S6E9 Joe Sanok: Optimizing Productivity through Neural Syncing, Discovering your Sprint Type, and making Thursday the New Friday...

And as always, if there's an episode, you really like send it over to your friends They'll probably like it too. Thank you so much. And let's get back to the show. So welcome back to Success Engineering. I'm your host, Michael Bauman. And I have the pleasure of having Joe Sanok on. He's a keynote speaker, a consultant. He's a podcaster.

He's the author of Thursday is the new Friday how to work fewer hours, which is great, make more money also great, and spend more time doing what you want, which is great. He looks at how can we actually have a four day work week that boost creativity and productivity been featured on Forbes, Good magazine, Smart Passive Income and then the host of very popular, The Practice of the Practice podcast, which is recognized as top 50 worldwide. So pleasure to have you on the show.

I'm excited to hear the insights that you have to share.

So, I had applied, I didn't hear. And then. I decided, I'm gonna do the next hairstyle and I dye my hair completely bleached it and then took Q-tips and did these little like cheetah print all the way through. And like the next day I get a phone call for an interview and I didn't have a lot of money at the time, so I. Had spent probably 30 bucks on this hairstyle. And that was a lot of money back in college. And I'm like, I'm not gonna just like dye black again and start over.

So I went into this interview with my suit and tie on and my portfolio honors college Joe with cheetah print hair and the whole interview I feel like I had a sense of what a lot of women go through where, guys are looking at their chest and they're like, Hey, my eyes are up here. Except it was the opposite. It was like, my eyes are down here cuz. Interviewers were looking at the top of my head for the whole time.

But later they told me I got one of the reasons I got the job was they thought I could connect with the more unique and punk rock kids there. So, perfect. I worked in my favor.

And so that outsider perspective we see over and over the top leaders maintain that. And, oftentimes we see it, people moving cultures, or, I mean you, yourself, living in China you have an outsider perspective and you see things differently. And then when you come back to the states, I imagine that you still have an outsider perspective because you then have lived overseas. So, oftentimes statistically outsiders have more influence than insiders.

And there's a really interesting study that was done where they brought small groups together, six to eight people. They sat 'em at a table and they showed them two colors, either blue or green, and they had these different kinda shades of blue and green. And they'd say to the group, what color is this? And most people would say, oh, that's blue or that's green. And for the most part, except for a handful of colors they would agree that's blue or that's green.

So then they did a second version of the study, same size group. But they had two people that were working with the researchers and there were specific color cards that they were supposed to say the opposite. So instead of it being green, they'd say blue, instead of blue, they'd say green. And they found that they were able to sway the group statistically more than they really should have been able to. And so we see this replicated over and over in different areas.

Even if someone say starts a new job. Uh, I remember I was working at a community college. And, this was, I don't know, 2010, probably 2000 somewhere in there. I started there in this counseling department, they were still handwriting all of their progress notes. So there's no way for me to digitally search for, Hey, has Michael come in before for advising? is he depressed? Like there was no way for me to digitally search for that. They were handwriting the calendar.

So there was no way for me to know who was on my calendar, except for going up to the front desk and Taking a picture of my schedule. Well, and then they filed the progress notes instead of by last name. Like, I couldn't even search by your last name. It was by day that the students came in and so they had to look at old handwritten calendars to find out that, last September you came in and had flunked your math class and then. We had to go back to that day. And it was just so ridiculous.

And as an outsider who had saw how community mental health works, saw how progress in those works, just say, this is crazy. Like So as part of the projects with the Dean, I said, I'd like to refine and change the system to be digital so that we can have, some ways that we can search for this. But outsiders oftentimes have that outsider perspective, and that adds a lot to a company. It can also be very threatening to a company.

And so if you can maintain that, especially as you move up in leadership it really allows you to do things that the average person can't do.

And I don't it's really scary. I was an outsider. And, but it's hilarious for me now. I feel like I'm walking a tight rope every single week. And so finding these things, it could be, if you're someone that goes to church, maybe. Go to a different church, go to a different religions, place, learn something, say there's a bunch of people from Columbia that live in your community and they have a, Columbian day and they have Columbian foods like go to those events, be an outsider.

