Sherpa Alliance

Last week was a “5th Week” for me.  What do I mean by that?

I design my monthly work pattern/schedule around a 4 week month and yet there are 13 weeks in each quarter, so one of the months has a 5th week in it - or some might call it a 13th week.  You might be wondering why that didn’t happen in week 13 of the year, rather than last week, which was week 18?

• That’s because I define my working weeks and months around Thursdays, anchored by one of my most significant recurring monthly events which happens on the 2nd Thursday of every month – the monthly, all-day meeting of my Vistage CEO Group, which I chair.
• So my weeks are defined by those which have the 1st Thursday, 2nd Thursday, 3rd Thursday, 4th Thursday and, when a 5th Thursday comes along, that’s a “5th Week”.  So I had a 5th Week last week (as Thursday April 30th 2009 was a 5th Thursday) and I had already had one earlier this year at the end of January (as Thursday January 29th 2009 was a 5th Thursday).
• That January 5th Week happened to be week 5 of the annual calendar, which is because ISO 8601 defines the first week to be the week which contains the first Thursday of the calendar year (which is coincidental and I didn’t know until I looked it up) and January 1st happens to have been a Thursday for 2009.

When my “5th Week” comes along, there is generally nothing of a recurring nature in it (I have one recurring event scheduled as the “last week of the month” which I don’t control) and I work hard to protect it from non-recurring events (saying no nicley such as, "sorry, I have commitments that week", or something along those lines), so I get to do with it as I please:

• Take vacation
• Catch-up, tidy-up my office, purge my files and generally get back on top of everything
• Do strategic work
• Schedule consulting or speaking engagements I couldn’t fit in elsewhere
• Do more creative work (writing, product development, web site development)
• Do pro-bono work and/or volunteer in some other capacity
• Treat it as a safety net/overflow for client work and/or project work
• Some mix of all of the above

All of the above aid my agility and would do the same for you – so, do you have a “5th Week” and, if not, how would it change things for you if you did?

• Would it allow you to take a bit of a breather, catch-up with yourself and take stock?
• Would it allow you to get to important, creative and/or strategic tasks and projects you struggle to get to in the normal day-to-day, week-to-week flow of things?
• Would it allow you to get some respite to feel less stressed, more balanced and with better perspective?

That’s what is does for me and similarly, that’s what I hear from others who have caught onto the idea and implemented it for themselves.  I come across so many people who are so caught up on the tread-mill of their day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter existence, that it has all blended into a sameness and it hasn’t occurred to them to design in the concept of a “5th Week”.  In the absence of that design intention, work and stress tend to expand to fill the space available, of all 13 weeks, and they are unconscious of the missed opportunity.  When they design in a “5th Week” they are typically amazed that it seems to emerge from nowhere, without a noticeable impact on the other 12 of the 13 weeks, kind of free-of-charge, all benefit and no cost, as if by magic!
 

That’s the magic of design intention (Agility by Design).  It might take you a while to institutionalize this design intention into the rest of your system (organization, portfolio of business activities, roles etc) which you are part of and which drives your calendar commitments.  But, if you set that design intention, you can migrate in that direction with every chance you get.  While you might initially think your are between a rock and a hard place, with cement being poured around the pattern of your calendar commitments all the time, you will gradually be able to chisel out a 5th week for yourself.  You could start that process this week:

• Buy an annual calendar and put it on your wall, so you can see the overall picture
• Start mapping your recurring events onto that calendar (with whatever frequency they occur – weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually – including the annual trade convention you always go to, for instance)
• Start looking for the pattern and what your options are to morph it in a way to liberate the 13th week, anchored around whatever definitional patterns might work for you
• Don’t get stuck on the concept of a 5th week or 13th week having to occur the last week of a month (you could define a mid month week, for instance, to avoid the production crunch of the last week and the accounting crunch of the first week or maybe unbundle it from being one complete stand-alone week, Monday to Friday - whatever works for you)
• Select the pattern/anchoring which seems to work best and begin reshuffling things around that and migrating things in that direction.
• See if you can schedule your first “5th Week” (in whatever form it is best shaping up for you), even if you are going to have to work at reshuffling some things and/or might not get a full week this first time around.

This is a design process (Agility by Design).  It first occurred to me when a corporation I used to be part of had a 5th week in the last accounting month of the accounting quarter, other months being 4 week months.  Your accounting months might be defined differently (maybe equal to the calendar months, for instance, or some other method) as might your pay periods (26 periods per year, for instance, or some other method).  Taking these into account in the design process mentioned above, you can still design your work-pattern however you best see fit.  Don’t give up and you will get to enjoy your own “5th Weeks”!