This episode features Interact’s Digital Marketing Manager and Host, Jessmyn Solana, Customer Success Manager, Damaris Pacheco, Growth Manager, Jackie Aguglia, and Social Content Manager, Jesy Nelson.
In this episode we will cover:
- As employees why is it important to have a schedule like a flexible schedule?
- How did you change the way you managed your time and projects when we shifted for 4 day work weeks?
- How do you prepare for time off?
- How do you think this positively or negatively impacts your life and work?
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Hi guys and welcome back to Interacts Grow podcast. So excited to be with you here. As always, I’m your host, Justin Solana, and with us today we have all the ladies of Interact, Damaris, Jackie and Jesse, thank you so much for. Popping on with me today. We are missing Josh because he’s out of office on vacation, but we will see him again next week.
And for those of you who don’t know, this is a podcast where we talk all things marketing and growing your business so that we can help you grow yours. And today’s, for the today’s topic. I feel like we talked about this last week a little bit when we were sort of talking about how to get time back in your business.
And Josh kept alluding to how we have four day work weeks and, and flexible schedules. But I don’t know that we actually got sort of into our own experiences of, you know, that shift that happened this year. With the four day work week and kind of, I guess like, I don’t know how best to word this, but the freedom to choose your schedule I think was a lot for me because you know, that’s not normal in a workplace.
Usually people will tell you, okay, you have to be at work from this time to this time, or even if you are, you know, coming up with your own schedule cuz you have your own. You sort of work with the hours that your clients work. Right? Whereas for us, a lot of it’s project base, so we were able to choose those schedules.
There was a lot of freedom in that. First and foremost, I guess what I wanna kind of go over, and Jackie can you jump in on this, is sort of like, what is this flexibility we’re talking about in our schedules this year and when did that shift happen? Yeah, so I mean, it’s always been a thing with interact.
When did we close the office? I wasn’t even on the team since I started with the team. Yeah. When we closed the office it was in 2019. Pre Covid. Yeah. And so when I came onto the team two years ago, I was the only person working east coast where everybody else was working Pacific Time. And of the interviews that I’ve had with new employees since then who now work in different time zones, the number one question they ask is, do I have to work Pacific Time hours?
Because nobody on the east coast wants to work Pacific time hours. Right? That’s way too late in the day. And so what interact allows is for you to choose your own hours. But then at the end of last year, they gave us a four day work week. And so we did mention this last week, our four day work week doesn’t mean that we’re working extra hours.
Those other, those four days, it’s literally here you get this whole day off, but the other days you’re expected to work just as you were previously. Right? And so we’re working less hours, we’re working on our own time zones or what, whatever days. Let me say this too. You’re able to choose the day off that you want.
So maybe people assume, well, you get Fridays off, right? You sure you can have Fridays off, but if you want a Monday off or a Wednesday off in the middle of the week, that’s totally up to you. So we as interact employees are allowed to choose when we want to work. I guess that’s the answer to your question.
We’re we’re given the flexibility to choose when we want to work. Yeah. With these sort of guidelines of four days, four days. Yeah, I kind of wanted to add on to this sort of like you take that day off because I think when most, well, this idea of four day work weeks came about, the original concept was.
Distributing those hours into the rest of the week. So instead of like an eight hour day, you work a 12 hour day for four days out of the week to, to make up that time. Whereas for us, it, we literally just removed those hours and. What was interesting, I think for me, when this was introduced to us as a, as a strategy shift for this year, was kind of like, we’re gonna test this out.
I remember that’s what Annie had said. She was like, we’ll, test this out and see where it goes. Which is why we were given so much freedom, I guess you could say, because they wanna know like, okay, well how is the team going to continue to work together? How will they figure it out with these off hours?
And how will they communicate? So I think my next question from that is, as employees, why do we feel it’s important to have a flexible schedule? Damaris, do you wanna jump in on Yeah, that is such an interesting question. Yes, I have, I have a lot of thoughts around this specific topic. But just to give some context too, and to add on to what Jackie and Jess said there has been sort of studies out there that showed that people that do work.
