Graham Allcott 0:04
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy, the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Alex Pang. He's the author of a couple of books, one called Rest and one called Shorter. And we're gonna be talking a lot about the four day week, which feels like it's one of those ideas that has gone from fringe to a bit more mainstream, particularly in recent times people talking about this of post COVID economy and ways to rebuild and all this kind of stuff and I'm kind of seeing a lot more coverage and credible coverage around the four day week. It kind of feels like it's, it's growing as an idea. And as you may or may not know, my company, Think Productive. We've been doing it for a week for eight years. So we talked about that a little bit in the episodes and I think Alex is pretty surprised he hadn't heard of us doing that. And then, you know, not deliberately but we'd been kind of keeping a bit of a low profile with our four day week stuff. Just we didn't really think it was that remarkable. So we weren't really telling the story. And weirdly, we'd told a couple of PR agencies and much more marketing savvy companies about it. They'd started doing for the week, and then started going, Hey, we're doing a 4 day week and getting loads of coverage about it. So you were talking about that in this episode, and how the idea might grow. And we recorded this before the lockdown. So I thought that might be quite a nice thing for this week, because we start the episode talking about the West End shows that Alex is going to see while he's over here from the States. So that's how we start the episodes and it kind of feels like a different world. Listening back to it now, but hope you'll find that you know, entertaining and kind of interesting And kind of a little bit of escapism, maybe, as well. So yeah, we're gonna get straight into episode in a second with Alex. The other thing I just want to say at the beginning is, I have recently launched my new mailing list is called Rev Up for the Week. So every Sunday I'm releasing an email, which is just a little short blog post short piece of writing with just a positive idea for the week, which feels very timely right now. So just positivity on a Sunday getting ready for the week. So if you want to sign up for that, just go to grahamallcott.com. And you'll see the little box on the homepage. And in fact, at the bottom of every other page as well. So just fill in your box there. If you don't see any email back, go to spam, it's probably there. It happens and sign up for that. It's building really nicely actually. And I'm loving the sort of discipline of putting something constructive and positive out there at least once a week. So it's nice to just have a rhythm around that sort of creativity for me. And the discipline of that is good. And also just the interaction of it's been really good. So just getting emails back from people saying, Hey, we love this bit. What about that disagree with that just kind of little things like that has been really interesting for me, just to sort of get out of my little solitude bubble and connect often with a lot of people I haven't connected with for a long time as well. So that's been really good. So let's get straight into the episodes. So I'm in London with Alex Pang. We're going to talk about the four day week, Alex's book Shorter. Just come out. So let's get into it. Here we are talking Western plays and what Alex is gonna do in London. So I'm here with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. How you doing?
Alex Pang 3:51
I'm great. That's good. Good to be with you. So you've come from Silicon Valley last week, last week, so I've been over here doing press for the for the new book. And we'll also sneak in a couple shows. Oh, yeah, well, while we're in London, we're gonna go see Phantom. I've never seen it. And this is now I think the only city in the world where one could see three consecutive three different Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals on three different nights. You know, why not? You know, when in Rome
Graham Allcott 4:25
I think that's always the case of London.
Alex Pang 4:27
Yeah. And then my, a friend of my wife's actually, has a play at the Globe on Wednesday, so we're going to go see that, and I know nothing about it, but I will enjoy it. And then we're going to go up to Oxford for a couple days and then back home to do us promotion for the American edition of Shorter nice. So yeah, trying to keep busy.
Graham Allcott 4:52
And obviously, this is a podcast which touches a lot on work life balance sounds like you have things in pretty good shape in that regard.
Alex Pang 5:02
I feel like it I mean, you know, this is a this is a busier week than normal. But I find I'm one of the, one of the real revelations for me of overriding the last couple books. And this is my third trade press book that's coming out is that when I first started writing this way, after having a earlier career as an academic, I didn't really think of the book promotion as kind of an extension of the work of being an author. It was just this kind of onerous thing that you had to do you know, for the man. Yeah. But it actually turns out that, especially if you get people who you know, have read the book, work in a similar area, and you know, you can actually have conversations that don't just require you to like, rehash the book, but actually get you thinking about new subjects. How would you know how what you've written maybe applies in areas you haven't really thought about. And in fact, Shorter itself grew out of conversations that I had while promoting Rest. And so I think that, that as a result, you know, for me, it is valuable to treat these things as kind of a serious intellectual enterprise. And that means that while I'm doing this, it's also important to kind of build in some downtime. Yeah, you know, because you need time for ideas to settle, to process things to reflect, kind of, if you're, if you're doing a kind of work where you're just doing the same thing over and over again, and you don't really have to kind of learn from your experience. Maybe you don't need that sort of opportunity for reflection. But when you are When you're doing stuff where you actually can learn some new things about what you're doing, yeah, you don't want to lose those moments and those opportunities. And if there's one really significant thing I've learned from writing from writing rest, it was that you really got to be conscious about building in those times, especially in today's working world. And so, you know, for me, here, what that means is having a tonne of stuff during the day, but also making sure that I've got, you know, time in the evenings to do stuff, like go on long walks, yeah. So, you know, sort of sit someplace, write about the day, think stuff through, and, you know, make sure that that stuff is is, you know, captured and it has time to kind of settle into a form that I can build on, for sure.
