All hail August Fridays, aka why Technical.ly is publishing less this month

At Technical.ly, we aim to emulate the workplace culture best practices we cover. That includes making space for intentional breaks.

That’s why we’ve instituted a trial policy called August Fridays. It means we won’t have internal meetings, and our team of reporters won’t be shipping newsletters, or publishing much on these days.

We’ve also encouraged staffers to use their paid time off on Fridays this month. Accordingly, most staffers have taken some or all of those days, with the last Friday of the month granted as an additional PTO day to everyone.

The goal is threefold: encourage use of PTO for mental health, test the four-day work week, and learn how both influence productivity.

On that first goal, we’re acknowledging that work-from-home and pandemic burnout is real, even as a few of us have made our way to our HQ or coworking spaces in recent weeks. We’re not alone in using less of our PTO than usual over the past 18 months, and frankly, many of us need the break. The policy is also in line with what we’ve done over the past few holiday seasons, when we’ve closed for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

And on the second point, we’ve noted the recent swell of conversation about the four-day work week as a potential trend, and have been curious what it would mean for us to enact such a policy.

From CEO Chris Wink’s forthcoming Culture Builder newsletter about the pilot:

“We have reservations: Can a business news organization really drop a workday? Do we risk conveying to our clients that we aren’t there for them during their operating hours? Our newsroom has opted to maintain at least one editor each Friday in case major news breaks, and we believe we can benefit our clients by learning and leading, but the questions remain. We’re far from this as a standard but I’m betting for the trend. We’ll report back.”

Indeed, look for a recap of what we learned after the month ends. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy your time off, too, whenever it happens. We’ll see you in your inbox on Monday.