Four day work weeks and really have that like sort of mental health break for those three days off are better at their job and are more productive. So I think that was also sort of part of the strategy of why they decided to test this out, which is now, I think it’s now permanent. Maybe let me not jinx it.
Hopefully. But when this was introduced at the beginning of the year, I was excited. I was shocked. I was not used to it in my previous role before I moved on, you know, moved to interact. I was expected to work five days, week late, nine hour days every day on site. And so the question remains, how do you, how do you prioritize and, and are, and are productive switching to four days, right?
And then And then being able to sort of create the schedule that you like. So for me specifically, my role with the team is a little bit unique than a lot of different people. I do have to have live office, you know, live chat, support hours for our customers that are, are, that need us when we’re here.
So when I started sort of building the schedule for myself, I was like, you know what? I think it would be better. For me to accommodate for those that work on the east coast and then myself to work sort of shorter during the week and then have some hours on Friday. And I just sort of started to test that out just to see if that worked for everybody.
And then I ended up liking it because, and then I ended up working with my lifestyle. You know, I have a daughter, I have a family at home that I also have to make sure I have quality time. So it just really depends on. The best way to answer this would be, especially for those that are trying to sort of find that work-life balance out there, is you have to test out what you think may work.
And if you like it, then stick with it. If it doesn’t work, try to shift some things around. So right now, I really enjoy it. I hope that answered the question, Justin. Yeah, no, I, it’s great that you mentioned sort of the customers, because that was something that I forgot to add earlier, was how do you take out those hours but keep the same quality of, you know, values, customer service product updates, all of the good stuff, right?
How do you keep up with that quality when you’re now removing hours? Did anyone have anything else to add to why it’s important to have a flexible schedule based on your life? Yeah, and I just wanna add to. One more thing too. When I said it though, when I was testing that out for the month of January, I was testing out the, the effect that it would have on our customers if I took off half a day off on Friday, for example, and it was very minimal.
So then that sort of gave me the liberty of, okay, I can totally do this. This will work for me. So just to. So just going back to testing it with, with your customers and sort of feeling comfortable with, with the schedule, you have to make sure that it doesn’t fully affect your clients or your customers.
And so I would just wanted, I wanted to make sure I added that for all of you guys listening out there.
But I don’t know who’s next, who wants to take the wheel. Yeah, no, I think Tamara said it perfectly. I think it, it’s good to have a flexible work schedule because we are all different people. I don’t have kids, right. But I travel all the time. I don’t have like a home base. I’m not always in the same time zone.
And so, This is the most chaotic answer that you’re probably gonna hear from anyone on the team. But I don’t really have a schedule. I just like make it up as I go because that’s how I operate like that. That is my schedule, you know, figuring out, okay, this is what I’m in this town today or this week, and these are the things that I wanna do personally exploring or like while I’m here, but these are the things that I need to get done for my job.
And so sometimes that looks like working a little bit in the morning, taking the entire day off, right? Like I’m working like maybe. Okay. I’d never wake up at six, but I don’t know, maybe I eat breakfast, right? And I get online for like three, four hours, sometimes two hours. And then I take off like the nine to five typical work day.
And then I’m back online after 5:00 PM because I just spent the whole day out in the sun, you know, getting to see these things. But I would rather be home at night, inside, after the sun goes down doing the things that I need to get done for work. And so there’s no one schedule that’s going to work for everybody in the world, and that’s why I think it’s so important to.
These, these flexible hours because when you’re happier, just like the America was saying about these studies that have been done, when you’re happier at work, you produce better results. Right. I’m like more willing and I’m also more willing when things change cuz things change here all the time. Right.
I’m so much more willing to jump in and help out. Knowing that I’m able to do so on my own time, like when I am able to, to, to participate, right? Or like have the energy to do that thing. Also, right, like sometimes we wake up and we’re like, I do not like Mondays. I don’t wanna go to work today. Take the morning off, like go for a walk.
You don’t have to log in or punch a clock at a specific time. And so I think the other thing that Damaris said that I really liked was, When she was testing out the, taking that half day off on Friday, knowing that it had a very minimal effect to our customers, they were still happy and they were still being able to, or rather they were still getting what they needed from us.
