Focused - 158: Humans First, with Rob Krecak

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Rob Krecak joins us to talk about the psychology behind email, the importance of communication norms, and tips from his experiences helping organizations move to a 4-day work week.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Great. We have a guest this week. Welcome to the show, Rob Kretchik. Yeah, thank you so much, David and Mike. Really appreciate the opportunity and looking forward to chatting with you guys.

Well, I haven't known Rob real long, but I did come across the Humans First, which is a consultancy. Rob basically works with people and companies to get them to transition to a four-day workweek, which has always been something of a fascination for me. It's very much in line with the whole ethos behind focused and being intentional and effective with your time and not just cranking the widgets and getting the hours in, the quantity. I first heard about this concept when I read the book Shorter by Alex Pang, I think the name is. And the topic has fascinated me. Offline in the day job, I have gotten connected with Rob because we may be a client at some point in the near future.

Because this is something that we hear all the time from people who listen to Focused is, well, aren't you guys fancy? You can make your own schedules. But I have a day job and I have a manager and I'm in sales and I have customers or clients who are expecting me to get back to them. Well, that's literally who Rob deals with every single day. And he figures out ways for people like this to enjoy a shorter work week anyways and still get their work done. Did I do a fairly decent job on the value proposition there, Rob? Yeah, that was perfect, Mike. I guess the only thing I'd add is that if you think about when a company transitions to a four-day workweek, to me, the biggest value is that you now have the ability to attract and retain the most rock star employees in your industry.

And so when you can attract the very best and top talent, what does that do to the value of your company? It increases it exponentially. And the reason that this is such an incredible employee benefit is because less than 1% of US companies offer this right now. Yeah, it's not the norm, but we're hoping to change a few folks' minds with that in this episode here today. I got connected with Rob because I shared the link with my friend who runs the day job company. And he talked to Rob and said, you got to talk to this guy because you guys are cut from the same cloth. So Rob and I had a conversation and we talked about books and reading and analog tools and building computer systems. And I just thought this is going to be a great conversation.

We got to have this guy on the Focus podcast. You know, this whole idea of a four-day work week. And just to be clear, you know, there's a lot of people who think a four-day work week means four 10-hour days as opposed to five eight-hour days. But that's not what Rob is talking about. He's talking about four eight-hour days, just taking the fifth day off. The first time I heard of this effectively used was at base camp. You know, they, they've done that for a long time during the summer months, because, you know, in Chicago, it's nice in the afternoon during the summer. So they, they work four days during, you know, the months when people can go have barbecues and

things. And they had commented in one of their books that I read that they had zero loss in productivity by going from five days to four days. The employees understood, you know, we get a day off, but we need to get our work done and magically found ways to get the same amount of work done. And we've talked about it in context of indie people like, you know, Mike and I, or well, actually Mike is a working stiff, but you know, some of those fancy indie people who are trying to find ways to alternate our work weeks. But, but you're right. I mean, this is not something just for fancy indie people. It's something that, that could help anybody. So Rob, why don't you talk to us a little bit about how your process works? I'm assuming that the, the big hurdle to get over is just getting people

on board with this mindset that it is actually more productive to work less hours. Do you mind just kind of talking about what are the things that contribute to that being true in the four-day work week, especially at a company or an agency level, being something that is actually feasible. Yeah, absolutely. So I thought that when I came up with this value proposition to help people with the four-day workweek, that there would be universal and unanimous support and that it would be like giving someone the gift of time, which for a lot of people is more valuable than money itself, because know, and because we have a very finite amount of time. And I've been somewhat surprised in that the amount of resistance that I've encountered

with some people. And I think the really the main reason is people just almost like don't believe that it's true or that it's possible. Right? And there's kind of two different reasons why people don't believe it's possible. The first one is we'll just put it under a bucket of scheduling concerns, which means, hey, my clients expect me to be open five days a week, but I would only have employees working four. And obviously, each situation is different, but some variation of the following would be probably appropriate. Let's say you have a group of 10 people, 10 employees at your company.

You can split that into group A and group B. Group A would work Monday through Thursday and group B would work Tuesday through Friday. So that way you have five days of client coverage, but every individual person is still working four days a week or again, some variation of that. But the second and much bigger concern for almost everybody is, well, how is it possible for me to even get five days of work done in four days, right? And here's what's, you know, if you take a step back and look at what's happening to the U.S. workers really around the world as a whole, the average white collar worker sends and receives 126 emails per day. And so if you take just two minutes to process or respond to each email, that's four hours of your day right there. Then if you layer in, let's say, two hours of meetings, which some people have even more than that, then you basically have six hours of your day filled

with meetings and email, which only means that in an eight hour day, you have six hours of your day filled with meetings and email, which only means that in an eight-hour day, you have two hours left to do your job, which for many people, that's very difficult. And so by being a little bit more deliberate about how you use meetings and how you communicate via email and Slack and other communication channels, you can drastically reduce the amount of time that you're spending on email and meetings. And it sounds very counterintuitive, but actually not multitask and single task and focus and get more done in four days than you could have used to do it in five. This all sounds great, but how do you actually reduce the number of emails and number of meetings? What's the process you try to lead people down to accomplish that goal?

Because that's the kind of thing that, in my experience, every time you talk about it, people will get excited about it, but then they try to implement it and it doesn't work. Things fall through the cracks, which maybe contributes to some of that resistance that you were talking about at the beginning. they're not going to happen, right? Because, you know, if every single employee at the company believes one thing and then management believes something else, ultimately what management believes is going to be, you know, is it going to be what prevails most likely. So it does have to start at the top, but to more specifically answer your question, I guess there's, I would, I would tackle them separately, right? So with meeting reduction, you know, there's a lot of times when, for instance, when I was in corporate America that I would sit in a meeting and I would just say to myself, there is something else on this earth that is a better use of my time than being in this meeting right now.

Or I would think to myself, I could just read an email summary of this meeting and understand about 90 percent of what was said. And I really don't need this. This isn't a relevant format for disseminating this information. It could have just been an email or a presentation that someone sent instead of something in a meeting that was, you know, getting people together in person. So when you start looking critically at meetings and their purpose and how we're communicating information, you know, people do discover that there's probably a lot of meetings that are either a don't need to happen at all, or B they're, um, probably attended by way too

many people who don't actively contribute. And those people then could get a summary of that meeting, uh, and, and still again, retain almost all the information and not have to be present. So the other thing though, uh, so the other, the so the other, the other area to focus on is email and I'll call it email and Slack use. I kind of combine them into one because I think that they're both pretty equally distracting. And what, what really is the problem for the vast majority of companies is the following. Almost every company I talked to does not have a written standard of communication or communication guidelines that has been disseminated to the company and its clients. And because there's no

written standard, what happens then is employees are forced to guess how and when and how much to communicate. And this guessing does a bunch of things. The first one is it duplicates efforts and it makes the communication incredibly inefficient. But the other thing is because employees are always guessing all the time how and when and how much to communicate, it introduces a ton of stress on employees unnecessarily. And that is a huge factor in them feeling stressed out and ultimately burned out at their job. And so by establishing written standards of communication that are endorsed by the management of the company, it dramatically changes how every single person is able to do their job. And dramatically also cuts down on Slack and email