Graham Allcott 7:54
And it's like, I mean, you've talked about this in both the books we just talked about their rest and both and both in rescue shorter, but this idea that if you're working with ideas and problem solving and creativity, that actually the work continues even when you stop working, right? So that downtime is actually often where people get their best ideas from or where you suddenly have this eureka moment or something pops in your head because the brain just, you know, keeps on working away at those ideas or those problems or whatever, right? As you spell it, right. So like that feels to me like a really important thing. So we talked about rest there, which essentially is a book about how if you work less than you get more done. And then shorter, you're focusing much more on individual case studies of companies and sort of different ways that people have taken that idea of work less and then get more done and created for the founders and for the people in that business. Better work life balance, more sustainable cultures and everything else.
So, I mean, this is obvious to me because my company has been doing a four day week for a long time. But should we just start at the beginning? So it feels to me like a very strange, counterintuitive idea, certainly is when I try and explain it to other people that you can get more done in four days than you would in five, and so on and so forth. So, should we just start with what you see is the main benefits of a four day working week or a shorter working week?
Alex Pang 9:26
Sure. So I have looked at companies around the world here in the UK, Scandinavia, the US, Australia, New Zealand. Interestingly, Japan and Korea have a lot of them and these are, you know, two countries whose languages have their own words for working yourself to death, right. So it is, what I'm seeing is that it's a global movement. It's also one that it ranges across Creative Industries, professional service firms, financial advisors, but also nursing homes. factories, restaurants, which, you know, talk about talking about an industry where overwork is the norm.
Graham Allcott 10:07
My girlfriend's a chef, by the way, and I was talking to her about when we'd set this up. I said, Hey, you we have this podcast four days a week, and her instant reaction was this would never work in my industry. And I opened the book to read it. And the first case study is a restaurant. That's right. So it's like, yeah, it is one of those things that, again, you start to think about this could be possible in certain industries, but not others. What you're finding is very difficult.
Alex Pang 10:32
It is, you know, it is it requires work to figure out how to make it work in every industry. And the solutions are, of course different depending upon the kind of work you do and the expectations of your clients and the particular you know, the particular economics of your industry. But the, however, fundamentally, I think there are a couple places that these companies start from .You know, first off, they are all run by, by founders or CEOs who've had their own experiences with overwork, you know, with burnout or a health crisis, that signals that they need to make a change, or, you know, two years from now, they're not going to be, they're not going to be in this job. And if you're, you know, if you're the CEO of a startup, or you're the chef, owner of a restaurant, you need, you need to fix this if the company is going to survive. Yeah, stay open. For all of them. Also, recruitment and retention is also a big thing. Right? You know, sort of, there's a war for talent in the software industry. in restaurants, there is huge turnover and you know, challenges keeping talented people in the industry in the face of incredibly long hours in a high pressure environment. And so that's another thing that's that companies are trying to solve for. And then, you know, things like, better work life balance opportunities for professional development or creative renewal. Being able to do a job well is important, but there's no industry in which having new ideas is an insignificant thing. Right. I think that we, we often don't think of stuff, you know, places like nursing homes, let's say, as kind of, they're not creative industries, would have been the, you know, the same way that you know, a design firm is, but that work does require an ability to solve problems every single day. Yeah, you know, and so even if you are at work, you know, if you're a if you're a nurse's aide, you need to be able to access some of the opportunities for rest and renewal that a composer or a chef needs And then. Yeah, so, you know, that's, that's kind of why companies do it. And then what I'm seeing in at least the office context, is everyone doing a few basic things, right? All you know, they all shorten meetings, dramatically. meetings, you know, meetings default to an hour long because sometime in the 1980s, an anonymous programmer in Redmond, Washington, decided that in calendar, calendaring programmes, yeah, the default was an hour. Yeah, nobody hit and, you know, the rest of the world just seemed to accept that this was how long meetings should be.
Graham Allcott 13:43
I went with loads of people by the way who who don't know that you can, you can actually just type over that and just say it's gonna be 36 minutes they think that they have to work in a 15 minute or 30 minute or Yeah, hour long. Yeah, like chunk of time. Well, it
Alex Pang 13:55
turns out that if you've got say a calendaring programme and another programme for reserving offices, that often, it's difficult to change the defaults in one and have them carry over into the other. So they were there, it turns out there, there are these, like weird technical things that that can get in the way of, of changing meeting lengths, and kind of making it stick across an organisation. But, you know, fundamentally, I think that, you know, most of these places, shorten, you know, they will get rid of, the weekly update meeting or, you know, other standing meetings or make them dramatically shorter. They will impose meeting discipline, thinking more about who needs to be in the room. Now, circulating agendas beforehand, having particular thing you know, action items for that time, and being really kind of ruthless about actually creating value in that time. That's an early win because nobody really loves meetings. Everybody knows that you can do them better. And so, actually, you know, so solving this problem that is almost universal is is a way of building a degree of confidence that, yes, you can actually make substantive changes and the way, you know, in the way people work. It obviously clears up more time and in everyone's schedule, and it raises the question, if you are able to change this basic thing that people dealt with for years, yeah. What else can you change? Yeah, yeah, opens up a space for rethinking other parts of the day.