You have that peace of mind where you can, when you’re away from your computer, you can actually enjoy the time off for yourself. You can spend, she can spend the time with her family without worrying about what’s going on at work. Customers are gonna be fine and they’re gonna hear from her on Monday if they responded after she logged off for Friday.
We’re all just gonna give better results to our customers, to each other, and to our company by allowing for this, this flexible schedule. Yeah. I also feel like if like the week kind of gets away from you sometimes, which it does Monday through Thursday, flies by, like Thursday comes up and I’m like, oh my God, it’s our Friday.
But if anything happens, I don’t feel like this dreaded thing, like, oh, I need to hop on and finish a few things Monday morning, you know? Cause I’m like, I had time to do it this week. But you know, something else came up and like, now I need to do a few things on Friday. I don’t feel like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna have to sit here until five o’clock.
I hop on, I get it done, and I go enjoy the rest of my day. And just having the flexibility to do that like is. A nice like mental break instead of, you know, waiting for a long Friday to end and you know, it’s just so much nicer being like, okay, I’ll hop on, finish it, and then back to your weekend. Yeah, somebody that I used to work with in corporate where it was like a very nine to five Monday to Friday schedule told me like we were literally living for the weekend.
And it’s so true. Like you only went to work to collect your paycheck and you were just waiting until Friday and then you had like the Monday blues or whatever you call them, and you’re waiting until Friday and like nobody wants. To live like that. Like how, so I, I don’t even know what percentage of your life that is.
Oh, all the Mondays and Fridays that we work, right. So to have this dread and to like only live for these two days of freedom on the weekend is awful. Like, that’s not what we’re designed to be doing. And so I think that’s where maybe some of the misery in the world is coming from, of like people being forced to work at specific times or like not be able to have.
The flexibility to do what it is that they need to do for themselves. Maybe it has something to do with wellness or a sickness or a family member, or just personal needs. It doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t have to explain what you need personally to be successful as long as you’re able to show up successfully.
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. On, go ahead. Go ahead. No, go ahead. I was gonna say, just on that note, when you have a project to do, knowing that whether you finish it or not, you’re still gonna need to sit there in front of your computer until five o’clock on Friday. Your productivity goes down so much, like, so much knowing that if you finish it and you wrap it up, you can clock out for the weekend.
That like you’re so much more efficient. I feel like it makes such a big difference if people try that out, obviously. Mm-hmm. Not everyone can do a four day work week, but if you can, I feel like my productivity has gone up so much knowing that it’s gonna benefit me if I finish this. No, I think that is true, especially if a bunch of our listeners are owning their own business.
You know, we can assume that they have flexibility or like they can choose flexibility in their schedules. I was gonna say that you know, it’s nice to have one day where you could get all your, you know, errands done, all your chores done wake. You know, whenever you naturally wake up and still have the full two days to, you know, you still have the full two days to, to enjoy your weekend rather than Oh, great.
On set. It’s Sunday. I, it’s laundry day, you know, like that’s the day that I used to do laundry. That was the day that I used to clean the apartment, but now I can wake up on a Friday. And just get all of that done and still have the rest of my, my evening to do what you normally do on Fridays. You know, go get dinner with your family or your friends, or, you know, go grab a drink, go to the movies, and so on.
And I’m real quick, Jess. Yeah. Real quick. We keep adding these little tidbits, but just to, just to flip it, right? Like everybody wants a day off. Everybody wants to be on vacation, right? And be able to do whatever it is that you want to do. But I would also say since we’ve switched to this four day work week and just having this flexible schedule, I look forward to coming to work.
Yeah. Because I’m not, I’m not burnt out. I’m excited to come back to my project. I’ve sort of like checked the boxes, my personal boxes of. What I wanted to do that week. Right? And so once that’s sort of done, I look forward to coming back to work. And I can’t say that I’ve ever really felt that way about a job before.
Right? Yeah, I agree. What I was going to say was, That I think the million dollar question for everyone who’s listening is, wow, guys, that’s so cool. Good for you, but how the hell do you, you know, manage your actual projects or manage your, your work week when you completely cut out those hours and now you only have, what did you say, Jackie?