use that's really unnecessary. So Rob, I would suspect that people that come to you are what I would categorize as kind of enlightened managers, people that are interested in this concept. I mean, there are so many managers in the world that would feel like by giving the employees taking one day off a week, they're effectively stealing from them, right? You know, I'm paying you to be here five days. You're only here four. You know, you're getting a day for free. days you're only here for uh you know you're getting a day for free and like but even having you know the enlightened folks come to you i imagine there is some resistance or some questions along those lines of kind of old school thinking about management and and really the same thing

applies to the point about emails like you can have an email policy but if the boss calls you and says how come you haven't replied to the email I sent you five minutes ago? You've got the same problem again. How do you, I mean, I feel like that is the gating issue here. You've got to get management buy into this, not just with their heads, but with their hearts. How do you do that? Yeah. So there's a, I would say two different, uh, I have like two different things to offer in response to that. So the first one is, you know, I, I consider the pioneer of this movement, Andrew Barnes, who he wrote this book

four day, uh, work week. And he is the founder of this nonprofit called four day week global, which is amazing by the way, if you guys haven't checked it out, it really is a great nonprofit. which is amazing, by the way. If you guys haven't checked it out, it really is a great nonprofit. And here's what, so in 2018, he took his 240 employee financial services company, and they transitioned to a four-day work week. And in New Zealand, where he's from, that was actually a 30-hour week, not even 32. So it was even less than in America. And what he found after he transitioned, and by the way, they had several university statisticians measuring this stuff, so it was very accurate, that they found that profit per employee after this transition increased 14.5%. That is insane, right? For any

initiative to be that effective, that is incredible. And of course, all these other metrics trended in an amazingly positive direction, like lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism, higher engagement, higher job satisfaction. Almost every metric that you could measure went in the right direction. So the second thing that I would say, I'll explain a little bit of psychology and physiology, and it will become maybe a little bit clearer why this fourth day or the four-day workweek is so beneficial. And this insight took me reading over 100 books and dissecting over 2,000 articles and studies to truly understand human nature and to relate it to technology and humanity.

It really took a lot of work for me to understand this. But here's what I believe is really happening to not only the U.S. workforce, but a lot of people around the world. So when we interact with technology, not all the time, but a lot of the time, it activates our sympathetic nervous system. This is the fight or flight system that keeps us alive if there's a threat. And so we check our email, activates our fight or flight system. This is the fight or flight system that keeps us alive if there's a threat. And so we check our email, activates our fight or flight system. We get a notification on our phone, that activates our fight or flight system. And so the problem with this is that when this fight or flight system is activated, it takes a full 30 minutes or more to downregulate or recover. And in the United States, the average person is checking their email and Slack once every

six minutes, and they get a smartphone notification once every 15 minutes. And so you're doing the math and saying, well, gee, we're never having a chance to recover. And that is exactly right. Our sympathetic nervous system, this fight or flight system, is just getting amped up throughout the day every single day. And we never get this chance to recover. So the reason that the four day work week is so important is when you give humans an extra day to fully down, regulate and recover from this highly fight or flight state, they are able to get back to a baseline where they feel, you know, they feel safe, they feel

secure, they feel rested and relaxed. And paradoxically, then when you're working less, you can work better and be more productive and do higher quality work when you are working. So by taking more rest, it's like a sprinter, right? If you're an Olympic sprinter training for the a hundred meter dash, you don't just sprint for two hours during your, your workout, You sprint and then take a huge rest and sprint and take a huge rest. It's the same principle here. It's just being applied to work. I love that. And I want to go back a little bit to something you mentioned around the communication expectations because I feel like this is a great example of how we're our own worst enemies because all the distractions and all the

checking slack every six minutes and things like that that you mentioned, that's not the tool's fault. That's our own fault because we never established the boundaries around which we were going to use these technologies. So I'm 100% behind the idea of getting the alignment with some of these communication expectations. And I've had these other places that I have worked in the past. And I'm wondering if you could give some examples of what those might look like. And also, I just want to preface the rest of this conversation. We've already mentioned that this starts at the top. You got to get management in alignment,

but that doesn't mean that anybody listening to this can't start planting some seeds for moving the needle on the people that they need to convince that this really is a good idea. And so tactical things like, Hey, why don't we get alignment around some of these communication expectations? I feel like this is maybe the place to start with this. If you're trying to make some change from the bottom up. Yeah, well, happy to go through some of that, Mike. And,

you know, I like the point that you brought up. You know, even if you don't have endorsement from the management of your company, if you're a manager of a team, you could still implement this on a team level. And I've worked with teams who have done that, and it's been very effective for them. So it doesn't, just because it's not coming only from the top doesn't mean that you couldn't do something with this in your own organization. So let's say, for instance, you're on a team and you implement this. I'm sure it will be successful. And then you could tell your CEO, hey, look at what we did in our team.

Talk to these five people. This was amazing. We need to do this to the whole company. And you can kind of be a pilot within your company, which is really cool. And obviously, then if it's successful, which I know it would be, your CEO would certainly be very happy with you as well, right? Because it's going to make you look good. But let me just kind of give a very broad example. And obviously, there's much more nuance to it than this. But I'll just kind of tell you sort of what the communication guidelines look like in a general sense, and then you can understand kind of what I'm talking about.

So let's say it looks something like this. We as a company believe that all communications, business communications, will be generally taken or done between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. local time. We will use email for external communications and we will use Slack for internal communications. We expect that all business emails will be answered within 24 business hours and we expect all Slack messages will be answered within three business hours. If there's something that requires more urgency than three hours, we expect that people will Slack call each other and that all Slack calls will be returned as soon as possible. So imagine for a second that you just took that information that I

said and put it in a document and then disseminated that in writing to all your employees. And you're, you know, there's a little bit more finesse to it to send it to your clients, but you, you know, you communicate that to your clients as well. Well, what does that do? That completely changes how every single person at this company does their job. Because now instead of people being nervous and worried about checking their email, cause they might quote miss something. Now they can check their email a couple times a day and have the most importantly, have the psychological freedom to do so. And that free, that, that freedom gives them, you know, it's from a sense of safety and security. They now feel safe only checking their email a couple

times a day. And that allows them to not be, you know, chained to their inbox and then do high quality work and focus on the other things that matter the most. I love it. And that's what I was going to point out is as you're reading those expectations, if you're putting yourself in the position of an employee who is being told these are the rules that we are going to play by, those are very calming and comforting because it eliminates the potential urgency, which I think that's the real issue, is that we tend to make things a bigger deal than they really are. And we think that maybe your boss does expect a response within five minutes via email. But in my experience, most of the time, we feel that pressure, even though they haven't explicitly said that. We kind of manufacture it and we believe like, well, if we can respond in five minutes, then we'll show that we're the superstar employee and we deserve a raise. And really that's just sabotaging the real effective work that you can do, which contributes to the data that you were talking about. If we can disconnect from that, we can

actually do more and better work even with less time. It's interesting, Mike. So the statistic related to that, and this is from a, I read books on email and one of the books, one of the books had this statistic. So in general, right, the average email sender, which would be like your clients, right. Or a company's clients, the average email sender expects a response within 24 business hours, but the average email receiver, which is probably you or the other employees at your company, expects to respond within four business hours. So this massive discrepancy of 24-hour expectation versus four is the cause of a ton, an insane amount of tension and stress that doesn't need to be there if there was just clear communication about it. Yeah, I also think that this whole idea helps push companies, employees, managers,

all away from the idea that the job is the email as well. I always think about my dad. He had a job. He went to an office. There was no email. There were no fax machines. So he spent the day doing productive work and, you know, read the mail in the afternoon, you know, so I do think that we've got away from

that and, and anything you can do to get people off that. And I understand like customer support, there's exceptions and sales where email is a bigger deal, but I think for a lot of jobs, email is hugely inflated. Well, would you mind if we talked a little bit about the psychology behind why email is so addictive? Because I just think it's so fascinating. Sure. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah. So if you look at email, I think that it's second only to social media as the most addicting technology that we have. And there's a couple of different reasons for it. First of all, email is an intermittent variable reward, which is very similar to a slot machine.