Graham Allcott 15:41
And it's almost like, if I'm gonna, I'm gonna swear because I get this podcast, so warning, but it's a bit of a head. Fuck, right. It's a bit of a mindfuck in the sense that people are so used to this five day, nine to five rhythm that like three Throwing people off that rhythm. I think we're just creatures of habit. I mean, it's really difficult. So yeah, it opens up that innovation around around doing other things, too.
Alex Pang 16:08
Yeah. So you know, that's a, that's an important early thing. And then, you know, the couple other things that everyone does is you look for ways to reduce technology driven distractions or other kinds of distractions. So, you know, that means things like having particular times of day when you check your email and having permission, importantly, to ignore it, the rest of the day, yeah, I'm getting slack under control. If you're an office where people generally have 12 tabs open. And then the other big thing is going to redesigning the daily schedule so that there are particular blocks of time off in the morning, where people have permission to be a little anti social, you know, to work on their hardest. They're hard problems without any, any interruptions because, and this works because very often, you know, a couple of hours of focus, concentrated work, you can get more done than in a distracted eight hour day. Absolutely, yeah.
Graham Allcott 17:15
And in my book, I call that practice attention. And then Cal Newport call it deep work, which is just way better.
Alex Pang 17:21
You know, but, but implementing that for everybody. Yeah. As opposed to making it something that you've got to kind of carve out of your day is, I think, a really valuable thing and making it a social norm. Making it something that everybody can do is also a really, really useful discipline, because, among other things, it just reduces the worry that you might have that you're seen as a you know, not a good team player. It also makes clearer to you know, kind of turns attention into a social resource. And in fact, you know, there's this important kind of social dimension to attention or focus. Yeah. Your ability to concentrate depends on my willingness to not interrupt you, you know, to respect the fact that you've got stuff you need to get done just as I do. And that if we all cooperate on that, then we can get out of here at the end of the day, Thursday. Yeah, for the week. Yeah. So you know, just those three things, dealing with meetings, dealing with tech distractions, redesigning the day is enough, in most places to allow, it's the it goes a long way to letting you do five days work in for now. And then you get into various particular things that companies do depending upon what industry they're in, and what opportunities there are for automating some kinds of routine work and augmenting your ability to do higher value added work. And sometimes simply eliminating some jobs that are kind of legacy and traditional, but which are no longer really valuable either to you or to your clients.
Graham Allcott 19:14
Yeah, I guess like the universal truths. People always think that, you know, I'm overworked, I've got loads to do, I need the number of hours I've got in the day. That's like a really universal reaction system. But also, what's I think, pretty universally true is that if people are really honest with themselves, there are always a few hours in the week, you know, we all do it, there's hours where we're not using those hours as optimally as we could do. And one of my experiences with, you know, being around the idea of the 40 hour week or five hour working days, and some of those experiments and stuff is that, you know, actually, if you know you've only got five hours, you treat that five hours so preciously, compared to seven or eight hours, right? Because it's like, this is such a precious resource. People are much more heads down and focus because they know they're leaving in the middle of the afternoon going to have a have a nice time later on. Right? So like, it kind of shifts that dynamic. And I think for me, you know, everybody really craves when I go and do workshops and talk to people. Everyone's really craving more thinking space and, and sort of time to actually get the, you know, the real big priority work done and not be in that reactive mode. Right. So like a, so presumably, you're seeing that this is something that actually creates a different culture in organisations as well as just being a short number of hours.
Alex Pang 20:33
Absolutely. You know, I've had leaders say, you know, and, you know, these are people who did their share of, you know, 12 hour days or, you know, sleeping under their desks, right before a big projects, we know that, you know, anybody can sit in a chair for 12 hours, right? Anybody can get a task done with enough time. But what really impresses me now is the person who can plan out the work and get it done in six hours rather than 12. And I think that you that by one of the things that the shorter day does is get organisations and teams to look at their processes to think about where the inefficiencies are, you know, what stuff can be automated. and that in turn changes the way that they think about value time. Right? If you if they set an organisational goal of being able to do all the work in six hours rather than 10 or four days, rather than, you know, five or six, then time becomes a more valuable resource. And you think about, you know, you take more seriously the challenge of how you can be more effective and more efficient, rather than assuming that the process is what it is and people will just stay late and They'll kind of make up for inefficiencies in the system or problems with the schedule and so on. It tends to get people to think more about systemic and organisational solutions to those problems, because they value their time because they value their time. Yeah, full stop. Yeah,
Graham Allcott 22:19
I want to come back to that idea. And the flip side of that, which is organisations that charge their services out by the hour. So let's park that for a second. But just let's finish off on the the benefits part of it. One of the things that I really liked was I can't remember who it was in the book, but someone in the book said there's fewer, but I never had the space before fewer spin up and spin down times. This idea that you know, you you travel to work you get there you have coffee, you socialise a little bit, you know, you check in you boot, the laptop, all that sort of stuff has to happen, right? So just having fewer of those times in the week, just means that on absorb percentage basis, just, you know, by the by just the way that works you get more of your time is going to be in a more productive mode, right. So like that kind of feels like a good, almost like a sort of offshoot benefit or a sort of additional benefit.