Is it, is it 32 hours? If it’s four hours or four days? A. I’m bad at math. Yeah, it’s 32 hours. So you know too, if you don’t have the normal 48 hour work week, like how do you actually manage your projects in order to get the things done that you need to get done? I feel like it’s gotten easier, like because.
There’s no time to deli dally or procrastinate. It’s like, get it done, or you’re gonna be working on Friday, kind of thing. You know, or like that’s pretty much it. Like I feel like it’s actually made it way easier. I would spread my time out too much and be like, Hmm, I can take some more time on this. Like if I don’t get to this today, I’ll get to it tomorrow.
And that’s okay. But now I’m like, no, I need to get to this today because tomorrow I have another thing to knock off the list. And after that I would like to take a day off. So I feel like it’s made it easier, but I don’t know if that’s just for me. How do you guys feel like project-wise? I totally agree.
And the thing that I wanted to say on last week’s episode of like, you know, being able to be more productive at work, you ha. Reducing your hours like this, you have to ask yourself why you’re doing something. And so when you have more time, you’re able to do maybe all of the things. And I think that’s where like this mentality comes of, well, I wanna be doing all the things and I’m so busy I don’t have time for that thing.
But what is it that you’re really trying to accomplish? Right? Like I, I am not a goal setting person. That’s like maybe a flaw that I have, but I’m just not someone. I told you already, I can’t like stick to a schedule. It’s very hard for me to be so consistent like that. And so, but regardless, every time I, I have my little to-do list, right?
You only have this amount of time in a week to get it done. You have to ask yourself, why am I doing this thing? You have to learn. I mean, you have to prioritize. It just becomes like a thing that you have to do. Whereas before when you had more time, maybe you’d spend a whole day prioritizing. Right, like, or maybe not whole day, but a few hours that you spent like reprioritizing things.
But this really forces you to have to do that because you, you can’t waste time or spend time on things that don’t. Contribute maybe to your bottom line or to whatever it is that your, your business goal is like, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the things that are going to help achieve that?
That’s what you have to be focused on. And you sort of, my old boss used to say, cut the fat. Where can we cut the fat? And you lose out on all of these extra things that you were spending time on. But that. Weren’t really helping you or your business where, where maybe you thought they would, or they sort of became routine.
Right? But you, you, those things drop off because your, your time is now shortened, so you have to focus on the most important things. They just become top priority without you even prioritizing. Yeah. I think it’s interesting that you’re saying that because it reminds me of, I think somebody mentioned this last week, or maybe I heard it somewhere in the ethos somewhere, but.
It’s, it goes back to when a person feels burned out and their productivity level is very low, it’s going to take them way longer to accomplish the task because they’re mentally drained, they don’t feel rested. Versus when you sort of cut, like for example, for us, we cut out a day so we can really fully rest our mind and not think of work.
So when we come back, we’re like, okay, we’re ready to work. Like let’s get it going. Let’s get this out. Let’s knock it out. At least that’s for me, that’s sort of. What I’ve noticed for myself, I feel that I’m not burned out. I feel that I feel a comeback refreshed. I come back like with the mind of like, all right, I’m gonna get to work.
I’m gonna cut all these tasks out, I time block, and then next thing you know, it’s Thursday and I’m like, okay, I’m gonna go back, you know, have a half day off or whatever it is. And it just sort of, it becomes more of a healthier work life balance, I suppose, is the best way to put it, you know? So, You know, that’s my takeaway from that.
I wanna lean into this concept of sort of how, how you look at your work week. Great. Like your perspective of it. So we’re talking a lot about, you know, cutting fat getting full rest and you know, really prioritizing your work so that you get it done within the four days and you can actually rest on that last day.
There. I was thinking of something where when I first started my career oh my God, five, six years ago now, and I remember feeling like every single email was urgent. Every single slack message was urgent. Every request that was made of me was urgent. Every single one of my projects was urgent. And throughout the years and this takes a lot of practice.
Where you really have to let go of that idea that you have to do every single thing right now and really pick out how urgent is each thing, right? Like really think about, okay, is this actually urgent? Do I need to actually get to this project right now? And then also not being so accommodating, I guess is the right word that I’m thinking of.