So when you go in your inbox, you don't know how many new emails you'll have. You don't know who they're from or when they came in, right? All those things are intermittent and variable. And so you kind of get this dopamine hit when you check your email, like, oh, cool, I got three new ones. Oh, then the next time it's five. And so there kind of get this dopamine hit when you check your email, like, oh, cool, I got three new ones. Oh, then the next time it's five. And so there's this addictive tendency for that right there. But then there's a couple other things that are really important. Email also involves social reciprocity.

So, for instance, Mike, even if you hated my guts, if I emailed you, you would feel this social obligation or social reciprocity to email me back because it's a hardwired human response. We're wired to reciprocate toward other people. The last thing, which is probably the most important, is that psychologically, when someone emails us, it makes us feel needed and wanted and important. And that is also a very basic human need. And so you have these three very powerful psychological things that are making people gravitate toward checking their email. And it's not their fault. It's just very difficult to resist those things because they're hardwired into human nature. It's difficult, but not impossible.

And there's this concept, I think it's called the curse of knowledge, where you kind of forget where you were at the beginning of your journey. And as you're talking about the social reciprocity and you don't want to let people down, I recognize that I've kind of gone all the way the other way with that. with that. And for the last several years, I've had to apologize to people because it takes me so long to respond. And I just say, I assume the responsibility of myself. And I'm sorry, I'm just bad at email. Don't hate me. But I'm curious, what are some things that you can do to start moving in that direction? If you identify with that, if you feel that pressure that you were just talking about, you want to not let people down. You want to have that social connection. Even at a tactical level, you don't want to start pushing for change from the top down. But just tomorrow, as people listen to this episode, what are some of the things that they could do to kind of push against that and move in a more healthy direction? Yeah, well, Mike, I relate to what you said because I'm exactly the same way.

I think I maybe swung a little bit too far in terms of ignoring my email. But it's kind of funny because I play this game with myself where I kind of see how long I can go without checking my email sometimes. And sometimes it's, I think the most I've had, and this wasn't when I was on vacation, right? It was just like a normal week. I've went over an entire week without checking my email at all. And that's probably too much.

That's probably a little bit negligent to some degree. But here's what I would tell people is, I think it just starts with being your own experiment. Because here's what almost everyone worries about. They worry about, oh, if I don't check my email continuously, I will miss something that's important, right? They'll miss something that's important. And I totally understand that, you know, that concern. But what I just started doing is very slowly increasing the increment at which I would check my email. So at first it was like, Oh, maybe I won't check it for a couple hours. And then I was like, Oh, maybe like half a day. And then I was like, oh, maybe like half a day.

And then I was like, oh, okay, a day. And what I found is that, and I'm not saying that nothing bad ever didn't, you know, didn't happen. Like, yes, there was occasionally something that I missed or whatever, but what I would just do is exactly what you said. I would just profusely apologize and say, hey, I'm really sorry. I missed this email and I didn't, whatever, like didn't see this thing. And you know, no one ever said, no one, not a single like substantial negative thing has ever happened for me, not checking my email, none, not one. So when you realize that there isn't that much that you're going to miss, and even if you do

miss something, it's probably not going to end your job or end your business or whatever. Then you start to realize, oh, like I can do this. Like I can kind of go a day without checking my email and it's totally fine. And, and then you, you really, you really realize how much time you were probably spending in it, right? Like what I would say is for me on average in a week, if I'm in my email more than like four or five hours the whole week, that's like way too much. It's that's like insane. Um, and so I, um, you know, just experimented with that myself. Another thing is there are other tools that you can use. One of my favorites, and I don't, I'm not, uh, I didn't create this and I don't get any referral or anything, but a tool for Gmail is called Inbox When Ready. It's a Chrome extension.

And what you can do is you install it and then it basically hides your inbox. And then you only see your inbox when you hit this button at the top. And the way that it's programmed is you see your inbox a certain number of times per day or for a certain amount of minutes. And you can change both of those variables. And after that, whenever you hit the button, it employs a 15 second penalty. And then you have to wait 15 seconds to check your inbox. And so when you use that, it makes you be very deliberate about using your email, and it totally changes your email use. I love it. That's awesome. I want to add some context to what you were saying

there, though, because I feel like the scenario that people maybe are telling themselves is that when you say nothing bad has ever happened from me. Substantial. Nothing substantial. Correct. Correct. Because in your head, you might have this picture of, well, if my boss comes and confronts me because I didn't respond to the email, that's the worst thing that can happen. But I think for anybody who has practiced this, what you will find is sometimes it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, especially when it comes to email. So you say, oh, sorry, I didn't see that. Well, they're a little bit annoyed because they have to bring you up to speed because you didn't see their email or whatever. But that's offset by the fact that you're actually able to do more and

better work in the meantime. And what I found is that those instances over time become less and less. And even when you first start doing it, it's not like it comes up multiple times per day. It's maybe once a week that it really is an issue. And then you apologize and you move on and you start to crave the margin and the space and the ability and the time that you have to think and produce the work that actually matters. Yeah. So I just want to add a couple of things to this discussion. First of all, you know how you talked about kind of the endorphin you get from getting and responding to email. There's a separate endorphin I want everybody to know about that they may have not experienced. And that's when you ignore an email so long that it solves itself and it didn't require any action because that

does happen and it feels great. But this whole idea of responding quickly and consequences, so for a long, almost 30 years, I was a lawyer and I was very deliberate about email. I checked it in the morning, in the afternoon, and maybe at lunch. And so I had judges call me and say, hey, Sparks, I sent you an email. How come you haven't replied yet? I'd be like, judge, you sent the email two hours ago. Do you think I just sit around looking at the email all day? I'm doing legal work here. And it reset their expectations. And then that judge, the next time, if it was urgent, would call me or if it was emailed, they would get it. And I did the same thing with clients. If you have clients and you're worried about this and they say, hey, I emailed you 30

minutes ago, you haven't replied, you say, you know, that's right, because I work really hard on my client's work, including you. And that means I don't check email all day. I'm doing your work. And that resets the expectation with the client,. I'm doing your work, you know, and that resets the expectation with the client, but it also tells them that you're different. And I can tell you that I trained a lot of people, people that worked with me and people that, that, that I worked for and people, you know, over the course of my career with just a very friendly, but kind of blunt explanation that, you you know my job isn't email my job is solving problems and and i think there's really something to that um now the other piece of

this the third thing i want to make is i know what this happens every time email comes up is someone says look i'm in sales if i don't reply you know within 30 minutes I lose the sale and that costs me money. And I get it. And there are people out there that have that problem. But that's not everybody. And I would ask you to really consider if that's you, if you think it's you. Is that really true? And if it is true, then you need to get smart.

