Two Months In: An Update and Learnings from Uncharted’s 4-day Workweek Experiment
Written by Banks Benitez, CEO of Uncharted
Uncharted is two months into its 4-day workweek experiment over the summer. In collaboration with Coeffect, the purpose of the experiment is to learn whether fewer hours in the office improve employee happiness and productivity. If you’re starting to follow along, be sure to read about this experiment’s origin, our update from last month, and the article Fast Company wrote about us.
We have one month to go before deciding whether or not the data tells us to implement 32-hour workweeks going forward. Today, I want to share a transparent analysis of how I’ve personally adjusted my schedule to accommodate 32-hours in the office.
Quantitative metrics
Before the experiment, I worked around 50–55 hours. Over the last nine weeks, I’ve averaged 33.6 hours. The most I worked was 35.52 hours, and the least I worked was 30.28 hours.
Dropping 20 hours of work per week does not mean you get everything done. Reducing my average hours from 50+ to 33.6 is not a function of getting more efficient or productive. It means being willing to drop balls, leave emails unanswered, and only focus on the most essential work. So how did I spend my time over the past nine weeks? I tracked that too:
I used a spreadsheet with the categories above, and after each meeting or segment of work, I’d go into the spreadsheet and enter the minutes. The way to read this graph is: 44.3% of hours worked during the last 9 weeks has gone to OKR time. This is the average across all 9 weeks.
We operate off of annual OKRs, quarterly OKRs, and monthly OKRs. I was most interested in looking at my time through a binary lens: how much of my time was directly focused on my OKRs and how much of my time was focused on non-OKR work?
Of course, there is important work that doesn’t directly tie into OKRs, but if we have done our strategic planning well (which I believe we have), then our OKRs are the measures of true organizational progress. Therefore, I should be spending as much time on those critical priorities that advance the organization forward.
So how did I do in achieving my OKRs?
In the OKR framework, the KRs (Key Results) are the measurable milestones. In June, I had 11 of them, and I achieved eight. In July, there were eight, and I achieved four. Best practice (see link above) says that you should set OKRs ambitiously enough that achieving 60–70% is considered successful. For the two months of the summer so far, I have hit 63% of my OKRs. As a comparison, this is about the same percentage completed from past quarters.
Qualitative Notes
- Our Chief Strategy Officer left the team on July 2nd, and I absorbed her three direct reports, which shifted how I spent my time in July.
- Some July OKRs we set at the end of May ended up not being achieved because we deprioritized them based on the rapidly shifting reality. Learning here is that even quarterly goal setting in an unpredictable year like 2020 is hard. This is partially why I had a higher OKR success rate in June than in July.
- I tracked my time to the minute and only tracked when I worked. If I got off a call and got up from my desk, stretched my legs, went to the kitchen and made myself a yogurt and granola, stared out the window, and then texted my mom, I didn’t count those eight minutes until I sat back down again at the desk. So the hours tracked are pure work. By comparison by 50+ hour workweeks sometimes included these breaks throughout the day.
- Of the nine Fridays, I worked for no more than two hours on only three of them. The rest of the Fridays, I didn’t work at all.
My Approach to Planning my Week
My approach has involved the following three steps:
Schedule Blocking
At the start of every week, I blocked off between 14–16 hours each week to focus on OKRs and scheduled that in calendar blocks on my calendar as “OKR time.” Like this:
In the past, I would schedule my meetings and then fit my OKR time around them. In this format, the meetings were scheduled around my OKR time. This inversion of scheduling has been the most valuable way to get the critical work done during a 32-hour 4-day workweek. You’ll notice that Uncharted’s entire team has blocked off two hours on Tuesday and two hours on Wednesday when the entire team schedules no meetings with each other and we all do deep work.
Weekly OKRs and Daily Tasks
I set weekly OKRs that connected to my monthly and quarterly OKRs. Our entire team publicly committed to these at the beginning of the week. Then I would set daily tasks for myself to make sure I stayed focused on those weekly OKRs.
Saying No to Meetings
For some meetings that I was invited to, I would communicate to the team ahead of time that I didn’t think my presence in the meeting would be more valuable than me doing something else, and I would skip it so I could focus on OKR time.
Takeaways
- Sundays: One of the biggest surprises for me is that I don’t have the “Sunday scaries” anymore. By Sunday night I found myself starting to power up and get excited to dive back into work, so I usually spent 15–20 minutes preparing for the week and thinking about the most essential work to do.
- Thursdays: Our team has been wishing each other “Happy Friday” on Thursday. By Thursday afternoon at 5pm, I have accomplished the majority of my weekly goals and by those objective standards, I have been successful. However, I still feel unaccomplished because I haven’t completed all the vanity metrics of work. My inbox has many emails I didn’t get to and there are non-essential loose ends I didn’t wrap up. The biggest area of growth for me is to disconnect my feelings about what is productive from what is actually productive.
- Dropped Balls: Moving to a 32-hour workweek means being willing to get C’s and D’s in certain areas. Here are the areas where I’ve dropped balls intentionally because they weren’t critical: 1) email response time, 2) taking meetings with people who just want to “connect and pick your brain”, 3) taking meetings with people who want to “find a way to collaborate,” and 4) social media (I used to tweet more often).
- Momentum: Getting a highly productive start to the day leads to momentum that carries me throughout the day. If I get some early morning wins, I’m invigorated and I get more done.
- Meetings: I am an impatient meeting attendee, and I quickly get annoyed when a meeting feels like a waste of my time. If there is one area where I think I, myself, and our team can improve in the 4-day workweek, it’s in the way we set agendas, determine meeting purposes, and facilitate the meeting to achieve meeting goals.
- Sleep: The 32-hour workweek is far less possible on less than 7.5 hours of sleep. I’ve found sleep to be this x-factor that makes me far more focused, far more productive, far smarter, and far better at determining the difference between essential and non-essential. In the spirit of data, I am also tracking my sleep in 2020, and I am averaging 72% of my nights in 2020 with 7.5 hours of uninterrupted sleep (my goal for 2020 has been 67%, which maybe tells you how little sleep I got last year). For the last two months during this experiment, I’ve averaged 79% of the month with at least 7.5 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
- Fridays: I’ve spent three Fridays hiking, two Fridays working on my garden, two Fridays driving up to the mountains for weekend adventures, one Friday at a wedding, and one Friday I can’t remember.
Next month, we’ll re-engage our third-party evaluator to share outcomes from the 3-month experiment, and we’ll explain how we applied that data to decide the future of the 4-day workweek.
P.S. If you’re a member of the media and would like to talk, please send an email to hello@uncharted.org.
