When I saw the book, I was intrigued. Because since the pandemic lockdown, I had been practicing Thursday as my new Friday. Personally, my career had a sudden shift into a work from home setup. I was thinking that I could get meaningful takeaways that I can apply to myself, given my situation. The book provided self-assessments to help the reader to analyze better understanding of oneself. Most likely, I found this book sharing insights on time management, re-evaluate your priorities and giving importance to what matters most.

Loved the idea of this book!! I firmly believe that Thursday SHOULD BE the new Friday!! I felt motivated and inspired by this book and it is one that I will be recommending to friends.

While the first chapter did a wonderful job of proving why four-day workweeks are best for productivity, the rest of the chapters took the book in a completely different direction. It was more about personality tests and other assessments to help you understand your levels of curiosity among other subjects. It's a hard book to rate for that reason. I wish it would have stuck to the main theme all the way through the book.

Long working hours are the scourge of modern life. Your risk of chronic disease increases and there is more chance of burnout.
More tech just leads to more messages and that feeling of being always on. I know it certainly feels like I never reach the end of my To Do list.
And the five-day working week is a historical construct.
So what if we just worked less?
We should be able to change the working week if we wanted to.
In this book, you’ll learn how to build psychological flexibility, question the industrialist mindset and create a working timetable that prioritizes what is important to you.
Ultimately, it’s a book about what you want to get out of life and how you can engineer that to happen.
Part One looks at developing inclinations, habits and actions by building curiosity and taking an ‘outsider approach’ to changing how you think about work.
Part Two encourages you to slow down and provides tools and techniques to do that.
Part Three introduces the concept of the four-day week and how it works.
The book includes questions and tests to help you understand your own approach to working hours and productivity. It encourages you to rethink your inner monologue, especially if you spend a lot of time thinking about ‘the hustle’ or worrying about your boss needing to see that you are a good worker.
Instead, focus on earning ROI for your time. Ditch the stuff that doesn’t serve you, stop the destructive internal narrative and start valuing your time in a new way.
If you charge for your time, it’s about rethinking priorities to increase your income.
The books seems to be aimed at independent practitioners, consultants, counsellors and people who are in a position to be able to dictate their hours. Perhaps as a team leader, there are some concepts in here you can take and adjust to the workplace, but I can see that in many organizational settings, you aren’t simply going to be able to tell your boss you no longer work Fridays (but still want the same pay).
If you are doing a side-hustle or running your own business, then this could be a good book for you.
I think the book includes some post-covid efficient working practices, although if you tend to work in a project environment it’s possible that you’ll already have a grasp of some of the ideas shared. The concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP), for example, is well-established in agile approaches.

3.75 rounded to 4⭐️

Thank you to Netgalley, Harper Collins Leadership, and Joe Sanok for a gifted copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thursday is the new Friday. Just saying that title makes me intrigued and I immediately want to hear more! Who doesn’t want to work fewer hours? Have more time to spend with loved ones? Have more time to relax? In a day and age where we are constantly overdoing it and expectations are sky high it couldn’t come at a better time, especially on the tail end of a pandemic.

I found this book to be quite interesting and informative. I knew going in there would be a lot that did not apply to my job due to the field I work in, but it still gave me a lot to think about and resulted in me taking a different look at and approach to the work I do and the life I live outside of my job.

A great resource for entrepreneurs, this book gives a history on how our work weeks came to be and the process it took to get there. It teaches how to manage your company in such a way to allow yourself less time there, and it also has lots of tips on how to grow your business (and how to talk to your clients about what they are looking for to help facilitate that growth.)

I can see this book being a stepping stone to a new future and I really hope that is the case. Burnout needs to be a thing of the past. If you are looking for ways to start, grow, or step back from your own business, give this one a try! And while you’re at it you will learn about work/life balance and why it is important!

This book is both a great history of work and how our society has come to function as it does and a starter guide to reducing our work-filled culture and embracing balance in your own life. Sanok uses his considerable experience as a consultant and fleshes out a basic plan that should work for a multitude of professions and lifestyles.

Great concept. I actually implemented this in my own life working from home. Gave myself more time for me.

I am a sucker for any and all business and productivity books, so I was intrigued by Joe Sanok's promise to help you create the schedule you want. Constant hustling will just lead to burnout, and Sanok is dead on that you need to combine rest and slow down with focused sprints to be your most productive and happier.

Unfortunately, Sanok is a terrible storyteller, miserably failing to connect his personal anecdotes into larger concepts and completely lacking in transitions between anything - topics, chapters, even paragraphs. The occasional pieces of decent advice are obscured by boring scientific statements, pointless tangents, and cliché personality tests. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.

Thursday is the New Friday aims to examine habits, workflows, and scheduling to take the focus off work and allow you to spend more time on other priorities in life.

I found this book interesting! It resembles a few emerging books I have seen in the self-help/work genre aiming to re-examine how much time work should take from your life. I found the author had a few new ideas to bring forth on the topic I found interesting, but for the most part it was just a helpful summary of how to take the focus off work.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in advance of writing this review. This book was written by a therapist turned entrepreneur. I was initially intrigued by the title especially given conversations about how work will look post-pandemic. The early chapters of the book do highlight that the units of time that orient our lives (weekend, 8 hour day) are often historical accidents but the bulk of the book is about self-assessments and tips and tricks for individuals interested in spending more time doing what they care about. The quizzes might set this book apart from standard productivity fare if you are into that sort of thing but they aren't going to meet anyone's definition of rigorously backed by research.

My curiosity led me to this book and it's interesting because at the core of everything we do there are plenty of motivating factors. We get bogged down by the 8-5 or 9-5 lifestyle and for someone who's had a tough time with this, it took me years to finally admit that I did not want to work by someone's schedule rather my own- and it made me seek out enumeration jobs which meant travel working in various communities, weather profiles and just setting deadlines on my one.

This book does not promise to abolish the 8-5 or 9-5 work cycle, but rather it offers insights on time management on scheduling, on maintaining and even improving on curiosity to get things done. It's a good read and I did not care much for the practicals- however, it was good to read a different, humane and self-fulfilling approach to work and productivity from someone who has done the research and lived it.

Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.