If you’ve interacted with anyone on my team at Fitabase you know as well as I do that it’s a hard-working, passionate, talented group of people who make all of what we do possible. This small but extremely capable team of 7 consistently runs circles around other much larger companies, releasing new features, new ways to collect data, and making sure all of our research lab partners get an incredibly responsive level of support from us.
This Summer we’re testing out Summer Hours. For three months, from early June until early September, we’ll work only 4 days a week, with Fridays generally being the day off (but don’t worry, we’ll have an on-call rotation for emergencies).
Why are we trying this? Well, as I explored ways to try to recharge our collective creativity, this idea, mostly influenced by 37 Signals’ approach, kept resurfacing in my mind. By removing a day each week we’ll have no choice but to reprioritize what’s important and shed the other 1/5th of what we’d be doing. Plus, summers are great! Summers are sunshine, catching up, relaxing, and just generally slowing down a bit. It didn’t take long after unveiling this schedule before everyone had a plan on at least a few things they were going to finally get around to doing with the extra day off.
It’ll be an interesting experiment. We’re already pretty good about closing up the laptop at 5pm. Our Slack is a ghost town after hours. I’ve always maintained and tried to set the example that 40 hours is enough. This summer 32 will be enough.
Please know we’re here for you every day of the year; you just might not get a reply as quickly on Fridays. And that’s a good thing :-)
If you’re curious about the details or you’re considering implementing a 4-day Summer Hours program at your company you can find the entire internal policy I shared with the team here.