How To Make The Best Use Of Time? Making Thursday the New Friday | POP 612

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On this therapist podcast, podcaster, consultant and author, talks about how to make the best of time. Making Thursday the new Friday.

What does time mean for you? How did the pandemic impact the evolution of business? How can we use this reality shift to reclaim agency over our time and lives?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks about How to Make the Best Use of Time? Making Thursday the New Friday.

Podcast Sponsor: Thursday Is The New Friday

Image of the book Thursday Is The New Friday written by Joe Sanok. Author Joe Sanok offers the exercises, tools, and training that have helped thousands of professionals create the schedule they want, resulting in less work, greater income, and more time for what they most desire.Thursday is the New Friday empowers you with a practical, evidence-based methodology to create your own work schedule and dedicate more of your precious personal time to pursuing your hobbies and spending time with your family and friends.

Be sure to get the bonus pre-sale offer when you buy 5, 10, or 25+ books you get a ticket to Killin’It Camp (Lodging, travel, and food not included), Make Thursday the New Friday a Reality Workbook PDF, First chapter of Thursday is the New Friday to begin reading immediately and so much more!!!

DON’T MISS OUT, PREORDER NOW!

In This Podcast

  • Where did time come from?
  • The impact of the pandemic
  • Time is manmade

Where did time come from?

Thousands of years ago, the Babylonians started the seven-day week schedule.

They looked up and saw the Sun, the Moon … they saw the Earth, they saw Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, so seven major celestial things, and so they said, “let’s have a seven-day week”. (Joe Sanok)

Fast forward: the Romans converted to Christianity and introduced the seven-day week across the Roman Empire, and the seven-day week took off from there. Time, calendars, and modern schedules have all been made up by people.

Fast forward again to the late 18th century where people were working 10- to 14-hours a day. In 1926, Henry Ford, to sell more cars, gave his workers a 40-hour workweek. He knew that by giving them a weekend they would be interested in purchasing a car.

The impact of the pandemic

The pandemic of 2020 hits and we see it’s the final nail in the coffin, that the industrialist era that Henry Ford gave us where people are machines, where people are thought of as parts of an assembly line, that is over. (Joe Sanok)

The pandemic broke the mold of work globally. There is a new way of business that is emerging from the impacts of the pandemic.

The businesses that are evolving are those that are retaining more employees because they offer flexibility and a new level of humanity in their work. These businesses know that life happens and that what is most important is that you have your health and your family, alongside your work.

To find what is best for your employees, consider asking them:

  • What is it that you love doing that you don’t want to stop doing?
  • What do you hate doing that you want to take off your plate?
  • What do you want to learn to do?

What this does is that it doesn’t just put people, like the industrialists, into some sort of job role that they’re stuck in. Instead, they can level up and change and switch as they go, which makes the organization more strong … and creative, and people know … in a year they can change their interests, they can always adapt differently. (Joe Sanok)

Allowing growth for your employees means allowing growth for the business because the business existing in its best form rests upon its employees being in their best form as well.

Time is manmade

You’ve created for yourself this illusion that you’re busy, and it doesn’t always have to be that way. (Joe Sanok)

A lot of people stress themselves out trying to maintain the idea of what time should look like, and what being successful looks like in terms of being busy and so forth. We forget that these ideas are all constructs, they are all manmade, and they can be changed.

Rarely do we step back and say, “do our kids actually need to be this busy to be successful? Do they actually need to play outside a little bit more?” (Joe Sanok)

Books mentioned in this episode:

Image of the book Thursday Is The New Friday written by Joe Sanok. Author Joe Sanok offers the exercises, tools, and training that have helped thousands of professionals create the schedule they want, resulting in less work, greater income, and more time for what they most desire.

Useful Links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Joe Sanok

A photo of Joe Sanok is displayed. Joe, private practice consultant, offers helpful advice for group practice owners to grow their private practice. His therapist podcast, Practice of the Practice, offers this advice.

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 612.

I’m Joe Sanok your host. Welcome to another episode of the Practice of the Practice podcast. Oh, my word, I am so excited, in just a couple of weeks here on October 5th, my book Thursday is the New Friday goes live worldwide. It’s through HarperCollins and I am just so darn excited about it because if I feel like it brings together just so much of what I’ve been teaching. So the title is Thursday is the New Friday: How to Work Fewer Hours, Make More Money and Spend Time Doing What You Want. And I think I’m going to start with the backstory of kind of how I thought through things to do this book today and then I also want to share with you just a way that I look at time and what I’ve discovered in this writing process.

