Thursday is the New Friday with Joe Sanok: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Truth, Lies, and Work. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how Thursday is the new Friday. To drop these value bombs, I brought Joe Sanok and EO Fire Studios. Joe is the author of Thursday is the New Friday, how a four-day work week boosts productivity and creativity. He's a mental health counselor, a keynote speaker, and a podcaster. In today's foundation, we have some great value bombs.

0:36Doing work with the pace you need in your life produces more joy, happiness, and impact in the world. Slowing down a bit and then doing the best work is where we see the biggest success and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Joe and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business.

1:10Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Fire Nation, you have a book inside you and it's time to share your message with the world. That's why I created Author 100, a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book. If you want daily guidance and mentorship from me, JLD, then head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details. Joe, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Fire Nation, what's up, JLD?

1:51I'm so excited to be here. You know, I think most people really buy into that hustle mentality and think that the more that they work and the more they hustle and the more they grind, that that's going to lead to success. And I would actually argue that our very best work is when our brains are optimized and we've rested first, and then we go in and we kill it. Well, I'm all about this. I mean, we actually had a little pre-interview chat about our morning wellness routines that I was talking about how one of my now involves three minutes in my cold plunge tub, which is quite the shock to the system for obvious reasons, but it's key, Fire Nation.

2:29Sleeping well, getting up, getting outdoors for a nice walk. That's why I love having a dog, my little, my little gussy poo here, and then jumping into my sauna and then doing the cold plunge. And then something that I know you do as well, Joe, because you were mentioning this before the interview was meditating and journaling. So what does that exactly look like for you? The meditation and the journaling side of things in the morning? Yeah. So I do Sam Harris's waking up meditation. He has a daily meditation. That's 20 minutes that just for me, it's perfectly aligned. He's such an analytical thinker that has turned really meditative.

3:02And so that aligns with me. I'll then journal just thoughts to just get them out. And these aren't business thoughts. It's life and personal and just any of the junk and baggage in my brain. Then I'll read for a little bit. I'll have a cup of green tea during that time. Then I'll usually move into listening to a playlist that's a little more active that I've put together. I'll do a three-minute plank. I'll do some push-ups and do some crunches and then usually go for a 45-minute walk or so and then come back. And by then my daughters are awake and we're ready to rock it out. Wow. I mean, Fire Nation, fill your own cup up first before you then looking to go out and fill up the cup of your audience or whoever it is you're looking to inspire that day.

3:40I mean, that's just a great way to look at life and to look at things. And as I mentioned in the introduction, Thursday is the new Friday. We're going to be talking about this a little bit because according to Joe, our understanding of time is flat out wrong. Now, Joe, I gotta be honest. I think I'm in this category where my understanding of time is wrong as well. So I'm in the majority here. Can you please let us know why are we misunderstanding this? Yeah, this was actually something I discovered as I was researching the book. So I had already done the book proposal. Here's what I wanna talk about.

4:15And then I'm like, I'm talking about the four-day work week and why that's better. I should probably understand really macro, where did we even get the concept of time? And actually, we have to go back thousands of years to the Babylonians. And the Babylonians believed there were only seven celestial beings that really mattered. And so like the sun, the moon, the earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury, what they could really see. So they said, we should have a seven-day week. So in nature, months kind of go because of the moon, years because we go around the sun. But the seven-day week is actually completely random.

4:46There's nothing in nature that points to a seven-day week. In fact, the Egyptians had an eight-day week. The Romans had a 10-day week. Even as early as the 1940s, the Russians were on a different calendar than we were on. And they had added extra days, and we had to realign that kind of globally. And so this idea of we're starting with the seven-day week that we made up. Then fast forward to the 1800s. The average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. What? And so that's going on. There's all this push. We may have heard of May Day. May Day, the reason that we celebrate, well, we don't really even celebrate it anymore.

5:23But in Chicago, there was this gigantic push against that work schedule. And there were riots and there was bombs. And the whole nation went on this nationwide lockdown because of the people rising up that were rebuilding Chicago after the fire saying, we can't work like this anymore. So then in 1926, on May Day, Henry Ford switches to the 40-hour work week. This is huge, but he did it for selfish reasons. It was so that his workers could buy his own cars and then have time to recreate. If they're working all the time, they don't need a car. So he's like, I can sell a bunch of cars to all my employees and then double my profits.

5:58So it was totally selfish. The industrialists view people at that time as part of a machine. They think through people as a machine. And the 40-hour work week is that machine. So we're less than 100 years into this thing that feels so grounded to us. Like the 40-hour work week is just what you do. And we saw a shift really when you start to look at the research that came out and the way that people were looking at how people understand Fridays in the 80s and 90s. And I mean, I don't know about you, but I remember TGIF with Full House and Kerkle and all that. And Friday was just like this day of release.

