I am free on Fridays! But not to talk, meet, or answer emails.
My disappearing act on Friday is one of my rules of life that has been fruitful for over 10 years.
In the corporate setting, colleagues having access to our calendars and our attention via text, emails, and IMs is like playing dodgeball against the world! The balls are coming from everywhere! Without good techniques, we end up being bombarded with endless meetings and tasks that suck the joy out of our work.
In the “Zoom Era“, we all need a break and we need boundaries. We need to master the art of saying no.
Society Loves Fridays
TGIF is one of the most famous acronyms since 1938 as labor laws of the Industrial Revolution (and Henry Ford) created the 2 day weekend.
From restaurant names, and song titles, to hashtags, the phrase TGIF caps the end of misery and opens the door to freedom.
Fridays are like scoring a birdie on the 18th hole after a horrible performance on the other 17 holes. It keeps us coming back to the next week for the promise that “the game will get better”.
The game doesn’t improve at all!
The fact that Fridays have been identified as the happiest day of the week for nearly 100 years is an indicator that there is a labor crisis still at hand.
Society Hates Mondays
There is much misery across this world starting every Monday that darkens the sky until Friday. Hello Monday Blues, Terrible Tuesdays, Hump Day, and Friday Eve! Oh, don’t forget Scary Sundays!
The apathy of job functions, the frustrations of overwhelm, and the loss of quality work time translate into various forms of Groundhogs Day burnout.
The pandemic has exploited and accelerated a shift in the Information Age that is similar to the birth of the 9-5 in the Industrial Age. The result was the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting”, and ownership of their 5 to 9.
Desk workers tasted freedom, autonomy, and flexibility for the last 2+ years. I believe that workers aren’t inherently lazy, we have globally figured out that our fundamental values and rhythms needed a realignment.
Establishing happy workplaces and retaining employees will not solely be found in 4-day work weeks, hybrid schedules, or workplace wellness programs. It certainly helps, but it’s just a Band-Aid.
The 6-Day Work Week
Our work goes beyond just the career! We are quick to forget that there is work at home, work in our families, work in parenting, work in our health, and work to support our communities. We are WHOLE BEINGS with many dimensions of our livelihoods that should work in harmony for the entirety of our days, weeks, and lives. This is the Rule of Life!
RULEOFLIFE.COM defines this harmonic rhythm as follows:
Your personal rule of life is a holistic description of the Spirit-empowered rhythms and relationships that create, redeem, sustain and transform the life God invites you to humbly fulfill for the glory of Christ our Lord. The five major categories are the following: spiritual, relational, physical, material, and missional. And these five categories shape the whole our lives (how we spend our time, steward our resources, honor our bodies as temples, etc).
This world was designed by God in a rhythmic order and our bodies, souls, and minds work in similar rhythms.
We are more than what we do!!!!
Living joyfully and fully requires us to selflessly live in harmony with who we are at the core…at home, at work, and in the community.
The divine rhythm is for us to steward all these dimensions 6 days a week and then rest. God stopped on the 7th day! He then established the 7th day as sacred, as a covenant, and a day to remember that He was the one that brought His own people out of slavery in Egypt.
The 7th day is meant to celebrate, rest, worship, glorify God, and reflect on the goodness of the fruit of our labor. The fruit of our labor is beyond the paycheck and accumulated “stuff”. The fruit is in our kids, our neighbors, and our inner character.
Unfortunately, we are a rebellious, stubborn, and selfish creation and we’ve done our best to take God out of the equation.
I cringe at the hot term, the 4-day work week, because this quick fix to work culture typically removes God, our call to work, and promotes a life of leisure as reflected by this Cambridge research on global economic progress.
As the economists Diane Coyle and Leonard Nakamura explain, Digital technology has prompted significant shifts in the allocation of time, particularly since 2007 with the arrival of smartphones and mobile broadband access. In the U.S. and other OECD economies, Internet connectivity became saturated between 2007 — the year the iPhone was introduced — and 2015. People are spending increasing amounts of time online, thanks to pervasive access to fixed and mobile broadband, engaging in a range of activities from accessing entertainment to carrying out banking transactions, accessing government services, booking travel, locating rides, and much more.
This research concludes that the Technology Age has quadrupled our ability to be more productive. It has made us more efficient and has created more knowledge-working jobs. This is good!
Technology has also increased the opportunities for leisure consumption from digital streaming to the ease of booking PTO experiences.
This push and pull of work and leisure with the enhancement of technology have made a dynamic shift that has turned the typical 40-hour work week on its head.
Technology has made idols of both our work and our leisure!
There we have it! Our approach to the rhythm of work and rest needs a chasmic overhaul, not just perks.
Let’s Replicate “Casual Fridays”
Many productivity experts and human psychology scientists are fixing workplace cultures by building models of asynchronous work, better time management systems, enhanced wellness programs, and overhauling corporate values. I totally agree with these approaches and would even emphasize mandatory personality/work style assessments for all employees to get clarity on their unique God-given talents. Clarity leads to fulfillment and meaningful productivity.