There are services like SaneBox and online filtering and rules. There is a way to make sure those super important emails get to you without everything getting to you. So then you've got an extra problem, but still email can be less of an issue. But I feel like for the vast majority of us, the solution is to train other people to not expect email from us. And like a company policy is such a great way to do that, right? We just all agree right now that when you send me an email, I've got 24 hours to respond. David, I really liked that you sent or that you said that, you know, you would tell people, I work really hard to provide a great service and that includes for you. And so like, when you say to someone, yeah, I'm not checking my email because it actually makes the work that

I do for you better. Then it's kind of hard for them to argue with that. You know, they're like, oh yeah, like he's doing a good job that this is why he does a good job. Cause he's not in his email all day. Then they, then it's like very, it's much easier, more palatable for them to hear that. It's very disarming. And I did the same thing to my bosses. When they say, hey, I sent you an email. I'm like, yeah, I'm working. If it's super urgent, you can walk in my office or buzz me on the phone.

But don't send me an email. Expect me to check it. But it only takes one or two conversations like that with someone and then they know you're different and they have they bring their own you know they understand there's a set of sparky rules for email and that's what they're getting and um i anyway i i think you're really on to something i'm glad to hear that yeah i appreciate that i want to touch on the the uh the comment that you made dav, about the salespeople not being able to disconnect from their email because I have been in sales. I experienced that and I understand it. I also know, Rob, that you work with companies and agencies where you have to solve this problem.

So how do you do it? Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, I think a lot of different ways. I mean, it could really just depend on the company, but this is one of the things that I actually think you can potentially use more technology to solve and make your life easier. So let's just, as a simple example,

let's say you are like, hey, I have this certain email inbox and it's only for leads. And, you know, if I don't see the lead every 30 minutes or within 30 minutes, then I probably lose the sale. But then you don't want a million notifications from all the rest of your inboxes and email to come through. So what you could do is set up something like, uh, uh, you know, use some software to, let's say, send you a text message. Every time you get a notification from this particular inbox, assuming that it's not like, you know, hundreds of them a day, cause that would be kind of crazy. Um, but then you probably have a different problem to solve anyway. But, um, but yeah, you could say, Hey, like, you know, set up this software, send you a text message. So then you're not having any email notifications and they're going all through your text.

Again, is this going to be ideal for everyone? No, but it's just an example of a way where you can actually, you know, just think, you know, creatively and use software and technology to make your life easier instead of harder. make your life easier instead of harder. Have you ever run into a situation working with companies and agencies where the sales department, let's just use that one as an example, but customer support might be another one. There was a point where you could not get any further and you could not implement the four-day work week because of the nature of the job? Or have you always been able to find ways around that using technologies like you were talking about? I think the real issue that you were hitting at is that we tend to think that I need to be a human filter and look at these things, and I can pick out the ones that are really important. But if you

dig a little bit deeper, you'll realize that there are characteristics that we can create automations to surface these things. But even then, is it possible to get to a four-day work week? You know, I would say for 90% of companies, if you are very open-minded and creative and willing to try something different, the four-day workweek is possible for you. So that doesn't mean that it's every single company.

I do think there are a handful of exceptions. But I think the biggest problem in having a company not be able to convert to a four-day workweek is just simply the belief from the people at the company, whether that's the employees or probably more importantly, the management, that it is possible. And I think if people just do not assume, if people assume that it is possible, 99% of the time it will be possible. But they have to believe that, right? And I think it's just kind of going through some of the things that we talked about earlier like this scheduling stuff

and then this productivity thought of how can I get five days of work done in four days. Once people truly believe that those things are going to be overcome then this is really a reality for the vast, vast majority of firms. So whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right. Yeah, absolutely.

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And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So Rob, when somebody buys in, what are the steps to get a four-day workweek going? And what are the stumbling blocks that people often experience as they get started? Yeah, so I think the first step is to really measure not as many things as possible, but measure a lot of things so that we can determine if we're successful. If you can measure things like email volume or Slack volume or obviously employee satisfaction or engagement. Of course, profitability is something that I'm hoping every company is measuring, right? But, you know, get some measurement and do some preparation before this process that, you know, just like anything, undertaking anything that's a substantial change, that

is really a critical part of the process. And then after, you know, you do some planning and measurement, then it's time for the process to begin. And one of the things that I think is really important about the process in general is that, you know, I'm not just simply telling companies or people what to do, right? What I'm doing is discussing their individual needs and company needs as a whole, and we discuss them as a group. And then I provide, you know, options or a variety of things that they can do. And we kind of come to the conclusions together about what is most appropriate. It's not me being prescriptive because I don't think that that is a very effective way to

elicit widespread change at a company. It really has to be a collaborative process. And ideally, that process is not just me and the management team, but it's also me and the employees. And so, you know, that I think is that I think is what makes this entire process effective is because when you come to conclusions together as a group, there's way more motivation and buy-in to make that process a reality. And then I'm assuming that in addition to the data, and you mentioned the profitability, that I think is ultimately what the management is going to look at. But I know that when you are working with the employees, it's important to keep that in mind, but maybe that's not the thing that they're most concerned about, right? So that's where some of the understanding the human behavior and the psychology, I would assume, comes into this as well.

What sort of things do you, how much of that do you typically share when you're working with the employees and trying to facilitate this change? Because if this is the first time you've come across some of these topics, they maybe seem a little bit ridiculous and maybe you are reluctant to dig into those. Yeah, I mean, I like to share, you know, I feel like I'm a pretty transparent person and I like to share as much as possible. I also like to really talk a lot about psychology because I think when people understand the psychology behind things, it allows them to understand their own feelings and emotions. And when you understand yourself, then you can, you're much more likely to change. So let me, as an example, the psychology of change is really interesting. So with humans in general, right, in humanity, we experience change as a somewhat negative thing. And the reason is because

a lot of change feels like loss. And humans are aversive to loss because we need resources to stay alive. So for instance, we need food, we need shelter, and we need clothing. The more food, shelter, and clothing we have, those are resources, the more likely it is that we stay alive, right? Not surprisingly. And so when someone says, I'm going to change something, even if it's not true that something is being taken away, in other words, like nothing is being taken away. Even if that's true, people still perceive there to be something taken away. There's this, they perceive loss. And because we hate loss, we perceive it as a threat. And anything that's perceived as a threat is obviously negative. And so this is the why a lot of people think that any change, even if it could be positive,

is negative. And so when you explain the psychology to them, I'm not saying it magically makes everyone want to change, but I think it makes way fewer people have a negative attitude toward change. And you mentioned that we need resources to stay alive. I feel the perspective maybe for employees would be, well, my most precious resource is the time I have while I'm here. And you're asking me to go from 40 hours to 32 hours. So I have less of this resource in order to stay on top of all of the things that I need to do for my job and I already feel behind on everything. So how would you try to shift that perspective and use me as the guinea pig here? Okay, so I'll project that on myself. Rob, I think you're crazy. I don't want to give up a day because that just means I'm

going to be more behind on Monday. What would you say to me to help facilitate that behavior change? Yeah. So what I'd say is, Mike, I totally understand that you feel like you're going to be overwhelmed or not have enough time to do things, especially when Monday comes and you only have four days instead of five. But if I could just maybe explain to you why you might be feeling that way, I think that that could be helpful. Would you be open to that? Let's do it. Cool, cool. Well, so it sounds like what you're telling me is that when you come in on Monday, there's going to be too many things for you to do and not enough time. Is that correct? Yep. That's it. Yeah. So what it sounds like to me is that you might be feeling overwhelmed with the amount

of things to do. Would that be would that be true? That is a hundred percent true. Okay. Right. So, um, so what happens is when humans feel like they're overwhelmed, they interpret that as a loss of control and autonomy is the most basic human need that everybody has because it's ensures our survival. human need that everybody has because it ensures our survival. And so when you feel overwhelmed, your brain and your body both interpret that as a loss of control, and you see that as a threat, and that's why that's very stressful to you. But what I'd love to do is come up with some techniques and work with you individually to understand what your responsibilities are and what you have to accomplish and think of some creative ways

where we could help you achieve all these activities in four days instead of five. And I know that it seems impossible, but I've actually worked with other clients and one woman that I worked with, believe it or not, I saved her over 40 hours of screen time every week on her iPhone.