6:32And my dad would put the Blues Brothers on and we would dance. And it's Friday. It's the weekend. But Fridays started to disappear from actually being productive days. It's when we host birthday parties or we have that meeting that it's the visioning meeting because it's Friday. Who cares, really? We're going to just waste time and have cupcakes. So Friday is this like half lived workday anyway. And there's all this emerging research around how a four day week just explodes productivity, explodes creativity. And then when you limit the amount of time you give your staff or yourself that you're actually able to do even better work.

7:04And so kind of the bottom line is the industrialists, to me, they were a huge step in evolution for business. Going from 16-hour days, 14-hour days, six days a week, like who wouldn't want to change to a 40-hour work week from that? That worked for that time and for that place. But we're less than 100 years into this, and that experiment no longer works. Fire Nation, our understanding of time is just wrong. I mean, when Joe broke that data, I'm just like, man, this just makes all the sense. I mean, the Romans had a 10-day week. I mean, think about this. I mean, this is really interesting stuff.

7:36And it's good when we think outside of the box. It's good when we pop our own assumptions, especially when those assumptions are based in a lot of weird places. And I want to talk about inclinations, Joe. Let's talk about what inclinations make people successful. Yeah, so I've studied over 500 business leaders. We have over 500 episodes on our podcast. Nothing close to what you've got, JLP. But through that and through just doing tons of research, there's three major internal inclinations that successful people have. And so in the book, I have an assessment that you can do to first figure out, is this a naturally occurring inclination or does it need some development?

8:17We all have areas where we need to grow, we need to expand that maybe don't come naturally. And so those three inclinations are first, curiosity. So successful people are thinking through problems in a curious way. They're not thinking pass, fail. They're not thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't do this. I'm such a loser. Like my ad campaign didn't work. They say, well, that gives me data. That's really interesting what I just noticed there. So they have curiosity at the forefront. Second, they have an outsider approach. There's tons of research. And one of the studies that I really was interested in was how the minority influence is greater.

8:51We're not talking ethnic minority. We're talking about a group of thinkers having more influence over a group than statistically they should have. So there was this one study where they brought people into a room and they showed them different colors that were either blue or green and they had different shades. And they would say, that's blue, that's green, blue, green. In one part of the study, you always have kind of A-B testing. One group, it was just all regular people. The second group had one or two people in there that they were in there particularly to say that green is actually blue and to kind of push back on that.

9:22And they found that statistically when there was a minority in there, that outsider saying, hey, we should switch this to think differently. This blue, I'm going to say that's green, that they had more influence than statistically they should have. And so we see that successful people actually take that outsider approach and put themselves in situations to expand their outsider approach. And then third, the third internal inclination is the ability to move on it. I mean, we've all heard paralyzed by perfection, that finished is better than perfect, those sorts of things. But successful leaders really push into that even beyond where they move on it before they're ready.

9:57They figure out that minimum viable product. And there's a lot of research as to the nuances of that beyond what we often talk about. Three inclinations, Fire Nation. Number one, curiosity. You got to be curious. Like, what are you curious about? Are you following your curiosity? Number two, the outsider approach for all the reasons that Joe broke down. And then number three, the ability to move on it. I like to say take action. Perfectionism is your biggest enemy. Taking action is your best friend. Now, we have a lot of things when we talk about Fire Nation, when we get back, we'll be talking about how entrepreneurs get both the weekends and hustle all kinds of wrong.

10:37We're going to be talking about what actually happens inside of our brains when we work less. Not more, when we work less. And again, this is all going to happen when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Picture this. You're at a party and someone asks you what you do as a marketer. How do you even begin to describe it? Not only do you brainstorm new campaigns, create compelling copy, dream up landing pages that will actually convert and generate leads, you also have to gather all the data to make sure it's even working. and tomorrow you'll do it all again. Marketers are spread way too thin, but HubSpot has a better way.

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11:51Sometimes it's about knowing which steps to take and when to take them to make it happen. If you know you have a book inside of you, but aren't sure where to start, then I have an exciting opportunity for you. It's called Author 100. Author 100 is a program I personally crafted to help you one-on-one every step of the way, from drafting to writing to publishing and even marketing your book. When you join the Author 100 program, you'll have access to me, JLD, for 100 days. We'll have weekly one-on-one calls, plus you'll get daily guidance from me whenever you have questions or hit a roadblock. Over the past 12 years, I've self-published five books, including one of the top five publishing campaigns of all time on Kickstarter, the Freedom Journal.