So a lot of people have said, well, how’d you get a book deal? How did that work out? Well, so every single year, I really enact that principle from the book, The One Thing. So in the book The One Thing, they say, what’s the one thing that if you achieved that would make everything else either unnecessary or irrelevant? Kind of the way I think through that is what’s a really big thing that if I do that, it’s just going to make things easier? So like when I worked at the community college, I think I was charging $150 per counseling session, I thought if I can get a handful of consulting clients that are 300 bucks an hour, that would make things a lot easier. And I did. The next year, it was starting some mastermind groups where people were paying $500 a month to be in small groups with me and those groups of about six or so and then that kind of fed into Slow Down School.

So that made it easier to get people into Slow Down School and get to know them more. And then the next year it was starting Next Level Practice, which is the membership community, so that we have some predictable income kind of based on my time, going from one-on-one to one, to a few, to one to many. And then in late 2018, I was like, what’s that next thing that if it opens doors that I don’t know, like what’s something that’s going to open some of those doors? I said if I have a traditionally published book that’s a New York Times bestseller that would open a lot of doors. So then I started really studying, like, what do New York Times best sellers do? How do they do all of that?

That was brand new to me. So I figured out they needed an agent and an agent usually represents you in going off to publishers. So early in 2019, every single author there was on the Practice of the Practice podcast, and this is kind of the power of a platform that I had this platform of the podcast. So I was interviewing all these top New York Times bestselling authors and I said to them, “I’m shopping around for a new writing agent. Would you mind introducing me to your agent?” I quickly realized that they would say, “Well, do you have your book proposal?” I was like, well, “What’s a book proposal?” I didn’t say it to them, but then I started Googling around. So I put together this basic kind of proposal idea, probably five pages long outlining kind of my idea for the book.

So within a couple months I probably had 20 interviews with different agents and of those, there were two that really stood out to me as being aligned and by April of 2019, I had my agent Greg and we had lunch in Austin, Texas when I was down there for a Front Row Dad’s retreat, then kind of reconnected with him and his wife, and just really it was a great connection. Felt like he was a really good fit for me. And very quickly he kind of said to me, “This is a good idea and I think you need to work with a writing coach to put together a proposal.” So that’s where Nancy, my writing coach came in and from early 2019, until February of 2020, every Thursday, Nancy and I would meet and we would talk and talk and talk.

At a certain point, I was like, what are we doing here? It felt like we’re just chatting, but what she was distilling down into was what are those unique things that Joe Sanok teaches that isn’t just regurgitating what other people do or say, but really it’s his own unique kind of brand? And it was interesting how really by the end of it, she landed on time and the way I view time and the way I structure my time and the way that I help consulting clients or people in Next Level Practice go about thinking about their time. So we started to build out the proposal from there and kind of built the book in three different parts, the first part being all around deconstructing time and looking at our internal inclinations, those natural things that either are firing on all cylinders or not. The middle section was really talking about slowing down and the science behind that and how to do that and then the last section and killing it.

It’s great because I had Killin’It Camp and Slow Down School and didn’t even realize that was like a method that I was teaching all the time. So by working with this professional, Nancy, it really helped me to figure out what’s unique about me because one thing that the publishers want is they want my own audience to come along as well as a new audience. So they don’t want me to go so far away from what Practice of the Practice teaches that all of y’all don’t want to read the book. Nor do we want to go so broad into the business category or so specific, sorry into the Practice of the Practice category that no one from the general business category wants to read it anyway. So it’s kind of a fine line there as we worked through that, work through all the proposal and then shopped it around in early 2020 and HarperCollins eventually in April of 2020 bought the book.

So I signed the contract and all that had to write from April until it was due October 1st, but I knew I was going on that road trip with my family in September. So I actually turned it in September 1st. So wrote the whole book over that period of time. I outlined every single chapter. I had walked through what was going to be in it. I had some great people that were helping with just kind of looking at research and ideas. For every chapter I wanted to have at least two or three pieces of research, two or three really good stories or case studies and then my main points. So that it was really kind of based on the idea of 40% research, 40% stories, 20% here’s the main takeaway, which we see as an amazing formula for top TED talks in current Malcolm Gladwell’s Talk Like Ted.