And when you do that, you recognize what that feels like. And once you know how it feels. You can then look for opportunities within the corporation to say, well, where am I not pushing back on things that maybe I should be pushing back? Are there questions that I wanna ask that I don't feel prepared to ask? And so making sure that you think through, well, how do I push back? How do I allow my feelings to come up? Maybe you need to push back in some new areas and just see how that goes.

And look at the data, look at your feelings, look at, what does that do for you? And then, adjust according.

Can you talk about the research around curiosity and how important that is to making sure that you just maintain that curiosity and willing to learn.

So these students come in and they, all that they were trying to figure out is how bored does someone have to get before they start getting curious. And so. It was all males. So these males go into their room by themselves. It's completely dark. The only thing that they really got was like their meals put under the door. So they saw this little bit of light, a couple times a day. There was a bed in there. And they were supposed to stay seated on the bed.

And so the first part of the study, they just have these guys kind of sitting in there. And they're like, how long do they stay seated on the bed? And then, they start wandering around. Well then they added this blinking red light and they, there was a button in the room that the, they couldn't feel until they were like feeling around and then they found this button and the button was totally random. It wasn't even associated with the red light, but then the guys would like hit this button.

And then once in a while there'd be like three red lights in a row. And these guys were just bored out of their mind. And so over time they did all sorts of other weird studies like that to just show that curiosity often comes from boredom. That's one of the areas. One of the other major areas is seeing someone do something that you don't have the ability to do. So our next door neighbor he's this middle school boy. He loves every single sport. It's like baseball, basketball, football.

He always has some sort of, sports stuff going on. But say he saw someone do a pitch in baseball that he's never seen before. I know he's gonna be out there with his dad, practicing that pitch until he gets it down. So curiosity sometimes comes out of the sense that I can't do what I want to do, or I saw something that I want to do. And then the last area of the curiosity often emerges is being able to say, I have a specific goal I want to reach. The goal drives it. How do I get there?

And then investigating because of that. And so when we think about curiosity, This is something that oftentimes we think we have to foster because it's not in us, but the reality is we all had this as kids, right. I was babysitting my nieces the other day. And so, they're four and six. My daughters are seven and 11, so, four girls under the age of 11 playing in the backyard. And they're squealing and loud and then it gets really quiet out of nowhere.

And I'm just like, uhoh I gotta go check on 'em really. That's how it's with kids. It gets too quiet. You go see what's up. And they're all standing around this dead mouse. And the conversation was hilarious. It was like, how do you think it died? Should we have a mouse funeral. Do you bury mice, but wouldn't an owl like to eat it, do owls eat live mice or dead mice? like, what kind of funeral would we have? What should we make a headstone for it, all these questions about this dead mouse.

But they're trying to sort out, is this part of life that happens every day and it's normal, or is this something that's really abnormal? So the first time they see a car accident, the first time they see a rainbow they're sorting out are these normal things I need to be really scared of. Like, could I die in a car accident tomorrow? Or is this something that really isn't something to be really scared of? Or savoring that rainbow is that something that happens every day?

And I just never noticed, or is this something that happens just once in a while that curiosity is them trying to have a construct for the world. But at some point we stop having level of curiosity, cuz we think we've figured out the world. And that's where I think top leaders realize that sure, you may have figured out certain expertise, but there's so many different areas that you can still continue to grow.

Having our taxes done, having all sorts of other things, you want that to be accurate and you wanna put the time into it, but for most of business speed is going to be greater than accuracy in most cases, because you're gonna get that feedback. You're gonna get that user data. You're gonna be able to see what works and what doesn't versus just waiting till something's perfect. And so being able to look at things and say, okay, why are we delaying this?

Could we set a date that's maybe faster than what we think, get it out and then adjust as we go. Those types of leaders are able to move quicker and to get more done overall.

