My Favourite Tip: Dr Jason Fox's 7-day rhythm for work and life

he approaches work. So if you haven't come across Jace before, Jace is someone that I've actually known for about a decade now, So like me, he is a scientist at heart and has a bias for strategies that are grounded in research. Jace travels the world, or at least he did pre COVID, helping leaders from companies such as My, Microsoft, Salesforce, McDonald's,

and Toyota in the area of motivation design. Jace is also the best selling author of The Game Changer and How to Lead a Quest, and in twenty sixteen was awarded Keynote Speaker of the Year. So this extract from my chat with Jace was around something he was experimenting with at the time, which was looking at a seven day rhythm for work and life, which I found absolutely fascinating. So let's head on over to Jace.

it is. And so recently I was doing this interview series and information Overload, and the previous person set forth the questions for me, and they'd written this article on the discipline and I kind of promptly ignored it because I had the word discipline in it. I since had a look at it. And what this guy is doing is he kind of organizes his week on ten day cycles. And so how this works in terms of a ritual and rhythm is.

ten day rhythm would be like. And in the ten day rhythm, he would have different focuses for each day. Can you believe it, I've forgotten his name, William van Dervich in an event, so different focuses might be a reading day, and that would be every spare moment you spend reading. There's a different like a play day, a

make day, a create day. And I kind of like that because I fall into this trap sometimes of being very optimistic in the morning about what I can achieve, and then getting through to four pm realizing I've only done ten percent of my to do list, and I curse my optimism, and I say, this is why, you know, I shouldn't hope, and you know, embrace despair into the night and then reset the cycle in again each day.

And what happens in the process is a lot of really good things that I'd love to be doing, like learning. I'm learning the tubbler at the moment, which is an Indian hand drum. There's working on the next book. There's a lot of bigger projects that don't necessarily fit in you know, optimized day to day rhythms. Even if you're to schedule time to work on it, it doesn't quite fit as a conscious thing that flares up because I always almost always seems to be other more important, salient,

emergent things to kind of tackle. But with this, with this focus, it allows you to say, Okay, today's reading day, every spare moment, I'm going to try to read, or today's a make day, every spare moment I can try to make. So what I've done is taken that inspiration. But for me, I can't. I can't really fathom desynchronizing from a seven day work week because there's just some things that happen on Like I know, on Saturdays, I'm probably going to be you know, there might be maybe

a social thing. I don't know. I know that on Sundays there's house things to do, like you know, cleaning up the house and groceries and things like that. I know on Mondays it's kicking on. So I've got this. I've got this thing, a seven day rhythm that I love to play with, and I'm trying to link this to the lunar cycle. So we've got the full moon every twenty eight days or roughly, and so that's for wakes,

so seven So hear me. You guys can't see this as you're listening, but Ama gives good back channeling of with the face expressions and something. So, as I say, in a cycle, it's great to see your reaction. So so here's here's what it looks like. As you know, I choose one word each year to serve as as a fuzzy contextual beacon and to kind of do a lot of heavy lifting amidst complexity. And my word this year is barred. A bard is a entertainer, a trabadour,

and I was trying to go bring more enchantments. Originally it was about doing more gatherings, but COVID nineteen is put a stop to dash that except for online mode. But so here's what it looks like. I have different modes that I cycle through. So on Mondays and on Saturdays, I'm in Barred mode, and this is where I'm outward looking. I'm more social On Mondays, I kind of do a lot of online social stuff like that is the one

day that I do social media. I don't really like social media, but if I'm going to be paying attention, I'm finding I'm actually finding that there's a lot of sense to be found from some folks on Twitter in terms of a sense making thing. I'm finding it's useful to dip in there, but I don't want to be subsumed or drowned in it, so I try to curtail it to the day. It's also Mondays out a day I get on top of emails, I interact with folks

as socializing in Internet sense. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'm in wizard mode, and that is where I embrace the disposition of someone who's prioritizing intellectual pursuits. And so this is like deep work, but it's allowing myself to stay in deep work beyond the deep work session, well not really beyond. I'll do the deep work, but then I might have queued up some I need to read some nonfiction things, or I need to kind of do some more highlighting there.

So I'm kind of I'm staying in the zone as much as possible. What it also means is if people are trying to schedule social things or going out to dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday, Third Days or whatever it is, I'm probably more likely to summon the lofty, arrogant hermit like wizard mode and decline Fridays and Sundays my druid

days and a driviid. And this is, for want of a better term, Drew is someone who's very connected to nature, very in tune into the rhythms and flows, and it's probably more likely to emphasize maintenance activities instead of making or socializing. So on Fridays, I'll make sure I get some extended time in nature Kim, and I might go for a hike or something. I'll also I would also, you know, tie up blue sands and just do good restorative,

rejuvenative activities. And on Sunday that's kind of like a home day, like where I'm just consciously at home, reading, pottering away in the garden, cooking and doing things like that. And I'm finding that, in addition to all the savvy stuff when it comes to productivity and deep work, having these thematic overlays to the week allows me to embrace different dispositions. That means that when it comes to you know, super deep work, yeah, Tuesdays on Thursday is going to happen.

When it comes to socializing, I can kind of say, oh sorry, I can't do it today, but how about we catch up on Saturday, or how about on Monday and so on and so and then there's there's two other elements coming back to the moon. On a new moon, which is where it's the darkest moon, I go into trickster mode, and that is a tricks to mythologically, is someone who inverts paradigms and kind of plays with tries to enter a meta rational or transrational perspective to ask

the questions are these things working? You know what's working? What needs to be tweaked? How can we tweak err in destiny? In fatim I don't believe in destiny and fate, by the way. But and then full moon, I embrace the lunatic element of things. That's where lunatic come from. And that's where I go full mode, and that's where I have permission to what anyone who's read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way would would know. As artist states, that's

where I just I simply play I do. I do whatever comes to my mind, and so in this way, I have a kind of version of the discipline that doesn't feel like I'm being disciplined. It feels like I'm being playful. I'm role playing each day of the week as an overlay to ensure that I'm seeing and tending to all the elements of life.