Every time I get an email, I would think, oh, I have to do this right now because this customer, this partner, had requested it of me. Whereas actually, if it doesn’t fit in or if it doesn’t align with your schedule, if it doesn’t align with the initiatives of the program that you’re running or even the initiatives of the company, it is okay to say no.
And it is okay to say, Hey, this is something that I can’t get to right now, but we can do. Next quarter, or we can do this next month, or just flat out, Hey, this is not aligned with our initiatives this year, and we just can’t get to it. But if anything changes, we’ll let you know. Have you guys felt like you’ve been able to sort of rethink the way you do things or like the rethink the way you run your projects or requests that you get from, whether it’s partners, customers, or I guess even internally within the company?
I mean, we canceled slash postponed an entire summit, right? Like we, we were planning we were planning a summit that provided what, maybe 12 different speakers perspectives on different areas of your business, which absolutely would’ve helped a lot of people. I can’t put a number to it, right? But we were attracting, or I guess rather the reach of that summit would.
Would have gotten to maybe a hundred thousand people with it, with our combined audiences, right? That’s a lot of people that maybe could have benefited from these different workshops that we wanted to host from these really excellent speakers on these really excellent topics. But at the end of the day, We had to think about our customers, right?
Like we are in business. Our number one goal at Interact is to make it as easy as possible for you to launch a lead generation quiz and sending you our customers 12 ish right? Different workshops to, to listen to that aren’t necessarily directed specifically to your quiz. Wasn’t really in the best interest of them.
Right. And what was in the best interest of them was focusing on our AI tool and how you can use it to create a quiz in just one day. That’s the easiest way that we can get a quiz into your account right now. Right. And so that was a really hard decision and I think that we upset a couple of people in canceling that summit because some people had planned on.
Sharing affiliate links and pro promoting their own offerings of these different courses through their workshops. We, we had to make the decision for our customers. And so I, I think it was, looking back, I think it was the absolutely the right decision to make. It was in, I mean, just because we’re speaking about time, right?
It was in our best interest to devote the time to the AI tool, to the feature and helping customers use it. But just the other day, I won’t mention any names. We were talking to one of those speakers who was kind of a little bit upset and, and confused as to why we were no longer going to be promoting their workshop or even, you know allowing her not allowing her to record it, but like, we weren’t going to show it or share it anywhere.
Right. But we just reexplained what the strategy was and. They’re now going to use a quiz that will lead people to the offering that they wanted to talk about in this workshop, but in a way that aligns with what our customers actually need. So this person is going to use the AI feature to create a quiz that will lead people into their You know, paid offerings, which is what the workshop at the summit would have done, but in a way where it’s going to showcase, Hey, here’s how you in this niche can use the quiz and or you know how to put it into your funnel.
Or use some of the offerings that she does have for those people that would have benefited from that workshop. And so, I would just say, yeah, you don’t have to do it all and it’s okay to change your mind. And I think what Damaris was saying earlier with testing out what type of schedule works for you, you have to test some different things out.
So it was a little bit scary deciding that we need to pull the plug on the summit. Especially like we maybe were like a month before we were gonna launch it. So it was kind of last minute, but. It was, now I’m rambling and I kind of forgot the question, but I guess the point is, why are you doing the thing that you are doing?
And we were doing the summit for the wrong reasons. We really were, we were trying to, I think, reach a wider audience, which would be awesome, but we really needed to focus on making it as easy as possible for people to create a quiz. And so I think that Pivot has put us in the right spot and helped hundreds of people since then create quizzes with this AI feature.
Which is what our main goal is. So we cut a whole bunch of hours and a whole bunch of time in designing landing pages and interviews for the workshops and all of these things, right? So that we could devote our time to the things that we actually needed to be working on. Yes, I was going to summarize what you were saying, but I think you just did it.
Thank you. Ok. I really like, like, yeah, go ahead Jesse. I was gonna say, I really like how you explained the whole summit thing and everything, and it really just like led back down that it really just mattered about the customer. Mm-hmm. Like that was the bottom line, is doing what is gonna benefit our customers the most.
