and I want people to look forward in preparation, where they can say, "What I'm doing this weekend, what I'm doing this evening, is setting me up for the best possible work days, because I'm relaxing so hard. I'm enjoying this book. I'm loving life. I'm just hanging out with the people that are special to me in my world." When you do that, you'll do better work, and you'll feel better on the inside.

Jaime: Yes. When you're well-resourced, you actually get way more done, and feel a million times better. Why would we not do this? All right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where do they get the book, and where do they know more about you?

Joe: Yeah. So, thursdayisthenewfriday.com is where. It has resources for where to get the book. You can get it at your local bookstore; you can get it online; wherever you get books. If you want it from Audible or digital copy, it's available everywhere. We have some extra bonuses over at thursdayisthenewfriday.com, if you buy five, 10, or 25 books, you can get access to those there as well. And yeah, just share it on social media, if you like it, and reach out. And I'd love to hear more about your experience with Thursday Is The New Friday.

Jaime: Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Joe. It's always a pleasure.

Joe: Jaime, thank you so much for having me.

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