A four-day work week in the UK

In June, 70 companies and their 3,300 employees started a four-day work week pilot program. The early responses make an interesting read. Halfway through, in September, the New York Times and Forbes reported good results with no loss in productivity.

A while back, I asked in Post Status Slack‘s #business channel if anyone has tried a similar practice with shorter work periods. Justin Sainton said they’re almost to that point at Zao:

“We’re still five days a week, but our Fridays are very, very, very chill. No meetings, minimal client work.”

Ginger Coolidge said Sandhills did a four-day week last summer — “and it was amazing, such a quality-of-life bonus.”

Justin pointed to a white paper that was the convincer for him: The Four-Day Week: Guidelines for an Outcome-Based Trial Raising Productivity and Engagement. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang‘s Strategy and Rest is another solid source of sources dedicated to advancing the four-day week.

Are you trying or considering a modified work week where your company embraces what Cal Newport calls “slow productivity?” Tell us about it!

What good sources for professional development have you found?

Earlier this year, Andrew McCauley asked in Post Status Slack #learntogether what others are doing for hands-on professional development in WordPress companies. The first thing that came to my mind was contributing to WordPress core in any number of skill areas. For opportunities that could be paid for out of an employer’s budget for staff development, Devin Price suggested video courses in PHP and Laravel at laracasts.com, and for JavaScript and React, I think Wes Bos‘s courses are a good choice. Ross Wintle proposed looking beyond the WordPress bubble and bringing back new things to share. Courtney Robertson echoes that idea, suggesting community management and Tessa Kriesel‘s developer relations mastermind and self-paced peer-learning groups.

Programming your own internal presets

Ivaylo Durmonksi breaks down “implementation intentions” and some ways to make them work in your life. The idea comes from Peter Gollwitzer who noticed how hard it is to maintain good habits. Our intentions tend to get derailed, so Gollwitzer’s solution is to have preset plans for what you’ll do when you’re derailed. Ivaylo explains:

Or in other words, in combination with setting healthy habits. You also create a list of fallback behavior in the following format:

Whenever situation X arises, I will summon the goal-directed response Y.

It’s almost like adding snippets of code in your brain that will be triggered based on predefined conditions.

This is hard to do when you have many sources of distraction. Ivaylo has some suggestions about how you can prepare for that and keep true to your intentions.