So I feel like for business owners, maybe that’s kind of something to consider. What’s gonna help your customers and your audience the most? Is it going to be making this real that, you know, might get you a lot of traction, a lot of view, some Instagram followers, or is it gonna be making that, you know, that like p d F document that you said that you’ve gonna make for a long time and you’re gonna email it out to your existing customers and that’s something that helps them with their businesses and it relates back to you like what is going to help your customers?
Making your customers happy should be number one and helping them should be number one. And I like that you brought it all back down, that it’s as simple as just going back to that and kind of deciding from there, which I think is what all of us have kind of done with our projects at this point. Like what is the bottom line?
How is it helping interact and its customers, right? Yeah. And I think. No, I was gonna say, how can you like make sure that you fit that within the time that yes, you wanna work and keep that flexibility. Go ahead Jackie. Sorry. No, I just wanted to add what Jesse was saying was great, and just another example that I think really relates to our audience and our customers is, would you rather, rather, would it be more beneficial for you to be funding all of this time trying to automate all these beautiful sequences, the email sequences that you’re sending out after your quiz?
Or would it be in your best interest for your customers to simply just send them an actual email from. You know, and so we talk about that a lot of like, I mean, that was a whole episode of barriers for your quizzes, right? But like, Probably for a lot of our customers, they would benefit so much more from just sending a personal email and connecting with their audience van, trying to build out some of these marketing flows and email sequences that you hear through big top influencers in the marketing space.
So I just wanna say that because. Yeah, why are you doing what you’re doing and is what you’re doing actually moving the needle? And if it’s not, it is okay to stop doing it. Stop doing it. You don’t have to like plan like a phase out of it. You can just stop doing it and then test out, you know, what do I wanna try next?
Or how does this change things? Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. It sounds like kind of what we’re all sort of alluding to is making sure. When you decide what you’re gonna do with your time or the time that you have, if you do decide to, you know, cut your hours within a day or cut your hours within a week, or, you know, give yourself a full week off in a month, for example.
Is what you’re doing meaningful to you and your business and is it meaningful to your customers? And I think like that’s a, a good way to sort of manage your time and your projects and, and making sure that you’re getting it done. Cuz if you have x amount of hours and you wanna stay true to that, then you do have to be really strict with is is what I’m doing matters.
Damaris, did you have anything to add to managing projects in time since you are first and foremost customer facing? A lot of your time actually has to do with the customer’s time. You know, it’s different than marketing where it, like we do customer facing things, but we don’t have to be readily available for customers at all the time.
I was gonna say at, yeah, yeah. Whatever time, but all the time. That’s a good question. I. I think that you have to, as a business owner, if you guys are listening out there, I think you have to know what your strengths and witnesses are, right? With anything. What, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses?
What are you good at? What are you not good at? I am pretty good at multitasking, so that’s probably why they put me in customer support cause we get a lot of different and for me personally I have to structure myself and I have to keep myself organized in order to be able to help all of you guys out there.
Right? And you know, I have different support roles, customer outreach, chat support, AI quizzes, you know, contact me, Facebook, I mean, you name it. I probably have a list of five, six of them. But it’s really. Organizing myself in order to not feel overwhelmed or burned out and really provide our customers their correct answers in a timely manner.
So I base it all around, structuring my time giving myself some mental breaks during the day to sort of separate. Back and forth. And then, you know, and by break, you know, it can be as easy as, Hey, you know, I’m gonna go get a snack downstairs. Let me get my mind off work. Or I’m gonna, you know, research some something else that I’ve been.
You know, telling myself I’m gonna do for the last 30 minutes or an hour. Just something like that. Right. But back to what Jasmine’s saying to the hours, this is why I said I had to test out, for example, Fridays to see if that would affect our customers or not. Just to sort of gauge the, the impact of, of what we would have as a cut, as a, as a company.
And then usually on Mondays, you know, when I come back, I fully block that day off to, to answer all of our customer’s requests to make sure that I’m caught up on everything that came through. So nobody feels neglected. Everybody’s, you know, getting their answers. So it just, it’s really different. It’s everything.
Everybody has different methods, I would say. Yeah, no, that’s super helpful cuz I think a lot of entrepreneurs out there will be doing all the things right? They’re gonna be doing projects, but they’ll also have to be customer facing and it, it sounds all fun and like, you know, really great to be able to do four day work weeks.