12:36I've also traditionally published with HarperCollins, so I know a lot about the book publishing world and where most authors go wrong. I created Author 100 to share my experience and the lessons I've learned along the way, and I can't wait to share it with you. If you're interested in learning more, head over to author100.com and sign up for a free call with me. That's author100.com. Joe, we're back, and I want to talk about entrepreneurs getting both the weekends and hustle wrong. Break down both of these walls. Yeah, so the University of Illinois looked at something that is called vigilance decrement.

13:16Vigilance meaning how well we pay attention to something, how our brain stays focused, and decrement meaning breaking down over time. So there's a naturally occurring phenomenon when you're on a task too long, you have Vigilance decrement. It goes down. So they wanted to see how long of a break someone actually needs to reset the brain. And so they brought these students in and they were on these computers and it was a 50 minute session or so. And it was a super boring task. They would give them these four numbers. So say it was 3215. Every time 3215 comes up on the screen, you got to click this button.

13:47Anytime any other number comes up, don't worry about it. Just don't do anything. So for almost an hour, these students are sitting there. Well, we saw vigilance decrement in that study. Over time, people paid attention less. So then what they did is with the second group, at a third of the way through, they interrupted the task and they said, you know what, we put you on the wrong computer or we just need to give you a quick break. They gave them a one minute break. One minute break. They came back and then they did the task again. And then at the two thirds mark, again, gave them a one minute break.

14:16What they saw is there was no vigilance decrement when they did that. And so study after study has continued to prove that, you know, when we look at Parkinson's law, that work expands to the time given to it, that when we give ourselves breaks, that when instead of hustling all week until we just feel dead and then we're recovering on the weekend, if we flip that and start with let's slow down a little bit and then do our best work after that, that's really where we see the biggest success. I have this event called Slow Down School in the summer where entrepreneurs fly into northern Michigan.

14:46We hang out on the beaches and go hike. And obviously this is outside of COVID. And for two days, we genuinely slow down. And to see what people do on that third day when we just sprint towards their goals. I mean, there've been people that in 20 minutes figured out their business name, launched the business, bought the URL and outlined their main core offering. There've been people that in 20 minutes have wrote down all seven chapters of their book, outlined it, and something that seven months worth of time they haven't been able to achieve. And so when we flip it and we slow down first and then we move into actually killing it, that's where we see we're actually using the brain's natural flow in a way that we typically just don't do.

15:29Slow down school, Fire Nation. Who's raising their hand right now? Who wants to go to slow down school? Because for me, that sounds pretty delightful. And I will say it's one of those things too where when I give myself more space, more breath, just more relaxation. And that's why Like when Joe and I were talking earlier about meditation, about journaling, about just writing things down, not always business stuff, just writing things down, getting it out of your head, clearing up all that junk that's always swirling around in that brain of ours. And just think about that topic we talked about first.

16:01How long do you need, Fire Nation, to reset your brain? And are you ever, ever giving yourself time to reset, to refocus? Are you doing that for yourself? Now, what does specifically happen, Joe, when we work less to our brain? Yeah, so when we look at our brain, a lot of what's happening is that fight, flight, or freeze. And so that's the deepest part of our brain. We might even think of it as kind of the snake part of our brain that first developed that all animals have. And when you're living in that space, your brain doesn't know the difference between a tiger in the woods or like I was chased by a wild rhinoceros in Nepal.

16:38My brain doesn't know the difference between that and looking at the news. We are the first generation that has 24 access to news just bombarding us. Our brains have not evolved to even understand the difference between me being chased by a rhino in the middle of Nepal and looking at news that freaks me out. And so the same thing happens when we're just stressed out at work and we're pushing ourselves. And so our best work, our best flow, the best connections within the brain are when different parts of the brain can speak to one another in a way that's different than when we're stressed out. And so there's obviously the myth of multitasking.

17:15There's all these other ways in the brain. And we can talk about, I think sprint types would be helpful to talk about different types of sprinting that people get to after they slow down. But the bottom line is that we don't allow ourselves to get out of that to then allow our brains to rest. And so when the brain continues to be in that spot where it's fight, flight, or freeze, or even just kind of the next level up before we get to the prefrontal cortex, which is the last part of the brain to develop, our prefrontal cortex doesn't fully develop until we're age 26. So the decisions we make around what substances we put in our body, the way that we analyze things up to age 26 can really impact it.