So being able to figure out some of that origin, whether that's through counseling or meditation or, self-help books or there's so many tools out there to address those types of things just looking at, do I accept myself as a human. Just as a human or do I have a mindset where I need to do certain things to achieve? And so, a lot of the kind of Protestant Western culture is based on a original sin model, even if we're not maybe Christians that's still a very pronounced part of our culture.

So starting with it. Babies are flawed with original sin. That's gonna do a certain kind of way of thinking for people where, you have to achieve your way out of it, or, find a savior, whatever. And I'm not saying this as a critique on religion, but just thinking about that has influenced how people think. And so digging into our imposter syndrome and saying, do I believe that I need to achieve in order to be successful? Do I believe I need a certain net worth to be successful?

Do I need to have a certain number of employees to feel successful? And then to challenge that and say, is that. Like, if you didn't have 10 employees, if you didn't have a hundred employees, if you didn't make multi seven figures or whatever your number is, do you feel that you're a bad person? Do you feel that you shouldn't have a voice in the world? Now. That mixed with, we all have goals.

When we launch things, whenever I launch a new product, like if two people buy it and I thought 10 would, or a hundred would, of course I'm gonna feel bummed about that. That's okay. Like we put time into something, we wanna see it be successful. But then to say, as a result of that, I'm a bad person or I'm a bad entrepreneur. No we're learning through that process. We're seeing what our people want, what they don't want.

That's where that curiosity comes in to say, okay, In the eyes of the world, this feels like a pass fail. I just failed. I spent more on that Facebook ad than I ever have, and nobody opted in. They clicked a lot, so I had to pay, but, I didn't actually sell anything. Of course, you're gonna be bummed about that, but then to say, what did I learn from that? Okay. I learned that they clicked on that. So the title's good.

I learned that the copy was good, getting them there, but that landing page, there was something about it that didn't resonate with people, nobody purchased. And so being able to remain curious throughout that, I think allows you to step back from feeling like an imposter and saying, Hey what do I have to offer? What am I doing? Where can I find success? And does it all need to come from my work? And from the things that I'm doing in the world?

We spin and the sun comes up and down or, I mean, we rotate and the sun doesn't move, but yeah. The months are loosely related to the lunar cycle. But there's nothing really that points to seven days. And so, as I looked at it, it actually goes back thousands of years to the Babylonians. And so the Babylonians. They looked up and they saw the sun, the moon, mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. And then they looked down and saw earth. So seven major celestial things in the sky.

And so they said we should have a seven day week. We just, as easily could have had a five day week and had 73 weeks in a year. The Russians as early as the mid 18 hundreds tested out a five day work week. The Romans, they had a 10 day week, the Egyptians had an eight day week. So this idea that. The calendar has been set for, all of eternity or, for the last thousand years, it's just not true.

Like even the Russian calendar compared to the Western calendar, those weren't even aligned until the mid 19 hundreds. And so people, we had to actually like lose days when they all aligned. We made up time, we made up the calendar and the seven day week is completely arbitrary. And so if we just start with that, Thing that we made up. If the Babylonians had better telescopes we may have had a 15 day week who knows.

So that's completely made up then if we fast forward to the late 18 hundreds, how the average person was working was absolutely insane. They were working 12 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. So they had a farmer's schedule. Even if they weren't farmers. Like people moved over from Europe to help rebuild Chicago after the great fire.

And they started protesting in the 18 hundreds in like 1884 1886 specifically because their work conditions were so bad and they thought they'd come to the United States for a better life. And it was terrible. There was, there were bombings that happened at these protests. The nation went on a national lockdown because of it, like the government thought this was gonna erupt and really be this huge labor movement and this huge, just like all sorts of things.

So that's actually where we get Mayday as a holiday to look at worker's rights was from that in 1880. So fast forward to 1926, exactly 40 years later after these Haymarket protests that happened in Chicago, Henry Ford launches, the 40 hour work week to Ford industries with the goal of selling more cars to his own employees. I mean, the guy just wanted to sell cars to his own people because he thought if they have a weekend, they're gonna want to get outta Detroit and, go see upper Michigan.

