The Four Day Week

November 25, 2018 - By

In 2010 I began to dream about working a four day week. “What could be better than long weekends every week!?” I would ask my wife. At the time my motivation was time-squandering laziness. In the fall of 2017 this dream was half realized–thankfully the good half. 

In the years that have passed since this dream’s inception I have been volunteering web design and development skills for our church and some other non-profit organizations. “Web ministry” (I started calling it this as a joke, but it stuck) has been a much more rewarding use of the time than leisure! This however does put my “free time” at a premium, and last year I began to try to think creatively about how I can carve out meaningful consistent time for web ministry, while maintaining boundaries around family time on weekends.

The management team at Carpages were gracious enough to allow me to experimentally work a four day week. Starting in October 2017 I reserved Thursdays for ministry time – with my children in school this meant I’d have the house to myself to focus on work… it was so quiet!!!

Initially my hope was to finish those hard-to-reach tasks for our church Harvest Bible Chapel Oakville that just never quite get touched. However, doors quickly began opening, and some urgent projects lined up well with my time. By the end of that year I had been involved in significantly more projects and serving opportunities than I could have imagined. Some highlights include:

  1. Harvest Bible Chapel Oakville
  2. Harvest Bible Chapel Ottawa
  3. City Center Baptist
  4. Harvest Bible Chapel Toronto West
  5. Milton Gospel Hall Vacation Bible School
  6. Joshua Project Unreached of the Day app
  7. Operation World design and moodboards
  8. Youth For Christ MacKenzie Collateral
  9. Pioneers Prototype R&D
  10. Multiple Missionary projects
  11. Pregnancy Support Services of Hamilton
  12. 40Authors
  13. Theology Along the Way blog
  14. Biblical Counseling Canada
  15. Crossroads Media Prayer Ministry
  16. Tim Challies ergonomic consulting… ok, just me nerding out about keyboards with a patient listener

Some of these line items have pretty fascinating stories behind them, it’s pretty astounding to look back at this. A four day week was a blast – and significantly more work than the ‘long weekend’ dream. Usually Thursday was the busiest day of the week by far.

In fall 2018 for various reasons we needed to make some adjustments to my schedule; and I have joined the Growth Team at Crossroads with some of their web projects. Life continues to be busy and interesting!

Time is a precious thing that is spent but once. I am so blessed to have so many great opportunities to use my time on projects that are outlets for helping the hurting, the lost, and just loving people.

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This post was written by ArleyM