But I guess we also have to keep in mind that at our company we do have a team, right? We have a team that has dedicated. Responsibilities and if you are a solopreneur, it might be a lot harder to kind of figure out, well how can I implement, you know, a four day work week or, or something where I can get that mental rest, but it doesn’t have to actually look like what other people look like.
I think just. Concluding with what Damara said, you have to figure out what works best for you. Whether that looks like cutting out a full day, or maybe you do need to distribute those eight hours into the rest of the week, or maybe you take a full week off once a quarter, or maybe it’s two weeks off in a quarter, but spread out like it.
It really is something that you can test out and figure out for yourself. That’s the beauty of I think having your own business. You get to kind of call the shots. Yeah. The last question that I wanna ask you guys before we close out maybe is a little bit more personal, but like, in, in your own life, how would you say this either positively or negatively impacted your life and also your.
I mean, I’ve been in Africa for the last three months, right? Like I got to explore Cape Town. Yeah, which was a place on my bucket list. I got to go to Egypt and see all of these pyramids. I got to extend my trip in Egypt to go to Luxer because there’s all this more stuff that you need to see while you’re there.
I’m currently in Morocco, so this has absolutely, positively impacted my life because people, my. Think I’m on vacation all the time, but I’m not, I’m totally able to manage my projects at work. I’m even able to pick up extra projects sometime because I’m so happy with my situation. I’m just so much happier to work when I’m able to work because I’m able to not work when I don’t have the energy for it or when I want to be, you know, checking these sort of like personal boxes for myself.
So positive all. I agree. I feel like I’ve only felt positive impacts from this, like the whole thing where like when you get something done, it kind of starts building momentum, you know? And I’m getting more things done every day, and that momentum lasts through Thursday. I’m not procrastinating, I’m not putting things off.
I’m not spending too much time on something that I shouldn’t be spending that much time on, and just having that day off to do anything or run errands and get that time. Feels so great, especially when I’m coming off of a week that I felt really productive and, you know, I checked all these things off, it just builds this momentum and I’m happy to come back on Monday and, you know, do that all over again.
Yeah. Well, I will say that I am working on my control issue, guys. I am a work in progress. However I think overall when I, and I can only speak to. In my experiences personally when I compare myself from corporate Demaris to interact Demaris, there has been a big, big shift. I used to tell myself the narrative was, you know, I’m a workaholic.
I, I work, I work, I work. This is how I feel. Maybe validated or productive, right? And then you sort of start shifting and I’m really talking to all of these business solopreneurs that feel like workaholics, you know, I have to work all the time. And then you sort of start thinking like, do I have to work all the time?
Can I have a better balance? And also be productive? And once you start sort of embracing that change It has been incredibly positive, at least in my lifestyle. You know, I have a family, I have to remember, I have to be there for them. I have to remember, you know, that it’s not all about work. It has to be about life as well and my experiences.
And so I think that for all of those listening, if you have been thinking about making the change, maybe this is your, your sign to, Hey, let’s just try it and test it out, because from personal experie, I’m gonna stay at Interact forever, so, mm-hmm. And it’s been positively, you know, it’s been a positive experience and I, and I love it.
So hope this helps. And I, I just wanna say real quick, the, we were talking about like, what projects are you working on? Why are you doing these things right? What are you trying to accomplish? Why do you work? Like what’s the purpose of you going to work? For me, honestly, it’s to make money so that I can spend time traveling and exploring the world.
I studied travel and tourism since college, and it’s been a lifelong dream of mine to get to explore the world. I am now currently working and doing that. I don’t have to work my whole life away to wait until I. To then go travel the world when how many people get sick or something happens before you retire.
You don’t make it to retirement, you can’t afford to retire, and then the whole reason that you were working your whole life away never actually gets to happen. So I would say that too. Like why are. Are you working? And maybe it’s not, you know, to make a million dollars. Do you really need a million dollars to live out the stream?
Right? Like, just think about that because that’s where the positive impact is gonna come from. If you’re able to do whatever it is that you’re gonna be spending this money that you’re ma, I’m assuming, right? We’re all working for money because we wanna do something with that money. What do you wanna do with it?
