We are hearing more and more about the four-day week, but that is not really the subject of this article, which is less about working hours and more about how they are organized.
At first glance, it doesn’t make much sense: why plan your week as if it only had four days when you’re actually going to work five? And yet it’s the best idea I’ve ever had, and I recommend it if you want to regain a little control, serenity, and… results.
It’s not a miracle method, but rather a simple way to take back control of your time and energy.
In short:
- Planning over four days allows you to better absorb unexpected events without extending your week.
- This means recognizing that 20% of your time is spent on interruptions or unexpected tasks.
- The fifth day is still a work day, but it is free and flexible, allowing you to catch up, reflect, or exchange ideas.
- The goal is to focus on quality and impact rather than filling up your schedule.
- This approach helps you prioritize, delegate, and conserve your energy.
A full schedule and no time to work
There is a mistake I made consistently when I started out, and one that many professionals continue to make throughout their careers: planning my weeks as if everything were going to go according to plan.
Of course, we all know that meetings never run over, that no emergencies ever disrupt our days, that our brains work at full capacity eight hours a day, five days a week, and that our ability to find solutions depends solely on the time we spend on them…
Obviously, the reality is the exact opposite.
In the meantime, our schedules become a pile of meetings and sacred moments for certain tasks, with no space, no time to breathe, no room for the unexpected, and at the end of the week, it’s a constant rush, a race, and more often than not, dissatisfaction at not having done what was planned.
It’s not a problem of willpower, motivation, or ability to work, just a problem of organization.
Planning for four days means accepting the reality of work
When I started planning my week for four days, it didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to work on the fifth day, but simply that I accepted the fact that at least 20% of my week was spent dealing with unexpected events or was time lost because of others (you know, people who can’t stick to meeting times and agendas and end up making everyone else late…).
So, of course, there was a simpler solution: extend my week and do what many people do, i.e., spend half my weekend working. But while this may sometimes be justified by circumstances, it’s not sustainable in the long run and, above all, I realized that it sent a terrible message to my teams, who might feel obliged to do the same. And in any case, it didn’t solve the original problem, which, in my opinion, was an organizational issue.
There was another option: push the surplus into the following week, but again, a simple calculation shows that this doesn’t work. If we push 20% of each week’s work into the following week, we end up a week behind after five weeks.
And how would we make up that time? With longer days, working weekends and holidays? Again, that’s not sustainable, and it certainly doesn’t set a good example.
So planning my week over four days was simply accepting several things I can’t fight against: there will always be unexpected events and interruptions, my brain needs buffer space to breathe, my work isn’t limited to what’s visible, and it takes time to think, coordinate, digest information, and solve problems.
Efficiency isn’t measured by how full your schedule is, but by delivering quality work on time.
An invisible day for better work
This fifth “unplanned” day is still work time, of course, but it’s a different kind of work, a sort of free zone.
Besides, I don’t claim to have found the perfect organization. Personally, I liked to lighten my Friday, while a friend of mine prefers to set aside two hours a day, and it’s up to each person to find what works best for them. In busy weeks, I even mix the two a little to adapt in real time to a flood of unexpected events.
It’s time available to finish what couldn’t be done, think about what you didn’t have time to frame, deal with non-priority emails, reread a deliverable in peace, take a look at various reports to prepare for Monday morning’s meeting, have an informal chat with some members of your team, spend quality time with them (that’s also part of being a manager)…
In my experience, the day I didn’t sacrifice to meetings and constant responsiveness is often a day that has allowed me to be even more responsive when it matters.
A paradigm shift that requires clarity
I repeat, planning over four days is completely counterintuitive, at least for people like me, for whom what is done is no longer to be done, but in the end, intuition does not stand up to rational and logical analysis.
Our time and attention are finite resources, even if this is a fact that many do not understand or refuse to accept, especially when it comes to other people’s time. The corollary of this belief, hyperconnectivity, is a real scourge of modern times (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden).
Humans are not machines, but we share certain rules with them: we cannot exceed our production capacity (Eliyahu Goldratt’s fictional interview on infobesity and bottlenecks in knowledge work) and when we forget this, not only do we put ourselves in the red, but we also have a negative impact on the work of others, which we delay.
The idea is therefore to regain control of what we do and allow ourselves time to do it, knowing that the amount of unexpected events that are likely to happen will always exceed the time available to us, especially if we fill our schedules so that we have no time left.
Based on the principle that when everything is urgent, nothing is, and that we can never do everything, the idea is to choose what we do and have time to do it.
It’s about prioritizing what matters over what is potentially planned.
It means not measuring your week by the number of boxes you’ve ticked, but by the quality and impact of what you’ve done (Productivity: what if quality was the new quantity?).
It also means learning to prioritize and delegate the rest, because a good way to clear your schedule without necessarily postponing everything is to learn to delegate (How can you avoid becoming a bottleneck in the workplace?).
Bottom line
Organizing your week around four days means recognizing that time is a limited resource, that the brain is not a linear machine, and that true productivity comes from quality, not quantity.
It’s not about “working less”. It’s about working better.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
