How to Design a 2-Day Workweek Without Sacrificing Business Success

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Note: I am a business coach to owners of service-based businesses. This article is specifically aimed at such business owners; however, much of the guidance here will apply to all. 

Disclaimer: I write all my own blogs in my own write-as-you-speak style. I don't use ChatGPT, Copywriters, or tweak for SEO (probably to my detriment). This blog is written for you, the business owner. What got me here can get you there, wherever your 'there' may be.

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Nothing in this blog is groundbreaking, thought-provoking or any other buzzword you can think of. It's a step-by-step, common-sense approach to dealing with work-life balance.

Before we start, you should ask yourself the question, Is a 2-day workweek right for me? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, you may want to consider X number of hours spread over 3, 4 or even 5 days if that works better around your personal ambitions and commitments.

The perfect workweek will be different for everyone. However, the principles for achieving it should, within reason, be the same.

To begin, let's take a high-level view of what it is we are trying to achieve. We want to earn a sufficient amount of money to enable us to do everything we want to do, based upon a personal investment of 2 days' work per week. Or X number of hours spread over Y number of days, in your case.

Notice how I have honed in on the amount of money we need to earn each month. This is critical because we want to earn as much, if not more than we do now, for the number of hours we wish to work.

It's important to focus on the money because we need to evaluate the tasks that we perform that have a direct correlation to revenue generation. Bear in mind, we will also need to think about the qualitative aspects of what we do, not just the cold, hard revenue-generating tasks. Ask yourself this: What do I do that enables me to send a client an invoice and get paid? Or maybe, what does your team do, if you have one, that enables this?

Before we start, make sure you have your magic number in mind. Your magic number is the figure you need to earn every month to live the life you want. If you want to know more about this, I'd recommend reading my other blog, How to Build a Business That Supports Your Lifestyle.

With our magic number calculated, he can now begin the analysis work.

Step 1: Analyse everything

This is possibly the hardest part of the process. You'd think it's easy, but it's a lot harder than it seems. You'll be shocked by the number of tasks you perform subconsciously. This task took me a lot longer than I anticipated. Firstly, I started by writing a list of 'everything I do', only to find that the list actually wasn't that long, and I started wondering what the hell I do all day?

Depending on your business, you may need to spend at least a whole month (or longer) making a conscious effort to analyse everything you do, when you do it, and why you do it.

I found it helpful to trawl through my emails for the past 3 months, which is often where many of the clues lie. Emails are typically the precursor to those time-draining tasks that we neither anticipated nor asked for. All those 'quick question' emails or otherwise totally out of scope, out of the norm emails that you spend an hour or so poring over to resolve.

Scope creep is a real killer for service-based business owners. It's where the "I've been so busy, but achieved nothing" often comes from.

Having analysed my emails for 90 days, I felt I could categorise them into the following groups. Click to expand for a more detailed analysis of each.

Questions (easy)

Thankfully and unsurprisingly, easy questions are easy to answer. While this is true, the problem was the sheer number. Once I started to look and analyse altogether, I realised that many people asked the same dozen questions, just worded in a slightly different way.

I decided the way to deal with these common questions was to write blog articles on my website to answer them. There are a few reasons I did this, rather than just create a canned email reply, although this is something that should also be considered, too.

Writing a website blog allowed me to write long-form answers covering a topic at large, enabling clients to cover everything in an easy-to-read style, while not scaring them off with the world's longest email.

Furthermore, it acts as a great marketing tool. If your clients are asking these questions, there are probably other people out there who are asking the same questions, too! Not only this, you've got an audience of existing clients on your website, reading your articles, which should work well for the search engine algorithm.

Adopting this approach not only saved me time in answering client questions, but I saw a massive spike in website views and an increase in new sales calls from people finding us on Google and not just via a referral. That's a win-win on this approach.

Questions (hard)

This group is slightly harder to define, as generally, they're curve-ball questions covering all manner of topics. You need to ask yourself the question, Do I need to respond to these emails? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. I guess it will boil down to who is asking the question, how often they ask such questions and whether they are paying you to answer it?

This is often where the scope creep kicks in. You get a question from a client for which you don't immediately know the answer, or it will take you a long time to work it out and/or make it specific to their circumstances, you spend an hour working it out, don't charge the client and possibly never get asked the question again. Happy client, you, not so much!