If you’re able to do that with a flexible schedule and go do it, it’s going to possibly impact your life right now. Without having to wait for retirement or years and years, and it never actually gets to happen for you. Mm-hmm. For me, I was definitely always very prone to burnout because I grew up with this structure in my family to like always be the best, work super hard so that, you know, you can live a comfortable.
So the shift was actually really difficult for me to go to a four day work week because I was like, what am I doing? Waking up and doing nothing today? This doesn’t feel right. But I was always really prone to burnout, especially trying to prove myself early in, in my career. Coming into tech as a woman is not easy, right?
And, you know, making a name for yourself and tech is not easy. That sort of idea where, hey, you work for four days, make sure it’s really meaningful, and then get three days to do what you want to actually rest. It was, I never had to plan, oh, I know in a couple months I’m gonna get really burnt out from this project, so I might need to take a couple days off to, to refresh my mind and, and do that reset.
Now I can do it more regularly. And fit it into my schedule each week so that I don’t get to that place so that I could actually enjoy the time that I’m, you know, resting and I can actually enjoy the time that I’m working and be like, okay, you know what? This is really stressing me out, but this project isn’t.
It doesn’t need to be done by tomorrow. You know, it doesn’t need to be done this week, so I can push it, I can take the weekend to rest and I could push it out till Monday and, and finish it Monday and get it done by the end of the day. And I know I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs on our podcast about burnout, about, you know, mental health and really taking yourself, taking care of yourself as an entrepreneur.
And the number one thing that I’ve always heard is to really take care of your mind, you know, and be able to take those breaks. But if you are able to fit that in more regularly rather than waiting for the burnout to happen, I think that’s much more meaningful to your life and to your wellbeing as. You know, as an entrepreneur and as a person, but into your customers.
Cause who wants to work with, who wants to work with cu grumpy customer service managers? Like we’ve all gotten that response or got on a phone call, right? Where you’re like, they’re not helpful. So let them be happy because they’re gonna help you more. They’re gonna be better for you in whatever it is that you’re looking for.
Ooh. You know, the last thing that I wanna mention before we close out I had spoken to somebody. On our podcast where it’s not out yet, so I don’t wanna say who, it won’t be out until like the fall, but they had implemented four day work weeks in their company, and they u their employees use that extra day for their own creative project.
So any side hustle that they’re, they’re coming out with any like solo project they have going, that’s what they use that time for. So it’s not necessarily something where like, oh, I’m gonna go play. This Friday and you know, just go hang out or I’m just gonna go run errands or do nothing. A lot of people actually use that time to be able to work on their own things.
So maybe if you are an entrepreneur, this could be that time that you work on your own business rather than the projects of your clients. Those are my last piece that I wanna say. Yes. Love it. Well guys, thank you so much for hopping on and. Dishing out all your secrets to a four day work week. I really love this topic because I think we always talk about mental health at interact, and we always talk about like, how do you take care of yourself?
And this is a step towards like figuring out sort of that perfect mix or that, you know, what do we, what do people say in, in our field? The secret sauce of, you know, becoming successful, having a successful company, but also taking care of yourself and making sure that you’re enjoying your life. Do you guys have any last minute things to add before we say goodbye to our listeners?
Love it. No, I think this is a great clothing. Mm-hmm. Well, guys, thank you so much for listening. We will see you next week. I was gonna say link something at the bottom, but I don’t really remember. I guess this is my plug for if you are interested in a quiz. Check out our new AI feature where you will work with someone from the team to create a quiz through ai and we’ll link that for you in the show notes and we’ll see you next week.
We could, we could also link the quiz that we made last week, right? So if you wanna get started on improving your schedule and creating more time for yourself, then take the quiz that we made with AI based off the podcast that we did last week on how to get started doing that. Cause I think this is a perfect segue into that, of that’s how you get started by one of those results that you’re gonna get from it.
Quiz. Yes, thank you. As you guys all know, this is not scripted, so I was not planned, but I never know what I’m linking at the end of the show. All right, guys. Thank you so much and we’ll see you next time. Bye bye.