At the beginning of this year, I asked Amy if I could try working four days per week. I’d heard great things about this schedule and wanted to see if it could work for me. The plan was pretty simple: get everything done by Thursday so Friday could be completely off.

Thankfully, I’ve proven myself trustworthy enough that Amy didn’t see an issue testing it out. So, I set up an automatic Friday email that essentially said, “Hi there! I’m testing a four-day workweek and will get back to you on Monday.” I waited until February and then went all in.

About a month and a half later, I realized the Friday-off structure wasn’t really working for me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle my workload in four days. I just didn’t always want Friday off. Sometimes I wanted some random day off in the middle of the week. Sometimes two half-days sounded better than one full day. That started to fight against the consistency I was trying to create by always taking Fridays off so clients and coworkers knew when I wouldn’t be available.

I still liked the idea behind a four-day workweek. Mine just needed to look a little different.

Apparently, I Was Already Kind of Doing This

Something I didn’t take into account before starting this experiment was that my work-life balance was already somewhat structured like a four-day workweek, especially compared to someone working a very rigid 9-to-5 office schedule.

We’re a smaller team, and luckily Amy has always created a pretty fluid approach to work-life balance. A lot of the flexibility was already there. I was just trying to put a more formal structure around it.

Testing it out did make me notice a few things about how I work and how I use my time.

Fridays Are Probably the Best Day to Take Off

I feel pretty confident to say that, after testing, very few truly urgent things were coming through on Fridays. There are obviously exceptions. If I have a campaign launching, an event happening or something important that falls on a Friday or around the weekend, of course I’m working that day. 

But in general, if you’re considering experimenting with a four-day workweek and trying to pick your day off, Friday is probably a pretty good contender. The downside is that Thursday can become a drag. I found myself trying to wrap up everything before the weekend while still waiting for other people to email me back, approve something or send information I needed. There were definitely Thursdays when I worked later than usual because I was trying to catch up on everything that hadn’t happened earlier in the week.

I didn’t really experiment with Wednesday, and I’m still curious about that setup. Working Monday and Tuesday, taking Wednesday off, then coming back Thursday and Friday could actually be nice. You lose the fun of the three-day weekend, which is one of the biggest selling points of the four-day workweek, but splitting the week in half might work better for some people.

Having Less Days Made Me More Productive

One of the biggest things I noticed was how productive I became when I knew I had a day off coming. It was almost like my brain understood that if I wanted Friday off, I needed to get things done.

My days became much more intentional, with my workload planned more clearly. I actually still use a version of this system when I plan my weeks now. I try to put the bulk of my important work into Monday through Wednesday. Thursday becomes my catch-all day for anything that didn’t happen when I thought it would. Then when Friday rolls around, it can be a freebie, a planning day or a back-burner day where I finally get to the things that aren’t necessarily urgent.

This definitely doesn’t work perfectly every week, and believe me, my brain does not always cooperate with the schedule I create for it. But when it does work, I feel on fire. Even when I end up working on Friday, I’ve usually gotten enough done earlier in the week that Friday feels much lighter.

Meetings Can Completely Change the Equation

I also learned pretty quickly how important it is to think about where meetings fall in the week. There were weeks when I had multiple meetings spread across four different days, and that takes a bigger chunk out of productivity than you might think.

For me, it’s not just the meeting itself. Beyond the preparation, I usually need time to regroup after the meeting, process what was discussed and refocus on whatever I was doing before. Sometimes getting back into that work mode is harder than expected, and when you’re already trying to fit your normal workload into fewer days, that time starts to add up.

The experiment also made me pay more attention to how long things actually take. When you work independently, it can be easy to assume something will only take an hour without paying attention to whether that is true. Trying to fit my work into four days made me much more aware of where my time was going, what took longer than expected and what I could realistically fit into a day.

The Version of Work That Actually Flows for Me

So yes, I tested out a four-day workweek, and in doing so, I realized I had kind of been working this way all along, just in different fonts.

Over time, I stopped trying to make the four-day workweek fit such a specific mold. Now I use a looser version that works better with my brain. Some weeks that means Friday off. Sometimes it means another day off. Sometimes it means five days of work, with one lighter day reserved for planning or those back-burner projects I never seem to have time for.

It may not technically qualify as a four-day workweek anymore, but the experiment helped me figure out how to organize my time better, be more realistic about what I can get done and provide flexibility when I actually need a break.

If you can talk your boss into letting you experiment with it, I think it’s worth trying. Your version might end up looking completely different from the traditional four-day workweek, too.