It's beautiful up here. I can see why they'd want a car. And. Less than a hundred years ago, Henry Ford starts this thing. He's the first major national corporation to do this, then, there's legislation and all sorts of things that happen where we see that the 40 hour work week was a giant step forward for the average person. I mean, for the evolution of business to go from six to seven days a week from 10 to 14 hour days that's a huge step forward. I mean, think about.

Our, that generation, that would be my grandparents or great grandparents going from when I was a kid, I had to work 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. You lazy 40 hour a week people. The baby boomers were the first generation to be raised by people working the 40 hour week. And, gen Xers and millennials are only the second generation in human history to be raised by 40 hour week people. And so this is a brand new concept.

And we see in the eighties and nineties, even Friday, Start to fade out. I like to joke that Friday has been having an affair with the weekend since the eighties. Let's just call it what it is. Because we see the rise of casual Fridays. We see, birthday parties. We see cheesy team building activities on Fridays, really start to emerge in the eighties and nineties.

And by the two thousands, we start to see more companies saying, okay, in the summer we're gonna do, work from home Fridays or no meeting Fridays. And so we see that this really starts to shift and the pandemic really was that final just break with the industrialist mindset. The industrialist way of thinking where everything is prescriptive, everything is a machine. Everything is to be optimized. We no longer thought that anyway.

But then in the pandemic, it really finish that whole system to say that 40 hours butts in a chair, that's the highest key performance indicator that we can have to really saying, like, what is the purpose of this job role? What's the purpose of me being in this job role. We see the great resignation or great recalibration, depending on how you think about it. Because the way people were doing it, since the eighties was saying no, like the industrials model doesn't work for us anymore.

And so then we see, post pandemic or post kind of major pandemic. We may see more pandemics who knows that everybody is thinking differently about how we work, where we work and what we're gonna do as work that gives us purpose.

They're going to plan their weekend when they're at their desk and their boss isn't looking. And what we see in case studies and in the research is that really, if we just say work a 32 hour week, but we're gonna pay you the same that you get the same or better outcomes. Iceland had a huge study, 3000 plus people in multiple industries. So we're not talking just entrepreneurs. These were bus drivers. These were, childcare workers. They worked a 32 hour week.

They were paid the same amount and they looked at it and they found that they were actually more productive than those working a 40 hour week. We see places like Kalamazoo valley, community college, who for years has done a four day week in the summer. They save millions just on air conditioning their students weren't coming on Fridays anyway and they're retaining people longer. They're also finding their student success has gone up.

We see the UK just recently a couple weeks ago, announced that they're doing the largest four day work week study in implementation. And so over and over, we're seeing that giant companies like Shopify or other ones are doing this in attracting top talent and within just a couple years there's gonna be enough evidence that really points to the four day work week that it's not gonna be a selling point to people anymore.

So right now, when companies are doing it, they're innovative, they're attracting top talent. But that's only gonna last until there's kind of a critical mass where, you know, that's not a selling point anymore.

I'm curious as how that fits into a model, cuz there's benefit to just chatting with your colleagues and stuff at the water cooler though it may not be productive. So I'm curious is how that gets incorporated into the model.

And so I would say being forced into a workplace friendship, just because you're working with someone, a lot of people would rather say I'd rather just go hang out with my real friends than hang out with the people that I'm working with and have an extra hour to go do things with my family. Now we'll see what happens in regards to a lot of that, but if people were more efficient, does that mean that they're not gonna get along with each other? Does that mean they're not gonna catch up?

Does that mean that they're not gonna do those other things? Things, I don't think that humans are just gonna become robots that don't talk to each other. I think we, we naturally are communal people and if we are able to connect with people, we're able to get more done, especially, as we work in groups. And so there's gonna be specific industries, that might be needed more, that might be needed less, but I think that's also where it taps into the idea of slowing down.

To optimize our brains before we get to what in the book I call killing it or sprinting. So if we just jump to, okay, we wanna work four days a week and sprint, we need to first say, well, how within the workplace are we slowing down to boost creativity, but also outside of the workplace, how are we slowing down to boost creativity so that the brain is optimized and ready to run when it is time to be productive?