How you deal with this will be dependent upon your business and your clients, and in particular, how much they pay you.

"Yes, I can answer this question, but I will need to charge X"

If you have clients who pay you a ton of money and are no trouble at all, you may choose to just answer the question for free; for others, the response above might apply.

Some clients will respond, Yes, please go ahead, others will say no thanks (they probably weren't that fussed on finding out the answer) and then others will ghost you, they too don't want to pay and/or don't care that much about the answer but don't have the communication skills (or courtesy) to email you back. Either way, you're either getting paid or you're not answering the question.

At this point, we have triaged our tricky questions; we're either answering for free for our A-list clients or we're getting paid to do so. That choice is up to you; I do both, as sadly, we can't have all A-list clients, it just doesn't work that way.

So the next question is, do I answer myself, or do I pay someone else to answer the question?

We've already established that it's not a quick and easy question, so unless you're getting paid a wedge to answer it, I'd suggest you're not the one to reply.

Who we pay will depend upon the question: tricky & technical or tricky(ish) & time-consuming.

For the tricky & technical questions, I pay a specialist consultancy firm to answer my complex tax questions. For the tricky(ish) & time-consuming questions, I get a member of my team to spend an hour or so researching the answer. If you don't have any employees, consider a competent virtual assistant that you can call upon.

Out of scope

These can fall into both the easy and hard question categories, but what's most important to note here is the fact that they are out of scope. Generally speaking, what I mean by out of scope are questions relating to services that a client is not currently, or has chosen not to, pay for.

A real-life example from my own experience, a client chooses not to engage our services to process their monthly payroll and instead opts to do it themselves. Said client then runs into problems processing payroll and emails for help.

In such situations, the client really needs to pay up, unless you have a commercial rationale to let it slide.

You could opt to charge on an ad-hoc basis or offer a support retainer payable monthly. Even if their question is easy, if they're not engaged for those services, you're not getting paid for the answer.

Team Needs

If you have a team, you may find that you're getting swamped with questions of all shapes and sizes. There are two ways to tackle this: firstly, empower your team to do more without you. Whether it's a certain level of authority for decision-making or a pre-approved limit to spend on the company credit card. Leave them to it; if you've hired well, they will do the right thing.

Secondly, and this will support the advice above, write SOPs (standard operating procedures).

The problem you may have already encountered with this is the fact that it takes just 5 minutes or so to reply to a team member's question, but likely over an hour or more to write up a detailed SOP. Trust me, this is so worth your time. I'm not going to labour this point now; it's a whole topic we'll cover next.

Information Only

These are usually super-simple to deal with; either eliminate them (unsubscribe) or set up an email rule and park them in a folder for later. While these emails generally won't take up too much of your headspace, you might be surprised to see just how many of these emails you receive each month. I calculated that I received, on average, 250 such emails every single month!

These emails might seem harmless but they can work against you. You can feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of emails in your inbox, leading to indecisiveness and an eventual lack of efficiency in tackling the emails that really warrant your time.

Junk

There's very little to say here. Remove with a vengeance.

So at this point we have a list of what we 'do', plus a better understanding and categorisation of the time-hijackers that enter our inbox.

You'll notice that I've thus far mentioned nothing about personal distractions, family, friends, walking the dog, or school runs. All the things that make the working day seem that little bit longer. I've not mentioned them (until now) as these are all the personal things that we are trying to make time for. Of course, they might impact your overall work efficiency day-to-day, but we're not trying to find a way for you to work the most efficient 40-hour work week. We just need to maximise our gains for the desired number of hours; what you do with the rest of your time is up to you.

SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)

Let's go back to that list you wrote first of all. These are all the tasks that you consciously do, the things on your actual to-do list.

We need to review each task in turn and ask the following questions;

Does it need to be done?

This may seem like a silly question, if it's something you're doing regularly, surely it's something that needs to be done, right?

Perhaps it does, but ask yourself the question in the context of your magic number. Does this task help me achieve my magic number? Does posting to social media need to be done? Everyone is doing it, so I should too.