Alex Pang 23:12
Yeah, you know, and I think you, you know, you you can you can see this most dramatically in like factory work, right? It takes a certain amount of time to warm up machines and they need time to cool down to the end of the day. But they're, you know, there was a similar kind of thing with with people as well. And it is easy to discount the amount of time that we spend, commuting, doing all the stuff that we need to do to kind of set up setup for the day. But that is a non trivial amount of time each day. And over the course of a year finish does add up to something compound
Graham Allcott 23:50
That by 200 employees.
Alex Pang 23:53
Yeah, all of a sudden you're talking about some real time. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the one of the benefits is that The times that you know the time savings, shorter commuting times, no less energy and money spent no just getting to and from work. There is plenty of people who are parents of young children talk about there being substantial money savings when you're when you've got a kid in childcare for days rather than five. And then places that survey this, you know, do a using Office vibe or net promoter score or other kinds of measures, find that people report being happier both at work and out of work in and at home. They talk about having better work life balance, and these things are pretty these these are, these are things that you would expect when you go to four days. Yeah, but people also are healthier because you've got more time to cook decent food, to exercise. And interestingly to get back to the question time pressure. There was a place of medical documentation company called synergy vision in London that did surveys of people right before starting a four day week and six months after. And one of the numbers that went up was the number of people who said that they felt they had enough time in the day to get their work. That went from about 50%, almost 80%. Wow. Even when going from five days, you know, by eliminating all of those inefficiencies, cutting the meetings and all that other stuff created, even though Absolutely. Now everyone knew there were fewer hours in the week would have to work. The subjective sense was that they now had more time to actually get the work done. Yeah. Which is, I mean, it's both pretty remarkable. But I think a lot of us have had experiences working in offices where if you kind of reflect for 10 years seconds on your own experience. You think? Yeah, I can see how that would be. You know how that would be true?
Graham Allcott 26:05
Yeah, I mean, the other the other benefit I really liked, you took about this company called Taipei media. Mm hmm. And, you know, and I found this with Think Productive with my company as well that what happens is you've got, as a small company, the pressure of trying to compete with, you know, much bigger organisations on wages, you just can't do it, right. So if you're in a place where people are looking for something different, and you're able to offer that, then you can actually be, you know, hyper competitive in terms of culture and satisfaction and everything else, and people are willing to, you know, to take that little pay cut to come to a position that that will, you know, really serve their interests. And I love that person from type emedia who said, their ideal hire is someone who has an expense account, but they're treated like shit. Yeah. And so it's like, you know, like those people are willing to move from those kind of organisations in order to kind of have that kind of better work life balance, and better lifestyle.
Alex Pang 27:01
No Ross Ross is a who's who's the founder of typing media was a very, was very colourful on all. But, you know, it is the case that you know, for small companies hiring and retention is an is like an existential thing, right? You can't lose a key developer at a bad moment. And you you know, and and one, one bad hire in a company of 10 people can be really toxic. And what these what all these companies report is that when you can offer a four day week, you're not offering such gigantic salaries, but you but it attracts the attention often of people who are a little more senior, you know, people who have no sort of dumb their share of late nights. Maybe they've got young kids. They're far enough in their profession to think that you have a lot Ours were cool when I was younger, but it's kind of stupid to keep working this way. And they can see how you could make work better. And they value their time a lot more. And so for them the proposition of, you know, of not just having more time for their families and themselves, but having the interesting challenge of figuring out how I can redesign my work now, is something that can be really, really appealing. And I think especially for that, I hear this a little bit more with companies that are let's say, outside London, or you know, not in Sydney or Melbourne, but in you know, Hobart Tasmania right now that they're there, they are able, they're able to attract people who otherwise might not be that interested in relocating or in some cases, you've got kind of talent that has already started, you know, moving moving in this direction Anyway, I'm looking for better work life balance, but they've got a two hour commute now. And if they can cut that down to 10 minutes and work four days a week, then that, you know, that's fantast
Graham Allcott 29:16
I mean, that's dramatic, isn't it? If you think, you know, two hours commute each way, you know, take a day off, that is what you'd like. It's that's a dramatic change in life.
Alex Pang 29:25
And, you know, the, we often we often commute at the times of day when our minds are at their best. And, you know, we're lots of us who in, you know, like, between eight and 12 are at our cognitive peaks. And, you know, we're spending a good chunk of that, that cognitive energy dealing with traffic. Yeah. Which, you know,
Graham Allcott 29:52
Reading really bad newspapers if you live in London. Yeah,
Alex Pang 29:54
you know, and it's a it's a, it's a real loss. Yeah. And so being able to to, you know, to take that really high quality time, and to actually devote it to work is, I think, a double whammy.