And so I know if I can save someone 40 hours, I'm pretty confident that I could save you eight hours a week of time. Oh, but Rob, you don't know my manager. His name is David. He's a total jerk and he expects me to respond to email within five minutes. I'm sure that this woman you worked with didn't have a manager like me. Mike, are you stealing from me again? Are you stealing from me?

Sorry, I wouldn't really laugh. But well, Mike, I totally understand that you think that, you know, there's this pressure from your boss to respond to emails within this certain amount of time. And here's the thing is that we're actually going to talk to and collaborate with your management team. And we're going to come up with a standards of communication that's going to be endorsed by your management team so that you don't have to be checking your email all the time. And I'm guessing that you probably right now, because you think your boss has to, or you have to respond to your boss that you check your email pretty often. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah.

And so what, how many times per day do you think you're check your email right now? Oh, probably 25 times a day. 25. Okay. I mean, I've actually heard some people check their email even more frequently than that. So I would say that's actually pretty good. But here's the thing is if you could check your email once or twice a day, do you think that you could get a lot of your day back? A lot of your time back? Goodness, that sounds amazing. Yeah, right. So what I'm going to do is help you and your company establish some standards of communication so that it will give you the psychological safety to only check your email a couple times

a day and still be within the expectations of your boss and your company. And I really feel like that's going to free up a ton of your time and make this not as overwhelming so that, and ensure that you get all your work done in four days. And end scene. That's great. You brought up psychological safety. I want to dive into that a little bit, a little bit more. What, what sort of a role does that, that play in the implementation of the four day workweek and maybe just productivity in general? Totally. Well, what's interesting is, and this has been studied by many different organizations, by Google, by all these other psychologists, and the number one thing that makes a team be a high-performing team in any company is trust, psychological trust. And trust ultimately comes from safety. If you don't feel like you can trust other people in your group to do what they say they're going to do or trust them to execute

on whatever you agreed upon, you don't feel safe. You don't feel like you can rely on them. And so when there's no trust, there's no safety. And when there's no safety, now all of a sudden the environment, even subconsciously changes. Everyone is now, instead of performing like a team and working together and working toward collective objectives, now everyone is interested in performing as an individual and working on individual objectives and the entire dynamic at the company completely changes. I've experienced that. I mean, I know people listening have the same experience, but like

you're at a business and you go on vacation and someone says, oh, I got your back. I'll take care of your stuff while you're gone. And then you come back and find out they didn't do anything. And then never again can you have a vacation worry-free. didn't do anything. And then never again, can you have a vacation worry-free? So then what happens is, and that totally resonates, David, right? I think this happens to a lot of people. And so when you can't trust your team and then you can't, you know, you have to sort of rely more on yourself. What happens is you, you worry about your job and the stability in your job because, and again, this sort of works back into or kind of traces back to more overwhelm, right? So when it seems like you have to lift the weight of the world because you're essentially operating as an

individual and not a team, you become overwhelmed because there's so many things to do. And that contributes to everything that we just talked about, you know, you being, you experience that as a threat. And then when, you know, and think about it in general, when humans are threatened, they don't think clearly. For instance, if, if someone, you know, holds a gun to your head, are you going to be able to solve complex math problems? No, of course not. You're just going to be trying to get out of that situation and not have a gun to your head. And so then when you're threatened and you feel threatened and overwhelmed, you can't perform as well at your job. And then

your job is actually at risk. And so it sounds crazy, but like when this trust breaks down, there's so many other implications for the team as a whole. And it really leads to worse performance on a, both an individual and a group level. It's just remarkable to me because we talk to a lot of people about these topics and the basic human psychology and wiring has so inadequately prepared us for the modern world. You know, I mean, the ability to dodge a saber-toothed tiger has made coping with email almost impossible. True. I really hope that one of the main messages that people take away from this is that when you start to pay attention to how much and how often interacting with technology activates your sympathetic nervous system, this fight or flight system, when you become aware of that and you start to sense that or pay attention to that more often, it really becomes illuminating

how much and how often that's happening. And then you can start to change your behavior to, you know, hopefully lessen that or avoid that a little bit. That kind of gets into a blog post that you had written. And I don't want to make this anti-technology, but since you brought it up, I know you have opinions and thoughts about how the technology that we use actually forms our identity. Yeah. So just to be clear to the listeners, I'm a super big nerd, right? Like Mike was saying earlier, I built my first computer in middle school. I love technology. I really pro-humanity. That's the way I describe it. But I also think of technology as a tool, right? And just, you know, any tool can be used for good or bad purposes. A hammer can be used to build a house and give you shelter and keep you alive, or a hammer can be used to hit someone on the head. And so I think that technology is no different. And the whole point of Humans First is to educate people on the ways that

technology might not be serving them so that they can make decisions on if they want to change their behavior or their use with it or not. And one of the things that I think is happening with technology that doesn't allow or people aren't aware of is that it does interfere with our sense of identity formation. So let me just take a different example as an analogy, and maybe it will help you understand this. Let's pretend you have a 10-year-old son, and you tell this 10-year-old son, hey, son, I'm going to hire a movie team,

a production team to follow you around, and I'm going to have them tape your life or video your life, make a movie about your life 24, 7, 365. They're going to follow you everywhere. They're even going to follow you in your, in your bedroom at night when you're sleeping. And they're going to, you know, film every single portion of your life as a 10 year old. And, you know, if you're the 10 year old kid, you might at first thing like, Oh, this is really cool. I'm going to be famous. But what you're soon going to understand is that you're just doing things because you're on TV, because there's a camera there, because you know that it's going to be broadcast to millions of people. what people are going to think of you when this film is being made, it changes who you are as a person. And so I truly believe that the appearance of social media and the average person now

essentially being the star of an ever long movie in their life, it really has changed people's identities substantially. And I think it's unfortunately sort of a disservice to those kids, especially kids, right? Because when you're 10 years old or 12 years old, you don't have full executive brain functioning. The part of your brain that controls critical thinking and decision-making and behavior, that doesn't fully mature in males until age 28 and in females until age 24. And so you can't, you don't have the brain capacity to, um, you know, fully understand all these things that are happening to you. And therefore it's affecting your ability to, to, to, um, you know, form your identity, uh, as, as a child or teenager.

But not just children, honestly. I mean, how many of us know people? Like Daisy and I have a friend, John, but there's two versions. There's regular John and there's Facebook John. And the things Facebook John says are not what regular John says. I mean, it's not just kids.