And maybe you network with people and the drink time in the evening is usually the most productive, cuz you're just like chatting with people. And so trying to take the best part of conferences. So the first two days of slowdown school, we go hiking. I have massage therapists come in. We hang out on the beach and skip stones and watch the sunset. It's right on, on lake Michigan and genuinely slow down and just get to know each other that are there.

Then on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning, We run full tilt towards people's businesses. I teach them how to sprint. We talk about setting, measures and people will say in these two and a half days, I got done months of work, but why it works is that you're allowing your brain to genuinely slow down. Like we think we slow down on the weekends, but usually it's more in reaction to the previous week than in preparation for the coming week. So we have a busy week.

and then, we sleep in on the weekend and maybe we over drink and, maybe we have soccer practice or other things with the kids. And, by Monday morning we're tired. We aren't genuinely rejuvenated versus looking at our weekend and saying, how can I actually prepare my brain for the coming week? So when we're looking at the schedule for a typical person, one very first step, whether or not you have a three day weekend is to do the add one, subtract one Exercise for your weekend.

So to say, what's one thing I can add into my weekend that I can test out to see if this adds more life to my weekend. So it might be, I have this novel, that's not a business novel, it's something I've wanted to read that I just haven't got to. And I'm gonna talk to my family and say, you know what, for an hour on Saturday morning, I want to drink my green tea and just go read this, leave me alone. Please support me in this.

I wanna see if this makes me a better dad or maybe it's, a friend that you want to connect. And you say, I want to, go grab a beer with this person or go for a walk with this person, adding something in that maybe you don't typically have in your weekend and saying, did that bring more life to my weekend?

And then having a handful of things on the menu that, brings you more life and making sure you pepper those into the weekend, the subtract one side is the same sort of idea, but it's taking something off of your plate that maybe could kinda have more weight when it's taken off. For example, Maybe you don't wanna spend half of a Sunday grocery shopping.

And so you use shipped or Instacart to have your groceries delivered and you see, okay, by not going shopping, did that make my weekend feel better? Maybe you do have a coffee date with a friend scheduled and every time you leave that coffee date you feel like trash. They're like a toxic person. Like we're too old to have toxic friends. You can cancel that. So just removing something from your schedule and saying, did that give me some extra.

And that's the shift that we see away from the industrialist. The industrialist said, here's the one model. Here's the prescription. Everyone should follow it. Whereas this post industrialist era we're looking at well, what's the menu. How do I taste that menu? Try it, evaluate it, experiment and see if it works for me, for my job, for my life, and then get the data. And if it doesn't work okay, that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that doesn't resonate with you.

And so really having that menu based model, both in work and in your life seems to be the post industrialist way that really helps people find what they're looking for.

So the old way of thinking was that, like a glass of water, the energy and the focus you have in a day, it just gets drained out. And really the only way to recalibrate that is to go home, go to sleep, come back tomorrow. Just don't keep working on the task. So they wanted to look at this and see, is that accurate? So they brought these college students in and they had them at a computer and they gave them a random four digit number. So say it was 4, 312. So 4, 312.

When that random number comes up on the screen, hit this button when other four digit numbers come up, like don't hit the button. So for about an hour, they're sitting at this computer super boring task. When the, when it pops up, hit the button when it doesn't. Don't hit the button and they found that these students had vigilance decrement. At the end of the study, they were pushing the button and missing their number more often than at the beginning of the study.

So then they did a second version of the study where at the one third mark, they gave them a one minute break. They said something like, we put you on the wrong computer, just hang out in the lobby. There were no magazines, no phones, no TVs, literally one minute of just hanging out, have a seat here, stand up, whatever, just be for a minute. Then they brought them back, did another third and then gave them another one minute break. And then they ended the study.

They found that there was zero vigilance decrement from just two, one minute breaks. So sometimes we think that we need this whole like three day weekend. But the reality is if you just set a timer for 20 minutes and. You then went outside or you just, moved your body or did a plank or whatever you do just don't go on your phone. It allows your brain to reset because when the brain's in a new situation or a disrupted situation, it wants to make sure you're safe.

