Four 🗞️ Slow News Day #82

Hey,

I’ve always said that my schedule works well for me. I work five days a week, but very rarely a 09:00-17:00.

10, 11, or 12:00-16:00 is more like it. So, I do ‘part-time’ hours across a five-day week.

(Side-note: not sure why, in all my self-employed freedom, I still maintain that work should be dictated by a 40-hour standard. Weird.)

I’m feeling like that’s not working so well for me, now.

It’s not dreadful, but my days seem to be getting stretched out. Work spills over into evenings. I sometimes do a bit on Saturdays. My relaxed approach is getting sloppy.

And now I’m thinking… I write about slowness, deliberateness, doing business on purpose. But I still have this idea that I should work five days a week. I'm trying to cram myself into it, but, in so doing, create some resistance that actually makes the whole setup worse for me.

So why am I carrying it on?

I’m working out how to reliably switch to a four-day week. I think I can see how it’ll work. I think I need to get a couple of projects finished before I can really implement it. I think it might be amazing.

If I can take Mondays off, then I get a three-day weekend.

If I can take Wednesdays off, then I can get a mid-week firebreak.

Either would be a dream for managing my resurgent anxiety and feeling more purposeful about work and life and all the rest of it.

The flipside is that I’ll need to be more diligent in my working hours. I’m thinking (hoping) that the promise of three non-work days will be enough for me to get my head down on the other four days.

Beyond that, though, I think the real challenge could be in letting my business brain relax. There’s also something else to do—a personal project to start, emails to send, bits and bobs to bob and bit.

On one hand, it feels like a relaxing.

On the other, it feels like a tightening.

Have you adopted a 4D week? I’d love to hear about other people’s approaches, as this is a bit of a shift for me. Your advice and reflections, as ever, are greatly appreciated.

Slow down guide

Need a little help moving slower?

Ease your way out of Friday afternoon with this newsletter, a nice cup of something, and a little background music. Steal my setup if you aren't sure where to start.

After I press send, I’m going to finish my Costa Coffee flat white. Not exactly in keeping with the caffeine standards professed by this newsletter, I know. The reality is, I’m still living at my parents’ house. They have my niece and nephew round today. It’ll be chaos, it’ll be (lovely) distraction. I can’t go into Generator to cowork, as it closes on Bank Holidays. I can’t go to a cute independent cafe, as they’re all shut. Making do, keeping it real.

The DJ (who, to be clear, is me) is spinning a nice one, this week. I don’t really know what else to say about Kai Warrior’s July 5th apart from this: I think the one thing that unites all the music I like, listen to, and recommend is that there’s something in it. Some feeling. It’s often tenderness, sometimes sorrow, sometimes tiny fragments of magic humanity that settle like snowflakes on a tongue.

This song is so tender it might not even have a solid form. There’s heart and vulnerability, there’s strength and conviction. And there’s some sweet vocals, too. She’s bottled some sort of human moment in this song and it makes parts of me ache in ways that only music can.

Take it easy,