It's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's true. I'm familiar with that statistic that you shared before because I grew up in a family business that my dad designed and built assessment and skill building software in the social emotional learning arena. in the social emotional learning arena. So I've been hearing about emotional intelligence and self-determination since as long as I can remember. And I remember him sharing the same statistic and how absurd it is to, in his words, you know, this is my recollection of what my dad told me. You have no idea what you're going to do with the rest of your life when you turn 18. of what my dad told me. You have no idea what you're going to do with the rest of your life when you turn 18. And to David's point, this isn't just for kids, but before your brain develops fully specifically, you have all of these tools at your disposal, like you were talking about,

Robin. You don't really understand the proper way to use them. And we can default into wrong ways to use them as adults too. It's kind of what the whole idea behind the social dilemma was talking about. I couldn't help but think of the Truman Show when you were describing the person who is always on TV. But what are the ways to spin this a little bit back towards maybe some of the positive stuff? So we've identified some of the negative stuff, the social media and being a different person than you are in real life. But how do we then turn this and use it for good? How do we compartmentalize this so that the tool serves us instead of us being just a data point in the algorithm? Yeah, yeah, I like that thought. So a couple of things. I guess the first

thing to realize is a lot of the unhappiness that comes from social media also involves social comparison. So I'll actually kind of take this back to a different topic, but it's relevant to social media. So I also studied the history of eating disorders for humans first. And what's really interesting is eating disorders in the United States really proliferated during the 1960s. And you might say to yourself, well, why is that? Why would that be? And what happened in the 1960s is that was the first time in our history where TVs became very common in the household.

And so what happened was, you know, let's just take let's just say you lived in a town of 1,000 people and you're a male or a female. You're a female. So you're comparing yourself to about 500 other females in this town. And if you're even moderately attractive, you're probably more attractive than a lot of them. And so you probably feel good about yourself. Well, now when TV comes along, you're not comparing yourself to the 500 women in your town. You're comparing yourself to the models and the actresses and all the people on TV, and you feel worse by comparison about yourself. And so that drove people, especially women,

to start having eating disorders. And so when you think about that, you, uh, you know, compare that to social media that it's, it's, it's like that same principle, but it's on steroids. And so the reason that I mentioned this is when you realize that you, when you look at social media and you're comparing yourself to everything on social media, you're comparing your every average everyday life, your average life to everyone else's highlight reel. It's like comparing your life to a movie trailer, right? Like the movie trailer is the best two minutes of the movie. The sizzle reel, yeah.

And so it's like, you know, that's such an unfair comparison. It's totally an unfair comparison, unfair to you, right? And so what I do if I'm ever on social media is I always tell myself, I don't need to compare myself to those people because this is their highlight reel and I'm comparing it to my everyday life. So I think that keeping that in mind really is beneficial. Another thing that I've chosen to do, and I know that this is probably a little bit more

of an extreme technique to, like you said, kind of box my use, but I've decided to delete all social media from my phone. But instead, I can be much more deliberate and intentional and only use it on a computer or laptop. That way, I'm not really tempted to use it on my phone, I can just use it and be more deliberate and intentional about it. And it doesn't have to tempt me to, you know, to use it when I'm on my phone and waiting in line or doing have to tempt me to, you know, to use it when I'm on my phone and waiting in line or doing something else. And so, you know, I think a lot of people, um, when I talk to people a lot more now, especially after the social dilemma, they're more open to doing

something like that because they, um, they realize that social media is engineered to be addictive and, you know, it's, it's, it's easiest to not be addicted to something when it doesn't really exist, or it doesn't exist and it's not convenient. I'm curious because I know when I talked to you previously, you mentioned you were taking notes on sticky notes, I believe. So I'm assuming you've taken the same sort of approach here with some of your productivity tools as well. It's not just social media that you've compartmentalized to the computer. You personally, where do you draw these lines in terms of analog versus digital and getting your work done? digital and getting your work done? Yeah, I love this question. So I do think there's a bunch of things that for me serve me better being analog. One of them is my daily to-do list. And I know that there's so many digital versions of to-do lists like to-do lists and blah, blah, blah, and just notes and all this stuff. But what I found is that when I use digital products for my to-do list, and I think it's especially detrimental to me

because of my ADHD that I just recently got diagnosed with, I don't think that it really serves me well because you just kind of get lost in this digital ether when you're looking at a to-do list on a screen. So I like the Post-it notes for my to-do list because I literally, my desk is completely clear except for maybe my notebook that I'm writing in and there's nothing else on it. So I only have this post-it note staring me at in the face on my desk and it, and it's

kind of honestly like annoys me. It's kind of annoying when I see something on there because then I, and it makes me want to get it done. And, um, so it isn't, there is, there is some data that shows that a physical checklist is one of the most, one of the most effective ways for people to do tasks, a physical one. And so I've decided that that is best for me. Another thing is I do take, um, written notes with pen and paper. And there's a bunch of research that shows that when you take notes with pen and paper, it slows down your brain activity and it slows down.

It allows you to better absorb the information. And that to me is really what I'm going for. I take notes so that I can retain information. But the way I digitize them is I take pictures of them with a PDF creator on my phone. And that is kind of a way for me to take analog notes, but then have them be digital and then make them available to send to people as well. I know David's got thoughts on the OCR PDF stuff. Oh, no, I think it's great. I think hybrid approach is something everybody should try. And like you, I have a very complex task system because I do a lot of

different things, but stopping every evening and writing down six things for tomorrow on a note card is extremely effective because it allows you... It's like the difference between the um you know the archive and the active i guess is a way to put it you know it's like yeah there's a

lot of stuff i'm doing but today there's six things here and if i get those six things done i'll be good and actually some days it's three things so yeah i'm with you. Do you still scan your journal entries? I scan everything. I scan everything. I use Day One, which is a journaling app, and it makes it ridiculously easy to take a picture. Very cool. So if I feel like writing with a fancy pen and a notebook, I'll do that.

But I also sometimes will just dictate an entry into Day One. But I think too many people get too hung up on the medium. It's like, well, what's the most effective service or no, whatever works for you. But, but yeah, I mean, we've had, we've talked about this on the show, Rob. It's just, I feel like going analog sometimes is very good, but also you have to acknowledge that in the world we live in, a lot of times analog isn't enough, but it can still be a piece. Yeah. I think I like what you said, David. Um, I think that, you know, my advice to people is be your own experiment, right. And experiment with a bunch of ways that you, you know, take notes or

have a system of capturing your information and see what works for you. Because obviously what works for me might not work for you and vice versa. And that's totally fine. I wouldn't be offended if someone said that. You find what works for you and then stick with it. But I think a lot of people don't experiment enough and they just try one way and it's not working and they don't think outside the box a little bit to just try something slightly different. Or maybe that's a little bit more unconventional, but ultimately could be helpful for them. So in addition to the task list, what other things do you use analog tools for? And what other things do you use digital tools for?

Yeah, so I actually have, there's a book called The Five Minute Journal that is an analog book. And I write in there, there's, it just, like it says, it takes five minutes each day, three minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening. And, uh, it's just something about writing in pen and paper that I really like for the journal. So I do that. Um, again, it doesn't take long, but one of the other things that I, I think this has got a, I think this is probably a little extreme for me. And I go to the gym and there's hundreds of people. And I don't think I've seen very many that do this anymore. But I actually, I started, I really love health and fitness.

