Moving to a 4 Day Work Week
Some of you may be thinking that I have drastically misunderstood the Tim Ferriss book. Yes, I know his book was about a 4-Hour Workweek. But even Tim will remind everyone that it wasn’t really about aiming for 4 hours. Anyway, I digress.
If you browse through the blog here, you’ll find a huge gap between 2017 and 2020, where nothing happened.
Did I get lost at sea? Perhaps I went undercover to break up a sinister crime family?
No, I simply got awful at letting work encroach on my schedule. Instead of closing the laptop at 5pm and calling it a day, I would do the bookkeeping equivalent of “just one more episode”. Plus, it’s effortless to say yes to billable time. Imagine if Netflix paid you every time you finished another show.
It’s amazing how 4 hours of work can take you 12 if you give yourself that much time. If there are no hard stops in your schedule, there’s no pressure to be efficient. If you’re “busy” all day, when can you find the time to improve your workflow?
This year seemed like a good year to tackle the problem. With the world temporarily grinding to a halt, I decided to take a step back and evaluate my systems. I’ve been going through every project and task, every process and assumption in how I perform my daily tasks.
My initial goal was just to stop working 7 days a week. I mean, there have been plenty of weekends where I just did an hour or two. Why not add 2 hours to Tuesday, and then suddenly the weekend is a weekend.
I won’t go through the whole process here. I think it’s worth exploring in future posts. I certainly haven’t developed a revolutionary new system. I just applied lots of common sense. If I’m doing 7 similar tasks across 7 days, wouldn’t it make a bit more sense to batch them all at once? Or, why not step back and see if 3 of them are entirely unnecessary in the first place.
Moving to a 4 day (client) work week
You’ll notice I didn’t just say 4 day week. I’m still trying to grow my business at this stage of my career. Cutting back to 4 days a week to run my business isn’t realistic. But the business itself needs attention. Your small business should be your first and most important client. There are so many tasks that need attention that aren’t billable.
- Communications - emails, phone calls
- Admin - you know what a bookkeeper doesn’t usually have...a bookkeeper. You still need to do your books.
- Marketing - chances are good that future clients aren’t going to go looking for you in a shared Google Sheet. And if they do try to reach out, and the emails and phone calls are piling up, you’ll never know you’re missing them.
- Training - I still think experience is the best form of education, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one. Keeping up to date on bookkeeping certifications and learning about the latest software and services is very important in such a fast-paced market.
The plan is simple. It’s just not easy.
The rough doodle on the back of this napkin says Monday to Thursday will be client work. If they start as really long days, that’s fine. This creates an urgency to be effective. This is where automation, batching, and the rest of the productivity catch-words get their chance to shine.
Friday is time for the business. This is the day I review the system. Tear it apart and build it back up until it’s as efficient as possible. Find a way to deliver high-quality work and still have time to see sunlight. It’s also the day I get to write again and share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.
At least that’s the plan.
So far, it has shown significant results. I’ve cut the time it takes to perform my recurring tasks in half. This is partly improved systems, and partly just realizing how much useless crap was getting done that seemed super productive.
As I find new tips and tricks on streamlining my practice, I’ll be sure to share it with the class.
If you have some tips of your own, please share! You can post them in the comments below or email me. I love learning new ways to improve the way I work, and I’m sure others would love to hear what you’ve learned. I can even share some of them in a future newsletter.
