The 4-Day Workweek: A New Era

• Taking control and power back (2:29)
• Understanding how identity is determining how you think about the hours you work  (06:57)
• Reclaim agency over your calendar and power over your schedule (10:20)
• Tapping into your intuition to make fast, intuitive decisions(16:05)

“If you think of yourself again as somebody who’s just constantly going for it, gunning for it, and you don’t take time for yourself and you work weekends and you work on vacations, that’s what’s going to happen”

“You have the power to change your calendar. The power to say no. The power to actually create a calendar and craft one that works for you.”

“Do you work to live or do you live to work?…If you are putting work ahead of your own life, you’re probably not going to want to have a 4-Day Workweek because you don’t understand who you are outside of work. You are not clear on your identity. You’re not clear on what is meaningful in your life.”

“When you use intuition and you have it as your beacon, your homing signal, like the thing that is guiding you every day, you have so much more time. That’s what’s possible. We’re not sitting around. We’re not wondering about our choices. We are clear on our direction, and then we move forward. So when you can do this now, oh, my gosh. That’s when we work so much more effectively. We’re more productive. And I air quote, productive because I’m not really into being more productive, but I am really into being effective.”

NICOLE

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the School of Self-Worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong. So I love when I get to come in for these shorter mini episodes to do a quick dive on a topic that is close to my heart, and this topic is one I am super passionate about, and it is about working less. Now you’re like, “Nicole, please tell me more?” But more specifically, I want to talk about how to have a four-day work week.

You heard me right. Four-day workweek. Yes, I said it. Working just four days. It’s like you might think, well, how the heck is that even possible? Like, I can’t do that. My schedule doesn’t allow for it,   my life doesn’t allow for it. Well, that’s what we’re going to get into today because I see so many corporate leaders who believe they have to work 8, 10, 12 hour days plus nights and weekends, plus working during vacations to actually get their job done, to get recognized, and more specifically, to now break through the ceiling for the next level in their career. But I promise you, there is actually a new way to approach this.

That’s what today’s episode is all about. So before we begin, if you are an Asian American woman leader who wants the exact breakdown of a four-day workweek tailored to your life, DM me FOUR on Instagram at Nicole Tsong, and I have got something for you. Okay, friends, let’s do this. Let’s dig into this conversation.

Welcome to the School of Self-Worth, a podcast for ambitious women who know they are worthy of an astoundingly great life. Join us weekly as we get on the right side of your intuition, redefine success, and reclaim your self-worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, an award-winning journalist who left it all behind to become a bestselling author of three books and work/life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfilment and radical joy. Every single week, I will bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life who share insight about what it takes to be brave, joyful, and authentic every day. Every episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.

Okay, we are here to talk about the four-day work week. So before I get into how exactly this is going to happen for you, I want to come into full transparency about how I work, time I spend on my business and my life, and a little bit of my trajectory to get to this place I feel so passionately about. I used to have a 40 hours a week job back when I was a journalist. Like, that was really standard. That was my norm. I definitely worked more sometimes, but I would say 45, 50 hours was max, when I was really in an intense season at work.

Then I went to work for myself, and that’s when I turned into 60 hour weeks. Like, really, I was working for myself, and I was teaching ten yoga classes per week. I was doing 20 hours a week for a yoga company as my part-time job, and I was also writing my fitness column. And let’s not forget all of the driving I was doing to yoga studios and for the fitness column. I was working nights, I was working weekends. Pretty much everything you can think of in terms of consuming time. Like, that was all happening, by the way, so by the end, I was exhausted. I was so burned out. I was so depleted. I didn’t really have much time left for myself. I mean, I was teaching yoga classes, and I didn’t even have time to take yoga. I was really depleted. I didn’t have time to see friends. I didn’t have time to do weekends because I was always teaching, and I was always working. So that was an experience for me that was not ideal. That’s when I started to look at my life and say, okay, how can I start to make some changes? How can I start to actually create a life that works for me in terms of the amount of time that I have? So now let’s fast forward to my current life, where I run a six figure business.

I have a team, I have a lot of clients. I have a lot going on, and I only work 25 hours a week, maybe 30 if it’s really busy. But I would say only 25 hours a week, and it would be an actual four- day work week, except I don’t like working more than 5 hours per day. But if I chose to just move it all into 6 or 6 and a half hours per day, I would actually still have a four-day work week as well. So I’m really looking at the big picture of time for all of you. Like, how can you actually cut back the hours if you’re working eight hour days? How do we cut you back 20% to 6 hours per day? And then that could be, you could start to choose to really create that four- day workweek for yourself. So one of the things I’ve noticed for people is that when we’re on this hamster wheel of, we think that’s the way we’re going to make our lives better, whether it’s getting a promotion or a raise or getting recognized at work, means that we’re networking and we’re working harder.