It's a huge passion of mine. And I started over 25 years ago lifting weights. And I wrote down every single workout in a notebook and I still have all the notebooks and I still to this day take a notebook to the gym and use it to write down workouts I do I've tried other methods I've tried you know apps and things like that I do not like them I do not like being on my to me it's sort of like my gym time is this sacred me time. And being on my phone, it just seems like it's a huge, it's like a violation of that for some reason to me.

And I do not like that. And so that's why I use the notebook in the gym. Well, I mean, Rob, you've been talking throughout the show, the way human nature and psychology has developed in ways that are, that make it hard to cope with this stuff, but there you're harnessing it. It's that, it's that ritual that you have that it's part of the process for you, right? I mean, if you didn't have the notebook, you would almost feel like you didn't do the workout at this point, I would guess. That's a good, I love that. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. That's a great way of thinking about it, David. So where do you use

digital tools then? I mean, obviously we're recording this podcast on a computer. You do a lot of consultancy. I assume a lot of that happens on a digital device of some kind if you're not meeting in person. Where do the computers and the machines actually contribute to your life instead of steal from it? Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways, right? I would say I'm, you know, I probably use most of the things that other people use. Like I use Gmail all the time I use. I'm a fan of Microsoft Office instead of Google product, you know, some some of the Google products, but I use both right. And I also use my computer for zoom a lot. So I you know, it's just the standard things.

But I guess the difference probably between how I use them and how the average person uses them is I'm really trying to think carefully about how I'm using them, right? So for instance, if we were local, I would have suggested that we record this podcast in person. And I would have loved to have done that. That, to me, would have been a meaningful change in the scenario. If we could all three get together and sit around a table, I think that'd be super cool. So it's not, it's not that I don't use technology and the ways everyone else does. I'm just, you know, probably a little bit,

maybe sometimes almost too aware of the ways that it could be used slightly differently. How does that show up in your daily workflows or your daily planning? You mentioned the analog task list, but are you literally just writing a task every day? Are you doing some sort of bullet journaling? So you've got like all the archives of things and you're looking at everything that you could do and selecting the things that are important how do you make sure that you do your work effectively and nothing falls through the cracks yeah so i and this is again i've i've experimented hundreds and hundreds of times on myself over the last four years to to come up with things that work for me um but what i've decided and i i i, saw that you guys have talked about time blocking

on the podcast before to me, time blocking my calendar is a game changer. And, you know, I, I realized that I needed this because I'll tell you a quick story, you know, after I quit my day job and I was an entrepreneur and I owned, uh, three health clubs and four cell phone repair stores. And, you know, I had a lot of stuff going on. But what happened is, but I also, like everyone, love autonomy, right? Like I don't want to feel like I'm chained to something or whatever. And so I would have no structure to my days.

And what would happen is I would, you know, do a bunch of work. And I felt like I was doing a lot, but I would get to the end of the day and then I would try to think about, okay, what did I actually accomplish? And the list of things that I could write down was very small. It was very short. And I was like, well, what is going on? This doesn't even make any sense. I'm doing all this stuff, but not really accomplishing anything meaningful. This is just blowing my mind. And I had read all the productivity books, like getting things done and a four-hour work week and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I thought I was productive. And I honestly, I wasn't. And so I started experimenting with

calendar blocking, with time blocking. And now my procedure is I block off from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. every day, Monday through Friday, infinitely on my calendar. And that's really my GSD time, which stands for get stuff done in the PG version. So I, so during that time, what I, I, you know, and it's not just blocking off the time. It's really what I don't do during that time. That's even more important. So what I don't do during that time, that's even more important. So what I don't do during that time is I don't check my email. I don't take appointments. I don't take phone calls. I, and again, I do not check my email. I can, I might send an email, right? Because I, you have that inbox one ready tool, but I don't check the inbox. And you know, the amount of stuff that I've been able to

accomplish by doing that is insane. It's exponentially greater and some interesting statistics just to back that up. Right. So I was like wondering, like, why is it that I can, I'm just getting so much more done. So these researchers followed around some executives and what they found is that when you're in flow, this, you know, state of it's a psychological state where like everything is just going your way and you're, you're kind of lose track of time. That's called flow. And when you're in flow, you're up to 500% more productive than when you're not in flow. But the problem is for the average person, when they're in flow and they get interrupted,

it takes them 26 minutes to get back into flow. Well, when you're checking your email once every six minutes and you're checking your smartphone once every 15 minutes for those notifications, the average person is never in flow and so they're never nearly as productive as they could be. So I use the time block to get into flow and really just crank through as much work as I can in those three hours. And what I do is I'll write down

usually one to three important things on my Post-it note. Again, usually not more than three. And then I just focus on those three things. And if I get those three things done during that three hours, then even if the rest of the day is a bust or I'm just in a bunch of meetings, it's still a hugely winning day for me. Yeah, I am such a fan of time blocking as well. And anybody who listens to the show knows it, but we get feedback all the time from people who find the religion of time blocking. There's just something to it, you know,

and it takes some intentionality. I think one of the reasons people don't try is they, they're so busy, they feel like they don't have time to time block, you know, to do the planning. But if you actually try it on yourself, I guess self-experimentation is a theme today. But if you try it, track how much time it takes you to actually plan it, because you'll be shocked how little time it takes and the investment pays off. I mean, I think of all the productivity tips, that's possibly one of the best, if not the best. Yeah. I love that you brought up flow rob i mean that that's a concept that probably everybody listens to this show is familiar with but it maybe seems

like every once in a while i catch lightning in a bottle and i enter flow and the rest of the time i just i'm not lucky enough to get there but i think that the reason that a lot of us don't get there is that we are our own worst enemies and we allow those distractions to reset that 26 minute timer frequently throughout our day. Has that been your experience by the elimination of those things? You find it easier to enter into that state more regularly? Oh, totally. I mean, that's a lot of the things that I do for people or teams or companies with humans first revolve around, how can I structure my technology use so that I'm not distracted? Which then means that I'm not relying nearly as much on willpower or almost no, it requires almost no willpower. So if I have more

structure and less willpower, that is a winning combination, but anything relying on willpower for any reason, right? Whether it's not being distracted at work or getting in shape and eating a good diet, that's ultimately probably not going to be as successful as having better structure. As an example, let's say I wanted to help you lose weight and you love chocolate chip cookies. Well, I could just simply say to you, hey, Mike, let's agree that you're not going to buy chocolate chip cookies and bring them in the house.

And you'd be like, okay, yeah, that sounds great. Well, that's way easier than setting a plate of chocolate chip cookies on your counter and saying, now, Mike, I don't want you to eat any chocolate chip cookies, and I want to just keep them here, right? Like that would drive you nuts. It'd be so hard for anyone, right? And so by relying on this technology structure,

it really changes the game instead of having to rely on willpower. You've done this. So you've gone through this process of kind of like diagnosing and helping a lot of companies with the four know, the four, four day work week. And you've done a lot of experimentation yourself. Could you share with us some of the struggles that you and the companies you had face have, have gone against in this process and how you got past them?

Oh, I don't know. That's a big question, but like, what are some of the common ones? If someone's listening, what, what should they expect to be the trouble areas? Where, where are the stormy waters? Yeah. Well, again, I, I hate to, uh, kind of belabor this point, but if you just from the get, from the get go, don't believe that this is possible, we might as well just stop talking, right? Like there's not, I could tell you a billion statistics, but if you just have it in your mind that the four day work week is impossible, there's no, that's kind of a showstopper. So I guess the very first thing that I would say is if you can, if you can be as open-minded as possible, that is really where this has to all begin.

