Ladies and gentlemen, essentialists, one and all, this is Greg McHughan, and I am your host on the What's Essential Podcast.

This is magical. I'm here with Banks Benitez, the CEO of Uncharted, and he has a story that absolutely is worth listening to,

an experiment that he began at any of you who are in a scenario where you want to accomplish more by doing less.

Any of you that are on a team or work for a company that dreams of being more thoughtful and conscientious of what you do and what you don't do are going to learn a lot from Banks.

Banks is nice to have you on the show.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Banks, tell us your story.

Yes, so back in November 2019, we were doing some reading about management practices and came across some research on the four-day work week and began to do some research into organizations and companies all over the world that are experimenting with the four-day work week.

I brought this concept to our executive team at the end of 2019 and said, I think 2020 should be the year where we experiment and try out and see if a four-day work week might work for us.

What were the companies that you had learned about Microsoft Japan as one of us?

Yes, Microsoft Japan had released some research in November of last year, just about this time, I guess, around the four-day work week themselves and then perpetual guardian, a New Zealand-based company has been doing the four-day work week for a while and so they had some literature out there.

And then there were small other examples and research in a few different places about non-traditional work weeks and so I began to assemble just a list of resources and articles and researchers in this space.

As an organization, we have always been really curious about how we can design the ways that we work and collaborate to be really human-centered, driven by values and to be rooted in trust for our team and so the four-day work week was a curiosity of mine that started at the end of last year.

And I sort of understand why you were curious about that, because you're thoughtful, but really why? Why bother looking into a four-day work week? What was the pull for you?

I think that there's, I mean, this one question of who chose a five-day work week? Who chose 40 hours per week of work? Some of these norms and the status quo that, you know, I just have accepted growing up in the US and thinking, okay, well, I guess this is the way that you work Monday through Friday, maybe you work 40 hours, maybe you work more, whatever.

And I think as an organization, we have always tried to sort of challenge the status quo. And so for me, I was interested in that. And of course, I know just observing my own performance that the number of hours that I work doesn't always contribute to the outcomes that I produce, that there are times when I am really producing at a much higher level, when I'm more focused, when I'm more disciplined, when I'm focused on the right things.

You know, we don't pay our team to just sit in their seat, sit at their desk, sit at their home office, and in a 2020 COVID reality, just for hours. We hire them, retain them, compensate them to deliver results.

And I've known that for myself personally, that delivering results is not always a function of hours worked. And so I was really curious about exploring the decoupling, the possible decoupling between full time and full contribution.

And the hypothesis that we used when entering this experiment was, is it possible to have 100% contribution at 80% hours for 100% pay? And that was the experiment we launched for the summer for the three months from June, July and August of 2020.

And then, essentialism played a role in this, and I don't want to be presumptuous in saying that, but tell me how that played a role and why you included that in your experiment.

Yeah, so I had read essentialism your book back in 2000, and I think it was 15, to be quite profound and helpful for me.

I have always considered myself to be a brute force entrepreneur. I'm a hustler, I'm somebody that just is, I will get it done, you know, that there are no trade-offs, I will do both.

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