Graham Allcott 30:09
Yeah. So let's talk about some of the resistance to this whole idea then. So I'd love to hear what you know about the Wellcome Trust. They're probably the biggest most high profile organisation in the UK that had flirted with this idea and then decided against it, right. But maybe, I mean, maybe this is maybe this is a time to contrast or maybe there's a bigger point to be made first. But it feels to me like there's often a lot of scepticism and you talk in the book about a couple of examples where the boss has said to, you know, the owner of the company or whatever has said to the team, hey, we're going to move this for a week and he is expecting of fanfare of joy and celebration and champagne, and actually, everyone's going, Wow, no way we could do this. And there's this kind of scepticism and cynicism that builds very quickly, so So, let's start with why do you think that's the case? Why do you think people are so reluctant to? To engage in that sort of head? Fuck change thing?
Alex Pang 31:09
I think that there's, you know, partly because people are exposed to enough change initiatives that don't go anywhere. Partly people who want to do a good job, look at a dramatic change like that. You know, in the end, the first question is, how am I going to get all my work done? Yeah, time, right. I don't feel like I have enough time in five days to do this. And now, you know, now we're going to say for the other question, you know, the other big question is what happens to salary? Yeah, right. Does this mean you're going to cut my salary 20% and expect me to do the same work? Now the answer to that last one is no. stout salaries in these companies stay the same. And there's go and so you know, Since effectively people kind of get a raise, yeah. And you also, you know, indirectly through lower commuting costs, childcare. That's a bit more of a bump. But I think that the, you know, that the best version of the scepticism is people who want to do a good job and want the time to do a good job. Want to make sure that this isn't going to make that difficult? So that's, I think, the first place that it comes from. And then, you know, they're just the ordinary logistical questions of how you know how in the world you make this work, especially in an era where our solution to the problem of having too much to do is to work longer and proposing that you go in a different direction requires some explanation. Yeah, so I that's what you know, that's that's where that's where the internal the internal resistance comes from. Yeah, resistance externally. has different sources. But in important ways, interestingly, is less of an obstacle than most places expect. And I think that's a that was one of the most surprising things I found when researching the book. Yeah. So because the question of how our clients going to react is always a big thing. And the worry, of course, is that clients are going to hate this, you know, they're gonna, they're going to desert you, you're going to go out of business. And I have heard one story of one prospective client who said, Now I need your people to sleep with their phones under their pillow. I haven't heard any stories of clients of existing clients, and in their leaving Yeah, and in fact, they've been quite supportive.
Graham Allcott 34:00
But what happens if, you know in agencies where you're charging people out? by the day, right, and you've got a certain level of retainer. So what happens there? Because then you're presumably if you're the founder of that agency going to your clients, and you're saying, Hey, you know, we're taking this much as a retainer every month. Well, that used to get you five days now it gets you four. But trust us, it'll be more productive, but that's quite a difficult sell, right?
Alex Pang 34:25
Yeah. So, if you are, if your current model is essentially to charge by the hour day, you got to switch to a project based billing model, okay? Instead, right? So the like accounting firms and financial service advisories that have done this have made that move first. I do know of a couple small law firms that have done it explicitly as part of an effort to just do less work. And so they did not play around with their billing. They just reduced the number of clients that they were that they took on.
Graham Allcott 35:03
So to do this work as in, let's make this more sustainable, and we'll make a bit less profit. But that's fine, exactly in this for the long haul,
Alex Pang 35:11
right? But I don't have notable examples of places where they said, effectively, our hourly rates are going to go up by 25%. But you're going to get the same quality of work out of us. I think, psychologically, it's easier for clients to get their heads around the idea that the project delivery dates are going to stay the same. You're paying the same amount of money for the same work. And it's just, you know, internal housekeeping and whatever the company needs to do in order to get this stuff done is up to them. When you're paying people by the hour. I think there is the sense that you have you have more command over their time. And so you are challenged, I think to to figure out How you can make this work if you stick to an hourly billing model?
Graham Allcott 36:06
And was just the customers or is it you know, because there's like these agencies that end up putting cameras in their office or that client, you know, promising clients can check in on where people are at the time because you're paying their way there's not this kind of feels like this is the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to trust and autonomy to let's say, the sort of Jeff Bezos Amazon warehouse, you know, kind of taylorism thing of everything's micromanaging time is, you know, you have KPIs around how many books you can put on the, you know, in boxes per three seconds and all that sort of thing, right? Like, it's a very different. They're almost like two competing philosophies that are probably, you know, probably going to shape the next 2030 years.