You see that in New York Times bestselling books all the time. So if you look at Malcolm Gladwell, he uses that formula, Dan Pink uses that formula, Angie Morgan these top New York Times bestselling status people use that formula. And I thought, well, if I’m going to have the best shot at this I want to do that. So then I turned in the book and then the hard work happens, the edits, the cover design, all of that. So, I mean, I turned that in September of 2020, and the book comes out October of 2021. So a year of working on non-writing. So the last two months in August and September I will, before the book launches have done over 200 media appearances. So this was a multi-pronged approach.

I hired a PR company out of Austin that has got some amazing things. So they were able to get me a Harvard Business Review article, they were able to get me in Forbes and Inc and Entrepreneur, all sorts of really top level things. We also had Interview Valet have me get on, I think, 25 different podcasts interviews that were kind of top level podcasts interviews. I’ll also then was a sponsored Podcast Movement and gave away over 3000 pairs of sunglasses that say Thursday is the New Friday, and it really became this buzz where people were saying, this is the best swag and all of it. And these kind of like wooden sunglasses that look really cool and just say, Thursday is the New Friday. No call to action, no book me on the podcast attached to the sunglasses, purely just awareness building.

And then in the brochure, we had a full page ad that had me and then like buy the book, but if you want to book Joe on the show, here’s the link to book him. And then we also partnered with Entrepreneur On Fire with Kate and John Lee Dumas. They’re just amazing people to have them help promote through their Podcaster’s paradise. We hosted a meetup at Podcast Movement and really just connected with some high-level people through that connection too. So it’s just amazing how, when you start to get some wheels turning. It starts to get going. We’re on track right now, we’re ahead of schedule for a New York Times selling status, but who knows it’s all that October 5th date. So if you haven’t bought your books it’s coming up. So it makes sure that you’re getting five or 10 because we have that Thursday is the New Friday mastermind group that’s starting in November, every Thursday at noon Eastern for six weeks minus Thanksgiving that you’re going to get to be a part of. So you just submit your receipt that you bought 10 over at thursdayisthenewfriday.com.

How’s it going, friend? I hope you are having a great day today. I just want to take a minute and say, thank you. Thank you for all your support with Thursday is the New Friday. We are so close to getting New York Times bestselling status. It’s crazy to see the numbers. I want you to be a part of this movement. I want you to be part of working less and having more time with your family, your friends, and with your hobbies to pursue health, but not at the expense of your productivity and creativity. We can have a life that we design, that’s different than what the industrialists handed us. We don’t think about people as machines anymore. Join me in making Thursday the new Friday by ordering your copy today. Again, it’s Thursday is the New Friday. You can order it wherever you get your books.

So one concept I wanted to talk about in regards to making the best use of your time today is just where did time come from? So when I started writing this book instead of going back to my notes, back to my proposal I actually started with a whiteboard. It’s actually right next to me. I have two white boards next to each other. So I have lots of whiteboard space to think and brainstorm and put quotes and ideas and steps. So I have this big blank space and I looked at it and I said, if I was starting from scratch with Thursday is the New Friday. What questions would I have? Some of the leading questions I had was where did time itself come from? Because our version of a day is based on the earth? So days out in the universe, that’s very different.

Where did we get the 7-day week? Where did the 40-hour work week come from? When did that Friday start to creep out from being a major workday? So I looked into it and thousands of years ago, the Babylonians, they started the 7-day week. So they looked up and they saw the sun, the moon looked down and saw the earth, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. So seven major celestial things. So they said, let’s have a 7-seven day week. The Egyptians had an 8-day week, the Romans had a 10-day week, and some people then point to the, well, the Bible says seven days. Well, actually the Torah, the first five books of the Bible that was written down in Babylon while the Jewish people were in exile. So we see this influence of the Babylonians throughout human history.

Then fast forward to around 300 when the Roman Ember converts to Christianity and makes the 7-day week just across the Roman empire. It really takes off from there. But we really didn’t even have aligned calendars until the mid 1930s. I talk about how even Russia and several other countries had different calendars. So less than a hundred years ago, our calendars got aligned worldwide. So even our version of time is made up by humans. We made this up. Then fast forward to the late 1800’s, how did people work in the late 1800’s? You know, the average person works 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. And it was like a farmer schedule, even if you weren’t on the farm. So then you see that people are just working all the time in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s. So this crazy amount of work that people are doing.