So what happens is, say that works for you and for some of you that probably has worked, and you get to be successful from that. What it does, it just creates the cycle of networking and working harder at the cycle. And I’m here to share with all of you that you can actually change the cycle with this new method of actually taking yourself down to a four-day workweek. And I promise you, this is actually the way that people start to have breakthroughs of recognition, promotion, unsolicited notes of appreciation from work, and from your bosses. All of that starts to become possible when you really change this mental barrier that you have about working less. So that’s what we’re going to get into. But first, my question for all of you is, is this something that you want? If this is something that you want, then stay tuned and keep listening, because it is important to know and understand. Do you want this? Do you want to work fewer hours?

If you like working 60, 80 hours a week and you like working on vacations and going hard, and this is how you tell yourself you’re going to retire early and all those things, then go for it, be in that life. I’m totally cheering you on from the sidelines. And if you are somebody who’s like, “Actually, Nicole, I would really rather not work so hard and still get the promotion and still get recognized at work and still be a leader”. But I don’t work so much, and I have plenty of time for my family. I don’t feel crazed all the time. I actually have space and freedom. Keep listening, because this is what we’re going to do. And really we’re going to start to get into, like, how the heck do you do this? How do you run a life where you are actually only working four days a week, where you have space, you have time for you! So that’s what we’re going to get into.

It’s actually so much simpler than you think it is. It really is. That’s why I wanted to break it down into four pieces for you today. This is all part of the four-day workweek. Like, how do you start to really create that in your life? And if you know that you want it, this is the place for you. So let’s dig in. Let’s get into this.

The first thing is the most crucial and the most important thing, and the reason I shared my journey around how much I work is because I really had to break through this first one, over and over again. The big piece of this is around understanding how you identify in terms of the way that you work, your working style, the amount of time you work. So when you have the identity of somebody who works hard, someone who’s a workhorse, somebody who works 40, 50, 60 hours, somebody who works to get it done, no matter what, it will be almost impossible for you to make the shift to somebody who has a four-day work week. You really have to start to understand how you think of yourself. If you think of yourself again as somebody who’s just constantly going for it, gunning for it, and you don’t take time for yourself, and you work weekends and you work on vacations, that’s what’s going to happen. You will continue to do that. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that, and unless it’s not what you want, if you want more space, if you want more time, that’s the key.

Your key is to actually start to lean into your identity, test out the waters, see what it’s like to be somebody who doesn’t do x. It’s very similar to anything we’re doing when we’re trying, like, wanting to work out more, we actually have to change to be somebody who works out, versus the identity of somebody who doesn’t go to the gym. Like, I transformed my identity into a walker. When I wanted to start getting 10,000 steps per day, I really had to think of myself as a walker. Previous to that, I wasn’t somebody who walked that much. It wasn’t a priority. I didn’t really care, but once I shifted my identity into somebody who walks, I became someone who walks all the time. I’m on a seven- or eight year-streak now of 10,000 step days, so that’s a big part of this. What’s the identity you want to be? Do you want to be in the identity of someone who has a four-day work week? You have to start to think of yourself that way, choose that way, and start to make decisions from that identity, because that is the only way to really get it grounded into the way you do life, every single day.

Then the second piece of this, once you’ve got that identity shifted and you’re like, all right, I feel pretty confident and clear that this is the identity that I want, and I’m going to do this consistently and regularly, this is going to be how I operate. and you’ll have to do it slowly over time. But really getting yourself into this new identity. The second piece, this one is really crucially important, and this is something I honestly see as the biggest mistake most people have around working, and understanding the relationship to it, and that is a relationship to time. So the second thing you need to do is to have a new relationship to time. Now, you might be like, “Nicole, what do you mean, relationship to time? I have a calendar. I follow it. I have things to do”.

A lot of times, people have the experience of their calendar controlling them, so if you’re in that experience of your calendar controlling you, that’s the relationship that I am talking about. Because if you don’t believe that you have a say over your calendar, you’re going to have a very hard time shifting yourself into a four-day workweek. Here’s what’s happening also: When we are looking at time and feeling like we don’t have time, and if you’re like, “I say that all the time, I don’t have time”, you are in the right place because we’re going to talk about why we say things like that.

When we say, I don’t have time. What’s actually going on is, you’re letting yourself be in the circumstances of your life. We’re all busy. We all have things to do. But when you really are not allowing yourself to believe that you have the power to change your calendar, the power to say no, the power to actually create a calendar and craft one that works for you, what you’re doing is you’re actually handing your power away to calendar invites, to other people at work, all of those things. When we say we don’t have time, we actually are acting like we don’t have power. And the other thing is, we’re often just a little bit afraid of what might happen, because when you start to give time to something (let’s go back to the workout example) if you say, okay, now I’m going to commit the time to working out, but then you do it and nothing happens. You don’t get stronger, you don’t look any different, you don’t feel any different, then we’re like, oh, my gosh, that was such a waste of time. Can you see where I’m going here? We often are afraid that the change that we want, or the life that we want, is not going to happen if we actually put the time in. So then we’re just like, I don’t have time. I don’t have time. I am the victim of time. I don’t have any time to myself. Instead of understanding that when we put the time in, that’s actually how we start to have the change.