If you win new clients from social media, then yes, absolutely, this task should be done. If you're getting a steady stream of new business from elsewhere, then perhaps think twice. I see so many business owners "invest" (waste) countless hours on social media, not including the doom scrolling, with zero return. This may or may not be you, but really think about it when you look at every task on your to-do list. If it doesn't need to be done, stop doing it.

Can someone else do it?

Let's stick with the social media theme for a minute. Let's assume that you do get clients from social media, creating content is a task that still needs to be done. So the question is, do you need to be the one to do it? It can be hard to let go, but with the right people at your side and with clear and precise direction, they should be able to handle anything you throw at them. If you have a team, consider which team members have the skills to pick up some of your tasks. If not, consider hiring a virtual assistant or outsourcing to a firm that specialises in the particular task at hand.

Can it be automated?

Automation may or may not eliminate a task from your to-do list entirely, but it may speed up the process of completing the task. Technology is advancing at a phenomenal rate, and unless we really stop to think about it, we may overlook the fact that we could be harnessing technology to our advantage. Even simple automations, such as email rules to categorise, forward or delete emails can save you precious time over the long term. Consider softwares such as Zapier to automate processes or hire someone who knows how.

Eliminating and automating tasks, I hope, speaks for itself. I want to focus on the tasks that need to be done, but could be done by someone else.

The likelihood is you've got a lot of valuable intellectual property rattling around inside your head. The problem is, until we get it out and onto paper, you will be unable to offload work and/or scale your business as you become a bottleneck.

I'm not a fan of their food, but I have to admire McDonald's. Their SOPs must be laid out to such exacting standards. How else can they produce the same product(s) at over 40,000 locations worldwide?

While we're not looking for global expansion, taking the 'McDonald's approach' to your business can have its advantages. Whether staff come or go, new or experienced, they should be able to execute your tasks to the same exacting standards by simply following your detailed SOPs.

How to write SOPs

I can guarantee you're unlikely to get this right the first time. I certainly didn't when I wrote SOPs to eliminate my workload. Why? Because we're so used to doing what we do, it's impossible to try and look at it through the lens of someone who knows nothing or at best very little. You just need to get a first draft out there, see how someone gets on and perfect it as you go. It's a bit of an arduous task at first, but it's so worth it in the end.

Here's an example of where I went wrong at the first hurdle. I had written detailed instructions on how to perform a task on a particular piece of software, I'd provided super-clear instructions (in my opinion) and even had screenshots of the different pages, tabs, buttons, etc. It was a literal, read and follow guide.

Five minutes after I sent it to one of my team, I got this reply... "How do I log in?"

I had literally covered everything but the most basic of basic instructions, how to actually log in. That was something that I took for granted; I skipped straight to the work itself and hadn't given logging in a second thought. It's examples like this that might trip you up at first, but they're just minor tweaks away from completion.

When I write an SOP, I do one of two things, sometimes both. I screen record the whole process using software like Loom, or I take screenshots as I go in order to capture the process. If you're screen recording, I suggest recording yourself at the same time, at least with audio, and talk through what you're doing and why you're doing it. If you're using screenshots, ensure you write up, in your own words, detailed instructions to complement the images.

What next?

At this stage, we've analysed everything and subsequently eliminated, automated, or delegated the majority of our workload.

What we're left with is the work we have determined must be done and can only be done by ourselves. I'm really hoping that, having reached this point, the amount of work you are left with is achievable in the amount of time you want to spend in your business. If not, we have a problem.

If you've come this far and your to-do list will still take longer than you want, you might need to consider the following...

1. What would happen if you cut back? Are you already hitting your magic number? Could you take a drop in income if it meant more time back?

2. Are you charging enough? Could increasing your prices result in more revenue without more work? Maybe you need to get rid of a few sub-prime clients, increase the price on the rest with a net result of the same or more income plus fewer clients to service.

3. Are you being too precious about the work you must do? We all like to think we're the most important person in our business, generally speaking, we're not. Find or hire a superstar to take more off your shoulders.

These are just two things to consider, there are many more. The crux of the matter is, you've got the game plan, go back and reanalyse until you hit that sweet spot.

I hope you found this blog informative but it is just that, information. You now need to take action, follow the steps and start regaining hours of your life every week.

If you think you could benefit from one-to-one coaching, schedule a discovery call on the calendar below.