Then we see in 1926, Henry Ford in an effort to sell more cars, gives his people the 40-hour work week. There are tons of quotes in the book of him talking about how, if people just need to get to work faster, they’re not going to buy a car, but if they have a weekend, if they get to go and recreate and have fun and see their family, they will buy a car. So to sell more cars to his own employees, he institutes the 40-hour work week and it takes off in 1926, less than a hundred years ago. So let’s just pause for a second. The 7-day week, the Babylonians made up. Henry Ford, a white man with power in 1926, gives us the 40-hour work week, which is a big step compared to that 10- to 14-hour day. That’s a big step for humanity and for business, but then let’s fast forward to the eighties and nineties.

You may remember ABC, TGF how Urkel and Full House and Friday’s really become this day that starts to fade out. It’s a day that we have baby showers, wedding showers, at work we might do a cheesy team building activity, all sorts of things on Fridays. We’re planning our weekends and you know what Fridays really start to fade out as a productive workday, unless the podcast I’ve said that Friday has been having an affair with the weekend. Let’s just call it what it is. Friday has co-opted and moved away from the work week and let’s just move it over to the category of the weekend. So we see the things are not looking great for Friday as a Workday, and definitely it’s moving into the category of the weekend and then the pandemic of 2020 hits. And we see it’s the final nail in the coffin that the industrialist era that Henry Ford gave us where people are machines, people are thought of as parts of an assembly line, that that is over.

We see that we think differently about work. We don’t have to do it the way we’ve done it. We see how even by commuting an hour to an office, an hour back, just making our kids lunches, doing all these different things, it’s just, wow, there’s a different way to live. And we all have a chance in this worldwide experiment to see a different way of living. Now, for a lot of people, it was more stressful, especially our frontline workers or people working in hospitals, people that were still working in grocery stores and being exposed. Like for a lot of them, it was significantly more difficult. For a lot of the therapists that listen to this you had some of your best years ever. So we see that there’s a new way, more of a evolutionary model for business that’s emerging.

The businesses that are doing this, they’re doing this evolutionary model, are the ones that are retaining people, they’re the ones that have flexibility. We’re hearing about the great resignation. How do you combat the great resignation? Well, you let people define and decide what they want to do and adapt your business accordingly. So even within Practice of the Practice, I talk to our staff at least annually, if not more frequently than that and I asked them three questions. The first question is, what do you absolutely love doing that you don’t want to stop doing? The second question is what do you hate doing that, you want taken off your plate and given to someone else or hired out to somebody else? And third, what do you want to learn to do that you’re not doing now? What do you need training in that you are interested in?

And seeing people like Sam C and Sam R, we’ve got the two Sam’s at the top of the pyramid, they both have continued to level up year after year in areas that they’re interested in. So what this does is it doesn’t just put people like the industrialists want it into some sort of job role that they’re stuck in. Instead they can level up and change and switch as they go, which makes the organization more strong as well, more creative. And people then know that, hey, if in a year I changed my interests, I can always adapt differently. So it’s really a way to allow this organism, this business, to grow and evolve over time instead of just saying you’re stuck in this role. So that’s just some of the concepts that I talked about in Thursday is the New Friday. I’m going to be doing a handful of episodes here. We also have a whole Thursday is the New Friday podcast coming out season one. We’re going to have 22 episodes. Angie Morgan, the New York times bestselling author of Spark, as well as upcoming book Bet On You interviews me over 22 episodes. So we’re going to just do a short little one of those episodes right here. It’s a quick little discussion between me and Angie. Here we go.