Alex Pang 36:47
Now, I think that there are so there are things that companies will do in order to help reassure clients that there'll be accessible when need be You know, so And for example, there's one, no one firm has a, has now started having project email addresses. And so a client can write to that, you know, write to that address, and guarantees that, you know, there's always someone who's watching that inbox. And so even on, you know, Fridays, where if there's an emergency on weekends, there'll be someone who will respond. And then another important thing that, that companies were able to do this will do is automate some of the processes so that clients have easier access to kinds of reports that used to be generated by humans, right. So I'm thinking in particular of a cloud based accounting firm called Darnell Clark up in Northridge. And you know, traditional accounting is done, you know, was even today in some places you've still got like the ledger books and people writing stuff down. And all that. And doing like quarterly reports, generating those things is a whole bunch of work that someone's got to go. Yeah, with cloud based accounting, you know, you get your clients to use their various tools that they use for, you know, for submitting receipts and all that stuff. A lot of that work is automated, which also means that stuff like quarterly reports can can be set up to be generated automatically. Yeah, you know, for if a client has a question about some set of expenses, or, you know, can I do this thing? Can we invest in this? You can answer that much more quickly. What that also means for foreign Oh, Clark, is that they've been able to move from just doing like accounting and taxes to doing more financial advisory stuff, right, which is, of course, you know, which of course you can charge more for, but which also requires a higher level of understanding of your clients and a greater degree of trust on their part that you know, you will understand them? And do you have advice worth taking? And then I think that there is and then the other places will have individuals who are tasked with watching the company, the company in box office on Fridays or on weekends, just in case. But I think what a lot of them find is that there are fewer emergencies than you expect. Right? I think the added, you know, the attitude that you always need to be responsive to clients comes from a good place. Yeah. But it can contribute to the sense that because there might be something happening you always have to you know, you've always got a got a got a minute, watch the inbox, and that turns out not so much to really be the case in a lot of businesses. Certainly there are ones, you know, where there are genuine, you know, genuine surprises. But lots of places find that that's more manageable than they expect. And I think in some cases, interestingly, clients don't mind having a little extra time when they don't have to respond to, you know, clients themselves or you know, our our times. Yes, yeah. Yeah. And so in a sense, there's a little bit of a gift in not putting them in a position where they feel like they have to check in on you on Fridays or email in the evenings.
Graham Allcott 40:41
Yeah, same reason. I love a bank holiday. I love working a bank holiday Monday, and then I'll take the Thursday or the Friday off. Because it's like, if you Zig when everyone else sags, right. You just know that you don't have 100 people. So coming back to you. Yeah. So we've got a few minutes left. And I think what would be nice to talk about is there must be loads of people who are sat there, listen to this guy. And this sounds like it could be the future. This sounds great. But I'm stuck in the middle of a big organisation that is just never going to change or is going to be behind the curve or whatever. So what thoughts do you have around that? So people who they're working five days a week, but are there lessons that they can take from a 40 week are different kinds of work patterns, even within a five day structure?
Alex Pang 41:23
Well, I think you know, first off that making this kind of change work in big organisations definitely is harder. The more number of moving parts you have, the more the larger the number of people who have to say yes, let's try this or have gets in the way of you know, of those changes. But I think that even if you're in a bigger organisation, that first off, there is the chance in smaller units to experiment with this on your own. Right. sk tell you know, sk is The Korean tribal that does telecom stuff and their cell phone company and a bunch of other things, they've got a couple smaller units right now that are trialling four day weeks, or like nine days in two weeks, kinds of things, with the idea that if that what they learn in these smaller units can eventually be rolled out elsewhere. And in fact, Ford Motor Company, famously moved the assembly line to a five day week in 1926. They'd spent three years getting to five days and all the rest of the company. So, you know, they knew an awful lot about how to make this work, when they finally put it on, put it into the biggest most important part of the company. So I think that you know, that structuring these more local experiments is one possibility, if you can, you know, if either you're a manager who can do this with your own reports, or if you have a manager who you can convince if you're not In either of those positions, I think there's still things you can learn from these small companies about how to more effectively use your time about the kind of social nature of time and attention that can help you and your colleagues be more effective. And then at least, you know, if you can't sneak out the door on Thursday, um, you know, free up time for more professional development. So, for example, and, you know, there are companies who operate on a model where they work for days, and then the fifth day, the office is open, so people can come in and kind of tinker around with programming languages or their own projects.
Graham Allcott 43:44
So it was like free Fridays. Exactly. It's like, okay, so it's still open, come in and do professional development.
Alex Pang 43:49
Right. You know, this is popular, especially with like software companies, because, for one thing, Google had 20% time, which was always something you had to negotiate it as an individual, it was never a company wide thing. It was always seen as something incredibly valuable, if you could negotiate it. So, you know, if you're in, if you're in a profession that is changing, and it's worth learning new things, you might be able to use the time that way. And then I think at the very, you know, at the very worst, there is satisfaction and being able to do things like you know, your work more effectively and run meetings more efficiently. That's good for building up local social capital, even if it doesn't immediately translate into tight into a shorter work week for everybody. But, you know, even since I turned in the manuscript a few months ago, I wrote about 100 hundred odd companies in shorter. I found another 50 that have started trials in the last several months, you know, including the Japanese Office of Michael resolve, which is, you know, more than 2000 people right there. And so I think that the places the size of welcome, are playing around with this.
Graham Allcott 45:13
What do you know about what happened?