And so even though we know we're safe our brain is still really old. It hasn't evolved at the pace of our technology. And so it's still looking for the tiger that might kill you, even though there's, no tigers in Northern Michigan. But you know, if I just step away from what I'm working on, it helps me reset. So we know that there's tons of other techniques that help you slow down or to optimize the environment. So for example, even changing your environment to match what your task.

So when I was writing Thursday as the new Friday you can see my home environment. I have a standing desk in the corner. I would change, I had different lights I brought in for while I was writing. So I had different light. I moved the chair, that's in the corner over to the middle and moved the desk to the middle instead of being in the corner. I had some specific headphones. I only wore and listened to a specific playlist while I was working on it.

And then I had a habit of how I entered into that day. So at the end of every day so I only wrote on Thursdays as I was writing it and I would whiteboard out the next chapter of the book and put the kind of three research studies, the three case studies kind of questions I had, and I would put it up on the whiteboard at the end of my day.

Then I would just let it simmer for a week and then I would come in and right away, instead of looking at a blank screen and having to type, I would say, what questions do I have? Like, what's interesting about this. So curiosity, for example I was like, okay, curiosity killed the cat. Where the heck did that come from? And it was literally a cat in 1910 that got stuck in a chimney. It made national news was in the Washington post, like front page. So it was a slow Newsweek.

And then after five days, This cat died in chimney. Like the firefighters were like dismantling the chimney and headline said, curiosity killed the cat. And so just things like that, that then it boosts my productivity because it's just interesting, I've slowed down enough to let things simmer and then I've changed my environment to like teach my brain that this is safe and we're ready to go. Then I can get more done when I am working.

I don't even have to put any energy into what I'm gonna wear for interviews.

And so there's two factors to your sprint type. There's what kind of work you're doing when you're sprinting and when you're doing it. And so. First we wanna look at be whether you're a time block sprinter or a task switch sprinter. So time block sprinter is someone that just does one task when they're sprinting, whereas someone that's task switching, they have a variety of tasks. Now they're not multi-tasking. These are still high level tasks. So it might be if you're a time block sprinter.

Okay. I'm just working at writing Thursdays a new Friday, like I'm gonna black that out. I'm gonna block out a four hour period of time for that. And it's just gonna be that. Whereas if I'm gonna be task switching, it might be for this first half hour, I'm working on something high level for the team. And then, for the next half hour, I'm gonna sketch out my podcast schedule and interviews and send some emails to people I want to interview. And then.

So it's still high level tasks, but you're very clear on what you're doing. So some people need a lot of variety when they're working and some people need a lot of focus and there's nothing wrong with either side of it. It's just knowing yourself well enough to really dive in. The second part is when we do it. So an automated sprinter is someone that puts it in their calendar and it just repeats every single week.

And so an automated sprinter for me when I was writing the book every Thursday, it's just on repeat like Thursday is the day that I'm writing the book. Whereas if we look at an intensive sprinter, they go away for intensive. So they might go to an Airbnb for a couple days. They. Find a space. My friend, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, I write about him in the book. He does this where a couple times a year he'll find an Airbnb. He thinks through it, he's a vegan.

So we make sure he's walking distance from a couple great vegan restaurants. He looks at the menu ahead of time and picks what he is gonna eat. So he is using his emotional energy. For his work, not for figuring out what he's gonna have for breakfast. He wants an outdoor space and then he also brings a lot of specific tasks. So he might schedule out his podcasting. He might work on the finances for his private practice. He might dive into something he's been wanting to explore or read.

So he comes with a clear plan and he sprints for those few days making the most of that time. And then he has everything set up so that he can, go get coffee or go get his lunch. And. Figuring out your sprint type then allows you to align your natural inclinations with your specific areas.

And I haven't heard it delineated like that. I think that's really interesting to figure that out.