Cause otherwise, and I think I asked the question poorly. What I mean is let's assume that we are invested and we want to do it. Where are the surprises when you start doing it? Where are you like, oh, I didn't know this was going to be hard? Where are the traps? Yeah. You know, I think one of the biggest things, and it's similar kind of to the psychology of the email stuff, but getting, getting people. So like, let's say I helped someone time block their calendar. You would

not believe how hard it is for people to honor that, like to honor it for themselves because they're just like, Oh, I, I, I, you know, I keep on getting it. My time block scheduled over. I'm like, okay, well, why is that happening? And they're like, well, this person just really needed this thing. And I'm like, well, was it really urgent? They're like, no. I'm like, okay, well, why is that happening? And they're like, well, this person just really needed this thing. And I'm like, well, was it really urgent? They're like, no. I'm like, okay, well then what, why did you really need to put it in that day? Couldn't you just schedule it a few days further out? And they're like, yeah, but you know, and so people, so I guess it's our obligation to other people and our want to not disappoint them is really the core of people not honoring their get stuff done time. And that is, I mean, and I, you know, did it occasionally too, but

what I realized is, you know, think about your schedule like this. Your calendar generally represents obligations between you and someone else. Well, if your entire calendar is filled up of obligations between you and someone else, when on earth are you supposed to get the stuff done for you? And the answer is you can't. And so when you realize that your calendar represents that, it doesn't seem that selfish to put blocks of time in there for you to get your job done. Like that to me actually seems smart. Um, but sometimes getting people to realize that it's almost, here's another, actually a good way of explaining it.

It's almost like a form of self care for you to put the blocks in your calendar for you to get your own stuff done. It's self-care. That's the way I would see it. But sometimes getting people to truly realize that is difficult. Yeah. I mean, we talked about a similar concept to say, consider those time locks appointments with yourself. Because if I make an appointment with Rob that I'm going to go, you know, help him, you know, move or do something. I'm going to do something with him. I'm going to be really careful to do that because I've made a commitment to another human. But for some reason, you need to like trigger in your brain, the same level of commitment to yourself. And that, I think that is difficult for people. That's a good one. I'm sure

a lot of people struggle with that. You know what though, David, you know why I think that that happens is, and again, like this is, uh, this is probably several, several layers deep, right? Like I don't even think that most people realize it, but why I think that that happens for some people is that they don't believe that they deserve the time for themselves. They don't believe that they actually, that they're worth having that time or that they should have the appointment with themselves. And so it sounds kind of crazy, but that, you know, when you realize that that might be it, right? Like you're afraid to honor this commitment to yourself because you don't think you deserve it. If you realize that and that applies to you, then you can start to think to yourself, I do deserve it.

I should have this appointment with myself. Yeah, that's true. I never thought about it that way. Mike, do you ever struggle with that, the blocking and favoring appointments with others over appointments with yourself? I do. I think I don't struggle with it as much as some other people. I think I don't struggle with it as much as some other people. I've recently gotten into this personality type assessment called the Enneagram. Yes. And there's a lot of, it's kind of freaky how accurate it was when I took the assessment. And I am a one, I am a reformer.

So I tend to just go do what I think is right and people got to fall in line. That's one of the areas where I got to be careful is I have to protect the relationships. But if you're a different person who typically wants to make people happy

and you are very empathetic and you're looking at other people first, it would be very easy to honor somebody else's request over the time that you had set aside for what you want to do. And even that being said, I still find that the stuff I time block in my fancy notebook, the time that I've set aside for certain projects, that still ends up being flexible in my eyes. But the meetings and appointments, those are things that absolutely have to happen just because I don't want to let somebody else down. I want to honor the word that

I've given them. That resonates with me, Mike. I love that you mentioned the Enneagram. And I recently took it too, and I'm a number two, which is sort of like a people pleaser, right? And so one of the things that I worked with my therapist on is to realize that I, you know, I'm sometimes want to help people because it's something that I'm doing it for my own, you know, like needs, I guess. And so it doesn't mean

that I should stop helping people, obviously, but it means that I, you know, maybe could come from a different place when trying to help people at times, or I need to just do a better job of putting up boundaries for myself when helping people. Uh, and, and that's really, I totally agree with you. It's very accurate. And I read substantially more about my, my type and it really was like scary how, how much, how accurate it was. It was really kind of freaky. The crazy thing about the Enneagram is that your greatest weaknesses are also your greatest strengths. There's a shadow side, but then if you learn to channel it correctly,

you know, you can express that in a healthy way as opposed to an unhealthy way. And I've kind of been digging into it and hearing all these people's stories about how they were this type and they were expressing it unhealthy. And they ended up, their life was falling apart. And then when they got the realization, they learned to channel it correctly, things started to click. when they got the realization, they learned to channel it correctly, like things started to click. And so I share that because I feel like everything that we talked about here today, it feels like this is a dichotomy maybe. Like if you feel that pressure for the social reciprocity and things like that, you can feel like you're so far away from this ideal, this four-day work week that we're talking about. But actually, if you're feeling that tension, if you're feeling that stress, it's usually just like a small adjustment and that causes those things to click into place. You're never as far

away as you think you are. You just can't see the path forward from where you are sometimes. Really well said. I love that, Mike. Another theme that I feel like we've had throughout today's conversation is the idea of awareness of these issues. Like if you're aware that you get triggered by social media, or if you're aware of how often you're checking email, those problems are much easier to cope with. It's the, when you're unaware of what an influence these things are having on you that you get into trouble. Yeah, I'm glad you say that, David. I mean, that's why I call this technology

mindfulness. The mindfulness part of it to me indicates that you have a heightened awareness of all this stuff. Absolutely. All right, Rob. Well, we really appreciate you coming out and sharing all this with today. If people want to learn more about the four-day work week and some of the things you're doing, where should they go? Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you guys so much for having me. I'm happy to direct people to the website. My website is humansfirst.us. And one of the other things that I wanted to offer all your listeners on Focused is a free 30-minute technology mindfulness call with me. All you need to do to redeem that is just email me. My email address is rob r o b at humans first.us. Just mentioned this podcast and the subject line. And then I'm happy

to set up a 30 minute call with you. Talk to you about the, uh, the four day work week or technology mindfulness, whatever works for you. Wow. And I'm super eager, Mike, if you're, if your day job starts doing this for you to report back to us how it's going. Will do. I think it's a matter of time till we get there. But it's one of those things. I know we're wrapping up here, but it's one of those things that you can get so stuck in your routine. Heads down, this is the way that we've always worked, that you don't even see

things like this as a possibility. And when you start to ask the question, like, how could we actually make this happen instead of just looking for the reasons why it won't work, then it gets pretty exciting. Yeah. And like, we didn't talk about it during the main show, but the fact that there's a five-day work week or an eight-hour workday is a fluke of history. It really, there's, this was not handed down from the heavens. You know, for some reason, we're applying factory mentality of 100 years ago to a very different world. So everybody should be questioning this stuff. Either way, Rob, go check out Rob's website, everybody.

If you want to learn more about us, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm. We've got a forum over at talk.macpowerusers.com. There's a little room there for the Focus Podcast. Lots of interesting comments in there. In fact, if you are doing something other than a five-day work week, we'd love to hear from you in the forums and how it's working out for you. Today on Deep Focus, we're going to be talking to Rob about exercise.

So we're looking forward to that. We'll get that started soon. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.