Alex Pang 45:16
Yeah, I know, whatever. I know, I know what everybody else who read the press about it. Right, which is that the sense was that it wasn't clear how you can make it work across the entire entire unit of, you know, several hundred people. And I think that there was also some that they couldn't sell it to the board. Right. And for those two reasons, they decided to sort of park the idea. I think if you went back now, with more companies that have done it, you could make a stronger argument. Yeah. And, you know, fundamentally, I think for sceptical boards, you know, the, the the argument is, the companies who've done this are more productive, they're more profitable. They've got better work life balance, and people have more time for talent development, you know, which one of these don't be what yeah,
Graham Allcott 46:08
I mean, it's like, if you could take a pill that gave you all those things, you'd, you'd take it whatever the consequence is, you know, and I don't know, but you got, like, you know, Microsoft in Japan, right? I mean, Microsoft, about the most corporate brands that are brand could be Japan, about the most obsessed with, you know, overwork, because, yeah, that could be and if, you know, they're embracing that, and experimented with that, then that tells you something, right?
Alex Pang 46:33
And they saw a 40% increase in productivity by, you know, essentially sales dollars per like hour of our work, but they saved a whole bunch of money on electricity costs. Yeah. And they printed a lot less because, you know, not just because they were working for days. And so you took like, all those numbers and you multiply by point eight, right? It's also the The other stuff that they did in order to assure that people were able to get their work done meant not a 20% savings in, you know, paper in, you know, in printing, but like, a 40% savings. Yeah. So and you know, the story, and I see over and over again, these kinds of stories of savings, or productivity gains in excess of the 20% that you need in order to make this work. You know, once you once once people start looking for ways to do their jobs better, so that they can leave earlier. They tend to keep doing it.
Graham Allcott 47:37
Yeah. Cuz then you're in that mindset of sort of always looking for those improvement opportunities. Exactly.
Alex Pang 47:42
Good things happen. Yeah, yeah. One of the one of the people I interviewed said that my employees now act like they own the company. And all I did was give them a day. You know, you you can't pay people enough to live that way. Yeah, but You can, but you can. But you can incentivize that by giving them a day off.
Graham Allcott 48:04
Yeah. And we have a very similar mindset, we think productive where the 40 a week is part of that. But there's just a more general sense of, you know, let's give people real ownership over the decisions. And let's be transparent with what we're trying to do. And, you know, all of that leads, I think, to a place where people feel like, yeah, they're thinking on on our behalf as a company, rather than just like their behalf as an employee. You
Alex Pang 48:28
know, I think, you know, you companies definitely need to have a tolerance for risk and a willingness to let people experiment and iterate. Yeah. But if, if you can do that, then you do end up giving people a lot more ownership over their work, or, you know, on the Marxist, the Marxist parlance, control over their own means of production. And I
Graham Allcott 48:55
love how you start the book, by the way, with Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Yeah, on the same page. Yeah. There's going too fast.
Alex Pang 49:00
So that's the, the fact that the fact that both of them both of this as worthwhile Yeah. Now should should tell you, especially, I think after the after the most recent election, where, you know, the four day week was part of the Labour platform, and was slammed, as you know, another example of john MacDonald's secret plan to destroy the economy. This really shouldn't be seen as a right wing or a left wing idea, but as a good piece of business strategy. It's simply a good business like
Graham Allcott 49:32
that. Absolutely. And so just before we finish, I just want to talk about you and your relationship with all this. So with me, productivity almost becomes like a rod of my own back, right? So every email I send, everyone's looking for how productive my email is, like, if I'm three minutes late somewhere, that's a problem and you know, like productivity and productivity ninja becomes a rough man back. So if you find yourself sort of Trying to do a sneaky email on the Friday for example, like did people call you out on that? Like is is is working for the week now something that you stick to religiously? Are there times where that doesn't quite work? How does that work with like your own personal
Alex Pang 50:14
right? Um, I, I actually still do the stuff that I talked about in my last book rest. So, you know, in there I talked about the incredible power of working a concentrated four or five hour day. And I tend to do for days, like six, five or six days a week, partly because I have a lot of clients who are either in Asia or near
Graham Allcott 50:36
?our hours, five to six days a week.?
Alex Pang 50:38
?eah. Um, but you know, with timezone shifts and stuff, there's a certain amount of having to break up the day or, you know, do do some stuff Sunday evening. Yeah, kind of thing. But, um, you know, I find even with between writing and talking to people in consulting and stuff that for me That is that a schedule that is both effective and restorative, you know, and gives me time to both get done obvious work, but also, you know, enough time to think about non obvious there's that later become, you know, things I can talk to other people about.
Graham Allcott 51:18
And here's one of my weaknesses is that I have sort of, you know, very set sheds around how I manage my attention along similar lines, and then it goes out the window when I travel, as you're travelling now, right? So how do you try and keep those things in play when you're sort of, you know, at the behest of someone else's schedule, and different country and all that
Alex Pang 51:39
the first thing I do is when I'm travelling, you know, doing workshops, talks, etc. I do as much of the prep beforehand as I absolutely possibly can. Now you I used to be one of those people who would write the talk on the plane. Yeah, you know what I thought, you know, what, have you got 10 hours, that's plenty of time to knock and I've definitely done that. You If you can write a talk on the player, I find though, that it is much better to, you know, just just as you should pack carefully so that you've got everything you need, but not too much stuff. So too I find that work that thinking, doing more planning on talks and workshops and so on, so that there's less improvisation of that around, that kind of stuff, leaves more space for the kind of valuable reflection of what's happened, you know, what's happened on site? What's happening in the moment. And so essentially, over plan so that you can generate more ease while you're on the road. Yeah.
