We want to work smarter
Most people who work an 8 hour day, don’t produce great work for 8 hours. They’d be lucky to produce great work for 3 hours. Distractions from email, co-workers, instant message, air con being too cold or too hot, meetings and calls add up. All that task-switching results in a massive cognitive load, making it difficult to get into your flow state and produce great work.
We don’t want to work like that.
We want to produce great work. And we think one way to facilitate that is to have a reward at the end of every week - doing anything but work on Fridays.
Friday off is a reward to ourselves for a week well worked. It’s a chance for our brains to take a break. Mark and I both have young families, so we spend time with them, do life admin, exercise. Basically we enjoy being outside an air-conditioned office (I think this is called “living”).
We think the 40 hour/5 day week is pre-historic
The 40 hour/5 day work week is outdated. It was created 100 years ago as the most efficient way to run factories! I can honestly say yarno is no factory - we’re a 21st century company of knowledge workers. We have made a conscious decision not to create death by PowerPoint learning material. And we know that in order to create beautiful content that resonates with learners, we need to be working in a challenging and invigorating environment. 9am-5pm for 5 days a week is not that environment.
We’re not the only ones
Treehouse, a web design and development learning company in the US, have been working a 4 day week since they started in 2006. They work 9am-5pm Mon-Thur and have revenue over $3M a year. Treehouse CEO, Ryan Carson, says that employee retention is amazing and that Treehouse has continued to experience significant growth since it was founded. He also says that some of his “employees love that their work schedule allows them to take a more hands on role in parenting and the household - which in turn might free up their spouses to focus more on their professional lives.”(1)