Like, that's just like, if I have an important task, I'm gonna schedule it during that time. If I have an important interview, I wanna have it during that time. If I'm doing emails, probably not. During that time, that's a waste of my best energy. I wanna put that into something else, and so looking at that, looking at. Maybe I need a little more kale in my diet. Maybe I need a, to like drink a little less right before bed. Like, do I wake up refreshed?

And just these really basic, how does my body feel and how do I align that best with the work I want to do?

But then energy, like you're talking about is not talked about as much, but you're going, like, how can I generate energy rather than just like, oh, I need to have an external stimulus to get a certain amount of energy it's actually going, how can I generate the energy that I need to do? And what energies do I need to bring to this situation? Like, it's a different creativity when you're doing podcasting, when you're doing your practice, when you know, whatever that is.

And so actually intentionally thinking about that and knowing how you can generate energy. And you'll see that in top performers, top athletes, like their ability to switch on and switch off is actually extraordinary.

And to just know those things about yourself, of, you look at, I mean, the famous Michael Phelps story of him listening to his playlist, and then, his goggles filled up as he's in the Olympics, but he knew exactly how many strokes it was for him to hit the other side. Like he had that rhythm, he had that predictability to know his body and to know where he was at in the pool, in the Olympics, even when his goggles were filled with water. Yeah, just that's the elite level Yeah, for sure.

I should be national parking instead of like working. And so in that situation, it would be, I would work say two or three days in a row, really hardcore and then be available via text to my assistant, but really didn't have anything that was time sensitive for me to do and then would work hardcore. And so. When we got home from living on the road, it was like, do I want to continue that pace? Or do I wanna work differently?

And so changing up the schedule and adjusting it to me, I'm constantly saying, why am I doing that work? So I'm trying to take things off of my plate, hand, 'em off to team members. And then also adding new things on that. I find interesting that my audience wants. And so. I start with the, my schedule it's planned, but it's fluid as to what's gonna be in that schedule and how it's gonna look. So that would be kind of a starting premise.

When I actually look at my typical week I usually take Mondays and Fridays off. I always take Fridays off Mondays. I might do a, if there's an important meeting that couldn't get in Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday most of the time I'm doing Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, pretty hardcore Thursdays being a lighter. That's where I would do more like webinars with my audiences where I might do some meetings that I find interesting more than kind of as like, pointed as maybe consulting meetings.

I prefer to have the more creative things at the tail end of the week. If it's at the beginning of the week, I found that. I'm kind of thinking about, or I wouldn't say worrying, but I know that I have a lot to do, whereas I feel that kind of refreshing feeling by Thursdays, like, okay, we're almost to, to Friday, Thursday's the new Friday, allowing myself to, to have that type of schedule. Other kind of core principles is I'm a single dad. And so I'm raising these girls pretty much on my own.

So I wanna be highly involved. In their lives. Like I want the teachers to know me. I want the principal to know me. I want their friends to know me. And so I volunteer on recess duty once or twice a month. I try to go to as many school trips and chaperone as much as I can. I try to do things that make the teachers feel good about themselves or, give 'em Starbucks gift cards.

And so taking time to make sure that I'm involved with my kids' lives is one of the like most important things in regards to how I structure my schedule. So then having those guiding principles then I look at what are other things that I know that I want. So I know that, I walk my kids to school. We are a block and a half from their school. So I walk them to school every day. I walk down and pick 'em up every day. So that means cuz school starts a little before nine.

I'm not gonna do a meeting before nine 30, cuz I want to have some time to come back, drink a cup of coffee, meditate. Maybe journal, maybe, I'm really into Daoism. So I might do some reading might listen to a Watts podcast or something like that for my own self development and grounding and realizing that even if I don't achieve all that I want to achieve, like I'm still okay. Like I'm still a competent person. I'm still a dad. That's trying to rock out something that's really difficult.

So starting with that and then diving into the day. And then I know that my last meeting needs to wrap up by three 30 because I walk down, I pick up my girls at three 50 and I wanna be able to take my time, get there early, maybe talk with some other dads connect with neighbors. And so then, know, making sure that there's that community we just had a block party, the other day that I hosted and. 40 or 50 people there. And most of those are neighbors who I know their names.

