Jeremy:
How do you craft your ideal week, in terms of the kind of productivity flow or even the energy output of your week? Jeff, I noticed you Alyssa talked about this and then April and I talked about this a little bit, I wrote about it in the Jeremy’s Journal email that we send out to family teams, and that is designing what you guys referred to, which I loved was like a hump shaped week.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Jeremy:
And we’ve been living into that for a long time, but that’s a great way to put it, which is that you kind of build up to a sort of a peak, for us it’s usually Tuesday, and then you start to come down a little bit and sort of gently arrive into your Sabbath day. So we’ve been sort of tweaking our weekly rhythm for many, many years. And we’ve discovered that when you work six days and rest one, what I think I initially assumed was that you would have maximum productivity Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and then rest.

But when you live into a weekly rhythm, it actually starts to make a lot of sense to sort of build up to a peak, and then sort of come down. I found that that actually maximizes productivity and utilizes energy even better. And so for us, what that looks like is we call Sunday Soft Launch Sunday, which was sort of like slowly are building up, and then our peak really happens on what we call Tough Tuesday. And then we start to come down and we usually have kind of almost another peak on Thursday, Wednesday’s usually a little bit easier day, our media nights on a Wednesday night, but Tuesday night we usually host something pretty intense at our house in the evening. And then Thursday night we also host something, and so those are busier nights for us and they tend to be 12 to 16 hour workdays, and then we really come down.

And then Monday, Wednesday, Friday tend to be a lot easier work days where we just chill in the evening and have stuff we just do with our family, and then we just rest.

But yeah, Jeff, have you guys thought about this? I would love to…Even with a family of young kids who thinks about, okay, how do I think about designing the ideal week from an energy productivity perspective?

Jeff:
Yeah. So there’s a couple different ways, but I think it’s like try to find what works for you. And so that could be a hump like ours or it can be even more like a wave, it can go up and down,

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
Up and down or it can be like a wave that’s going down. I don’t…or it can be a particle, I don’t know, just waves and particles I always tent to put those together. What it was that famous theory of like when you, when, when something’s observed and it changes from a wave to a particle, do you know?

Jeremy:
Oh yeah

Jeff:
Yeah, I just remember that stuff. So your week can be like that, if you observe it, it turns to a particle. But I think there’s a lot of different ways, give yourself grace tweak it and then just kind of like experiment. That’s what it comes down to for us.

We’re fairly, actually new to this. I would say only this last year, we’ve really kind of tried to, I feel like we’ve done it naturally or just by default, but then to really step into it, call it out and name it…

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
Just really recent. And so step into that and, that can mean a lot of things, like it’s easy to understand what this means when you maybe work from home, so all of us can understand that right now, or maybe you have a self employed lifestyle, but when we go back to work, I think, and maybe people still have a…They have to go to a office or a certain place at a certain time that doesn’t negate you from living this.

We don’t just mean, Oh, your work, I think we mean just like the spirit and tone of the entire household. So even if you have a normal nine to five, I still think there’s a level of up and down or parabola, like nature that you want to put to your week for energy sake, whether that’s your most intense days of hospitality in the middle of the week.

Jeremy:
Right.

Jeff:
And naming that maybe it’s your most intense days of like family connection in the middle of the week, and naming that. I know for us, the most helpful thing about it is from an energy standpoint. So there’s a different bunch of different reasons for us, I think understanding that we’re kind of easing back down into the week, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday helps us front load our week better…

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
So we actually almost sometimes even peak on Mondays sometimes, cause like we almost want to start and then fade out rather than what used to happen is we would get to Friday and I still had a lot of work to do, and so then I would just be trying to go crazy before Sabbath.

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
And what I realized is I could tell myself to shut off at five o’clock on Friday, but my body wasn’t ready to shut off at five o’clock on Friday, You know what I mean?

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
I was just buzzing.

Jeremy:
Yes.

Jeff:
And so I realized my body literally needs an off-ramp.

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
And, giving my body an off ramp really changed a lot of things from an energy standpoint and just being able to truly enter into rest, so that’s what I would say.

Jeremy:
That’s really good. So you guys have kind of like a ski slope week?

Jeff:
Yeah, exactly, typically.

Jeremy:
That’s cool. Yeah. And you guys, this just takes time to like kind of iterate on as a family and figure out, like Jeff said, what works for you and what sort of maximizes your week and you, the way your family is wired. And usually the first place where people start to tweak this is if you’re working full time outside the home or whatever is how you steward your evenings. One of the, you know, do you do two evenings or three evenings out of the house back to back? Well, that’s going to create a certain shape to your week and maybe it’s too intense and you need to like make it more of a hump or more of a wave or more of a ski slope.

And if all of this sounds new to you guys, we really encourage you to go to familyteams.com and check out the Seven Day Family. What we talk about, April and I and Jeff and Alyssa walk you guys through how you set up your seven day rhythm as a family. And this has been incredibly helpful for us and for the Bethke’s and for many other families, just to try to figure out like, what does it look like to balance all of the demands that are on a family and it’s, and how do you improve that over time? And so we feel like the best sort of framework for that was given to us in Genesis Chapter One, God gave us the week as gift for us to order our lives by. And if you’re not taking advantage of that gift, you’re going to burn out oftentimes or you’re going to under produce.

It’s very difficult to get that balance right unless you construct intentionally a seven day rhythm.