Welcome to Thursday is the New Friday, the podcast. That’s all about how the 40-work week will help you to work fewer hours, make more money and spend time doing what you want.
[ANGIE MORGAN]
Hi, I’m Angie Morgan, the author of the business books Leading from the Front, Spark and Bet on You. But more importantly, I’m Joe Sanok’s friend, and I’m really excited to talk with him about his newly published book Thursday is the New Friday.
[JOE]
So where should we start?
[ANGIE]
So we can start just talking about kind of the idea behind this book.
[JOE]
Yes, it’s interesting. I was working with this lady, Nancy, who is my writing coach to just get the proposal together. And as we were chatting about just like what I do with counselors and therapists and coaches one of the big things that she kept coming back to is how I view time differently than other people. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but there’s times where someone says to you, this is sort of a superpower and then it’s like, I didn’t realize that was abnormal. You know, people don’t just think this way. So as we talked more and more, I realized that like working four days or fewer a week was really something that I am passionate about that I feel like I’m more creative because I do that. But then teaching clients that I don’t know, have you ever had times that someone pointed something out that was like a super power that you didn’t realize was a superpower?
[ANGIE]
It’s great. I mean, it’d be better if you knew it was, and then you could be more intentional about it, but to have somebody identify it, that’s exciting. Yes, it’s funny. I want to go back to like the time thing. How do you view time differently? That’s kind of my curiosity.
[JOE]
You know, it’s interesting. So like when I got the book deal it was all about the four-day work week and time and all that. I thought I should probably know more of the history of time. So I started just thinking through why do we have certain things? So a year to me made sense and a day makes sense, but the seven-day week just didn’t even make sense. So I just kept digging in and going down these rabbit holes and for me, when I discovered that the Babylonians just made up a seven-day week, it was like, what? They just made it up? So that became actually a really big kind of theme for me of, we made all this stuff up. We can undo it also. And I felt like it gave me such a freedom to then say in life, most of this is made up.

Somebody somewhere said, we’re going to do it this way. And that just applies outside of time so much. And for me to be able to then reflect on my own life and say, I’ve actually kind of had that punk rock band for a while. Even in college, like I don’t have to go to school on Friday and I rarely did. I only had one class that I took on Fridays in college. So I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be this way and identifying that’s not how everybody always thinks was like a really big thing for me to figure out for myself.
[ANGIE]
I love how you started off with the book, just contextualizing that for us. So to help all the readers understand like the way you think about time is a manmade construct. And when you think about that, what’s the problem with how we think about time, because you not just only live your life with a really great perspective on time, but you also counsel people. So I’d be curious in your counseling sessions, do you feel that time is this major source of stress or pressure point for people? Is that kind of the Genesis for this?
[JOE]
I think so much of it is, so we have the kind of macro human made time, so Henry Ford giving us the 40-hour work week, but then we do that to ourselves all the time. I have friends just in the neighborhood. I didn’t think about like some of these neighbors are running to baseball games, soccer games, all these different things, because they think their kid needs to have organized sports. And there’s nothing bad about organized sports but if your whole family is just stressed out and maxed out and mad at each other and waking up at 6:00 AM on a Saturday, you’ve created for yourself, this illusion that you’re busy. It doesn’t always have to be that way.

I think rarely do we step back and then say, do our kids actually need to be this busy to be successful? Or do they actually maybe need to play outside for a little bit more? Do they need to just, like the other day, my daughters and my nieces found a dead mouse outside and it started this great conversation around, well, what happens next? There’s all this curiosity of, do you think an owl will come eat it? Should we put it in the woods? Should we bury it? It’s just like, that’s what childhood to me should be. That it shouldn’t be that you’re always just running from one event to the next. So it’s interesting how we just accept that the seven-day week and the 40-hour work week is just that’s what time is, but the reality is we’re creating our own busy-ness unnecessarily without saying, “What do I actually want for my kids? Okay, I want them to paint once a week. I want them to read a little bit. I want them to be active in some sort of sports, but not just be stressed out.” We can step back from the life we’ve created for ourselves and actually say, I want something different than this for my family or for my life and then to really zoom out from how you’ve been viewing time yourself.
[JOE]
So if you are ready to move to the four-day work week to boost your creativity and productivity, I want to encourage you to go purchase Thursday is the New Friday. You can get it from your favorite bookstore and have them pre-order it. You can get it from Amazon, from wherever you get your orders. When you buy 10 of them, you’re just going to upload your receipt of five, 10 or 25 over at thursdayisthenewfriday.com. We have tons of bonuses there. If you do this before October 5th, if you get five, you get free access to our online Killin’It Camp conferences happening in mid-October. We ended up having to switch it to online instead of in-person, so actually more of you have access to this than before. So to get free access to that. Before October 5th, please make sure that you order that your five books, if you want to be in that mastermind group with me, where we walk through, how you make Thursday is the New Friday within your business. We’re going to be doing some hot seats and getting to know each other, even better.

All you have to do is buy 10 of those books and then submit your receipt at thursdayisthenewfriday.com. Then if you get 25, we have tons of extra bonuses for you for that as well. Thank you so much for hanging out with me and for making Thursday the new Friday. Also, thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. Bye.

special thanks to the band. Silence is sexy for your intro music. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.