However, I believe that an analysis of Fridays, the “happiest day of the week”, should also be put under the microscope. If the core problem of misery in the workplace happens Monday – Thursday, let’s not toss out Fridays with the bath water of the weekend or the 4-Day work week!
We approach Fridays with more freedom to relax, to reflect our true selves as we “let our hair down” in preparation for the weekend. There is something to be said about casual Fridays as upper management has historically endorsed this day to remove the mask of professionalism and get a head start on the weekend by how we dress.
Paradoxically, we tend to build better boundaries as individuals on Fridays. We draw the line at 5 PM or even earlier to travel, enjoy friends and family, or to get a head start on something that is typically exciting…even if it’s just putting our feet up on your back porch. Somehow we lose this ability to say no on other days of the week?
Two themes that stand out are relaxation and boundaries. Two sides of one coin that works to our advantage.
When we relax, we remove our masks and can be more creative, productive, and authentic. Have you ever been to an all-staff retreat where you are in shock at seeing how your colleagues typically dress? It says a lot and it is an amazing experience of authenticity!
When we are putting a time boundary into place to reward ourselves with the weekend, then we exercise Parkinson’s Law which is the principle of a task expanding into the time that is allotted to complete the task.
The combination of relaxation and boundaries is the gateway to freedom.
This type of freedom shouldn’t be saved for one day of the week, it should be a lifestyle that is practiced as often as possible to bring full joy to our work, rest, and play.
The secret to enjoying a Monday, or any day of the week, is changing the approach! The same approach to a Friday should be implemented with much attention and intention Monday through Thursday.
4 Rules to Reclaiming Your Joy Everyday
So let’s review some of the practical steps of implementing a Friday mood to Monday-Thursday.
1 – Remember Your Purpose
As mentioned above, we are designed to work. This simple step to reflect daily that we “GET” to work, not “have” to work. Working is a blessing and a primary way to serve others. If you so happen to have lost track of the joy in your daily work, I encourage you to read this article to start on a journey of clarity on your unique talents and career choices.
2 – Put Your Mask on First
There is a 71% chance that if we take a meeting request, it’s going to be unproductive according to this very detailed research! So make your own Rule of Life that you become a person that does not meet on Fridays.
In fact, “Freedom Fridays” can and should be deployed for “Meetingless Mondays” too. If you’re a knowledge worker, try bookending your weeks with no meetings at all. Starting the week with better momentum into the deep work brings more satisfaction and accomplishment. This state of mind improves the mood and attitude going into a potential meeting heavy Tuesday. Getting a great start to the week has an amazing ripple effect on the ability to serve your colleagues and clients later in the week. The bonus is if you need to take an extended weekend, you have fewer hurdles.
3 – Build Your Time Walls
Like Fridays, it’s pretty exciting after 5 PM. Add more excitement and activities to your after-5 agendas Monday-Thursdays. Putting it on the schedule and holding to it forces you to shut down on time and raises the level of anticipation of doing something fun, playful, fulfilling, or restful.
Like Fridays, build unmovable time blocks of your end time. It may be 5 PM, but treat that 5 PM like it’s a Friday. Build a reward system to incentivize leaving on time and forces you to focus on the job at hand. Maybe it’s networking, a happy hour, or cooking with or for your family. Maybe it’s a hobby or side hustle that you are committing to. Point is to schedule it and remain committed.
4 – Be You, Be Authentic
The pandemic has given most of us permission to wear t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops all week! But casualness goes beyond just attire, it’s attitude. Casualness brings the permission to build and strengthen relationships. Building casualness into the workday which can be a 1 or 2-minute start to a meeting by asking a colleague/client something personal, doing coffee or lunch to network without an agenda, or building breaks every 90 minutes into your work day to remain fresh. (aka, following an ultradian rhythm)
Yes, life is a juggle and often a struggle Monday – Thursday. We get it right on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. It’s no wonder the 4-day work week is getting pushed hard.
If You Can’t Say TGIF authentically on Fridays, what should you do?
Don’t lose hope, start slow and follow the instructions below.
- Use the model above to frame your Friday schedule.
- Time block as much as possible to get deep work done. Use the big chunk of time to finish your biggest projects/goals for the week. Start slowly by starting to eliminate or moving meetings on your Fridays over the next few weeks until you build a rhythm. Encourage your team or department to do the same.
- Every Friday, take at least 30 minutes to organize your next 2 weeks. Have your to-do list side by side with your calendar and make sure big projects get at least 2 to 3-hour blocks on your calendar.
- As your Fridays get more time back to them, use the additional time to make it your dedicated errand day during lunch, actually take a lunch break, add play to your day, and then take advantage of the creativity that will naturally happen as you have swept out the clutter in your brain.
Though we are victims of a cursed world waiting anxiously to be redeemed for the New Earth, it does not mean that hard work should make us miserable.
Seasons of plowing, sowing, and harvesting can be difficult across all industries. Working harder and longer for the harvest can be extremely satisfying. The key is to study what this seasonal rhythm looks like for you and your family and build habits of rest, recharge, and restoration into it.
One passage that speaks strongly to our demeanors of our everyday work is James 5:7-8, 13 (NIV)
7 Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. 8 You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near.
13 Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise.
Choose joy every single day, not just Friday.