Graham Allcott 52:48
I mean, that's just a brilliant productivity lesson in general over plans so you can generate these, yes, wherever it is, you know, we're still in feels like a really good place to finish the books called shorts, if you want to just tell People where they can find you where they can connect with you know that kind of
Alex Pang 53:04
so on Twitter and Instagram and pretty much everything else I'm asked paying as a PA mg. Twitter is more work stuff, Instagram is more pictures of my dogs, bro. You know, coffee cups, but you know both have they're both have their place. And then my company is called strategy and rest. And the URL for that is strategy dot rest. Rest is now a top level domain, which I think says something maybe maybe says something positive about growth, you know about the future of work. Yeah. So
Graham Allcott 53:40
interesting. Well, it's been great having you here. Enjoy London, as always, thanks for being on beyond busy.
Alex Pang 53:46
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Graham Allcott 53:56
So thanks again to Alex for being on the show. And also thanks To Leo and Matt from penguin for helping me to sort that one out. And I want to say two more things before we go, obviously, thanks to mark Stedman, my producer on the show as well. And the funny thing I just want to say really quickly is just in relation to Black Lives Matter, and George Floyd and everything that's been happening over the last week or so. Obviously, it's been a really, you know, just a really traumatic time and not the first time, right. So this is just one of those things that it's shocking. And it's also just not surprising. We had quite a few conversations internally within the team about different things that we could do challenging or in biases, lots of stuff, which I think is really positive. And it's sort of echoed what I put on Instagram last Tuesday, which was like this blackout Tuesday thing, and I put the tile up my black tile, and then I just felt really uneasy about it and I wrote underneath our job is not let's remember that our job is not to put up a ttyl for today, but it's to spend a lifetime questioning or in biases, challenging prejudice and seeking quality for every single human being. And I feel like I have a good awareness of race and I, you know, I have a mixed race son, like, I care quite deeply about the kind of worlds that he is going to inhabit and how much prejudice he might face. And obviously saw some of that when I was with his mum. But, you know, when I looked through the back catalogue of beyond busy episodes, I was really surprised at how few black faces there were. And I think I'm pretty, you know, conscious and aware and very forward thinking around diversity. I think if you look at, you know, 1012 episodes have been busy. There's probably five or six men and five or six You know, I'm pretty good on gender diversity, I thought I was pretty good too, on racial diversity. And actually, when I looked at it, Blimey, it was very white. So I just want to say at the end here, this is just a little plea, just to get a recognition that I haven't done enough on that. And just a plea that if you know of interesting voices that you think I should elevate on this platform, and particularly black voices, then please let me know, because I really want to do more, and I want to do better and get some of those things out there. So yeah, I'm going to talk to a couple of people over the next week or so about this as well. But just if you have anyone in mind, who you think has really interesting thoughts to share around all our usual core themes, you know, success and productivity and work life balance and all that stuff. Then please do let me know. So I'm really just looking to Do as much as I can to use this platform and give this platform over to as many black and Asian and other minority ethnic voices as I possibly can. So yeah, you can email me Graham at think productive co.uk love to take your recommendations that way. And likewise, if you just go to Graham Allcott, calm, there's a contact form on there, you can just drop me a line that way if that is easier. But yeah, I want to do more. And I feel like, you know, let's all figure out actions that we can take. And let's all spend some time, you know, reading and thinking and challenging some of these more systemic biases. Like it's not enough to just say, I'm going to quote out racism, if I see it. It's you know, racism is part of it. But actually, the whole infrastructure is biassed, and the whole infrastructure needs to change and Yeah, that takes time. And it the first step of that is is the awareness. So, you know, there's loads of reading lists in there. And I'm not gonna recommend particular books, but there's loads of reading lists, you know, doing the rounds about particular books that you can read on the subject. There's some great stuff on Netflix, there's there's various other things to take into account here, but like, let's do the work, let's let's do some of that work and have some more of those conversations as uneasy and as as uncomfortable as they can sometimes be.
And, you know, it's like, I, I often, you know, I often talk about how I'm a feminist. And sometimes people find that odd. Why is a man a feminist? It's like, well, if anything, it should be more on men to solve issues of gender bias because we're the privileged ones, right? Like we've got more of that, you know, perspective of privilege to be able to break it down. And so the same is true When it comes to race, and I've always thought about myself as being an anti racist, but I do think that needs to be a proactive stance, and not just a badger, a label that we call ourselves. So anyway, that's, that's what I'm going to say on that there's, there's a lot more been said. And I think the the key thing over the next few weeks and months is to figure out what we can do. And one of things I can do is use this platform to elevate more black voices. So I'm gonna do that my phone's going, which means I need to sign off so I'll get ahead from here, but we're back in two weeks time with another episode. So until then, take care. Bye for now.
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