I know their kids, like that's really important to me that we create the neighborhood that like a lot of people wish they had. And so like that doesn't just happen. You have to foster those relationships. So all of that's more of the menu I choose. And then. Like unlike, I'm friends with a lot of the miracle morning people and, like Hal and I text about things. He has a very rigid morning, which is great for him. It's great for his people. For me. I like to have that menu where sure.

I'm gonna meditate. Four outta seven mornings. Sometimes when I have a good week, it's five, for a number of months, I was practicing Spanish, then I didn't wanna do Spanish anymore. know? So it's like, I'm not gonna be like, I thought I'm gonna do Spanish. So, so for me, it's really about having that flexibility in how we live our lives and saying, is this working for me now? And is it going to continue to work for me in the future?

And the other thing I was like, my meditation is really important. So as soon as I dropped my son off at school, I'd come back and I'm like, I need to do my meditation, but my two year old just wants to play with me. Right. And so I have this expectation and there's a frustration. Like I need to be meditated right now. Right. And then I just like asked myself, it's that question? What is it for? Right.

The meditation is so I can be more present with the things that are important to me and the people that are important to me. And I'm like, what if I played with my daughter during this period of time. Yeah. So I switched my schedule to like, I dropped my son off. Then I play with my daughter, for a while. We have a nanny and then she takes, takes her out and then I actually do the rest of the stuff. So very similar.

That it's way busier. And I think we're often in the kinda self-development optimized hacking world. Always trying to find this next thing and saying, I want freedom. But then we create these cages where we say, I have to do a cold plunge every morning to feel like I'm John Lee Dumas. And then I have to do the miracle morning. So I'm like, Hal Elrod. And then I have to meditate. So, I'm like all these people that meditate and we feel the same pressure we felt when we had a full time job.

And so to me, it's all about. Is this working for me, is this helping me feel different, feel present. And I think like an example of that, like the meditation thing I was doing laundry, the other and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna just enter folding laundry with some mindfulness. And it was crazy. I was like, this is the whole universe right here. Things get soiled and dirty and we're organizing them. We're cleaning them. This is gonna be on my children's body. Like this is gonna keep them warm.

It's gonna keep them snuggled. It's gonna, the entire universe was in this load of laundry. And it's just when you take the time to really think through. Dishes like you are cleaning something, someone else is going to nourish themselves with it. It becomes less of a chore and more of, wow. I get to enter into the universe in such a unique way that I get to help take care of these two wonderful creative little girls. And then that becomes the meditation and you get a little laundry done.

Did it have to take to, for to create, this microphone to create this computer that's in front of me, it was sourced from all over the world. People were mining this stuff, putting it here so that we can have this conversation and you realize you're like, wow, I am standing in the result of the collective work of so many people and it allows you to have that gratefulness and that mindfulness in the things that seem so can seem so mundane. And I think that is really important.

It's because they had maybe this extra baggage that they haven't worked through, they haven't thought through what does success actually mean to them to, I mean, I know you probably gonna ask other questions. Maybe I'm jumping the gun. No. Let's tee it up. But it's like to do recess duty with my kids and not feel guilty about missing, some entrepreneurial work. That to me is the life.

To be able to go to the parent teacher organization meetings and to make a good living and enjoy life with my friends and community. Not that it's all just about like living this lifestyle, but it's like being able to choose where and when and how I show up for work. To me that's the most kind of magnificent thing of this phase of my career.

That kind of thing.

That'll just redirect you to one of the pages on joesanok.com. Usually it's $59, but we have a code for your audience. So if they just put in TITNF so Thursday is the new Friday that then just enter that code. They'll get it for free. So I'd say that's a great next step for people, wherever you get your books, you can get Thursday is the New Friday. Whether that's Amazon or your local bookstore, I'm sure they would appreciate it if you ordered through them.

And then joesanok.com is where we have all of the teaching things around the book around Thursday is the new Friday. And then my podcast practice@thepractice.com. That's where all those things around that is we have four episodes a week and we have a bunch of resources there.