17:51That's where we make all of our decision making. We can't really get to that decision making and that understanding and being able to think outside of ourselves unless we get out of that reptilian brain that's just deep inside of us. Well, let's talk about those sprint types. Break them down for us. Yeah, absolutely. So there's kind of two axes. You know, you think of the XY axis. So there's one side where there's a particular sprint type and then kind of up and down there's one. And people typically fall more on one side or the other. And so on one side, we have time blocking people. And on the other, we have tasks switching.

18:23So what does that mean? So a time block person, we also might think of batching. There's a bunch of research around if you take the time to do one task for a period of time and you give yourself interruptions like we talked about with the vigilance decrement, but that you have one task you're doing that you're focusing on at a time, lots of people are in that category. But a lot of people will feel guilty. They'll hear these business books and say, you got a batch, you got to do this. And they'll say, that doesn't align with me. That doesn't feel right. And that's what I think is a little different about this book is it's more a menu to say, here's what the research supports.

18:55There's a lot of core things that we all should be thinking, but then there's also ways that we implement it that are unique to each person. And this is one of those where the task switch people, they're people that they can say, okay, I'm going to batch things today, but I need to have variety. Variety is something that I really value in my work. And so I want to record a YouTube video, or I'm going to spend 20 minutes brainstorming a YouTube video. And then I'm going to spend 20 minutes brainstorming a blog post. And then I'm going to spend 20 minutes setting up all of my recordings. And then I'm going to go have a healthy green smoothie.

19:25And then I'm going to go back to the YouTube video. And there's a lot of tasks switching within it. And so being able to discover if you're more on that side where you have to time block it, or if you need to be more on the side of task switch, that's really important to determine. And then in the other axis, we have how do we do that? And so we have people that are more on the automated side and people that are more on the intensive side. And so an automated person, what they're going to be is they're going to be the type of person who needs to put something in their calendar on a regular basis.

19:55So that could be the first Thursday of the month. You realize that you are a time block person. And that's just going to repeat in your calendar. So like how you do interviews, you definitely in regards to how you do interviews, because I know you do them back to back, you just kill it. That's an example of time blocking. So you have one task you're doing. You get in that zone and it's scheduled on a specific day of the month. And so that's the automated side. So for other people, they may say I'm a task switch person. I can only do two interviews and then I need to do something else and I'm going to have some variety there.

20:22So there's the automated side, but then the other side of that is the intensive side. So there's a lot of people that they need to go on a retreat. They need to take four days away. They need to do it several days in a row. Maybe they get an Airbnb. There's this guy, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, who has he has a testing psychologist podcast. So a few times a year, he leaves his town. He drives a couple states away. He gets an Airbnb. He has all these great specifications that I put in the book of it has to be walkable to everywhere he eats. It has to have a backyard. It has to have certain things for him.

20:54And he goes there and for three or four days, he is intensely working on his business. And so for some people like that, they need that retreat. They need to go to a hotel room. They need to go get an Airbnb by the water. And so when we start to discover our sprint type, we then can really say, OK, I've already slowed down. I've done all those skills from the second part of the book of how we slow down and optimize the brain. Now I'm ready to kill it. I want to make sure I do it in a way that my brain actually aligns with instead of just feeling guilty that I'm not like JLD or Joe Sam. Know thyself, Fire Nation.

21:27Where do you thrive? Ask yourself that question. And it may be you having to test a few different things. Do I want to block? Do I want to really be creative and be doing a variety of different things throughout my day? I mean, you need to know thyself. And once you see where you thrive, you focus on that. Now, Joe, Thursday is the new Friday. This is your book that's coming out. And it's all about how a four-day week boosts productivity and creativity. Why should Fire Nation read this book? When we really think about how we approach business, the posture that we take, the way that we analyze it, more often than not, it's reactionary.

22:05Someone calls us and says, I want to work with you. How much should I pay? You don't have a set plan. You maybe don't even have an evaluation process of whether you should even work with that person or if that time works for you. And so understanding your hard boundaries of the things that you always will do. So I will never take a consulting client that says they want to work on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. That's just never. I'm never doing that. But then there's soft boundaries of things that I may do sometimes or I may kind of have some wiggle room. So when we think about Thursday as the new Friday, do we want to define the life we want to live?

22:37does it feel like it's in line with the way that we approach it, that slowing down and hearing that before we go kill it, like, does that resonate with you? And if you're hearing this and saying, oh my gosh, like, this is what I want. I have business books that tell me how to kill it. And I have other books that tell me to just rest, but nothing that's really integrated those two together into one cohesive process. If that sounds good, Thursday is the new Friday that's going to really walk you through that blueprint, give you practical case studies and show you how to take those next steps. Brother, you have broken down a lot of interesting concepts, a lot of new concepts, a lot of head scratching concepts in a good way, because it's good when we scratch our heads, Fire Nation.