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🎯 The 6-Week Work Cycle is Revolutionizing Agency Productivity 🎯

What if you could boost productivity, cut burnout, and give your team more time off—all while improving results?

Joe Martin, author of Six-Week Cycles, has helped agencies escape the daily grind and build a work schedule that fuels performance and happiness. His six-week work cycle is turning the traditional nine-to-five model on its head, and today, he’s sharing exactly how you can make it work for your agency.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
👉 Why working harder isn’t the answer to burnout—and what to do instead
👉 How a six-week cycle can supercharge productivity without sacrificing quality
👉 The biggest mistake agencies make when trying to improve efficiency
👉 How to get your team on board with a work model that prioritizes results and well-being

📢 Ready to transform the way your agency works? Hit play now and discover why top agencies are embracing the six-week cycle!

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📩  me@hijoemartin.com 

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The 6-Week Work Cycle for 10X Agency Productivity

Introduction

Joe Martin: Our agency switched to this idea of work for six weeks, take off for two schedule, which sounds crazy, but the results we’ve seen are absolutely through the roof.

Jeff Tomlin: Today, we’re joined by Joe Martin, author of “Six-Week Cycles,” a game-changing framework for agency owners and their teams. Joe’s helped companies break away from the traditional nine-to-five model, boosting productivity and morale. He’s here to share how you can cut burnout, avoid common productivity traps, and get your team performing at their peak. So how does it work?

Joe Martin: I’ve helped agencies implement this, and the key principles that make it work are […]

Jeff Tomlin: This episode is all about helping agency owners snap out of the daily grind and win back their time.

Joe Martin: Clients care about the results. They don’t care about your availability. As long as you’re delivering high-quality work, they don’t really mind if you take a break.

Jeff Tomlin: And make your employees love working for you.

Joe Martin: Every agency that I’ve seen adopt this, we see more happiness, we see a significant drop in turnover.

Jeff Tomlin: All the while, you’ll discover how to tackle common productivity mistakes effectively.

Joe Martin: I hate to break it to agency owners, but if you’re experiencing burnout, it could just be that you’re working hard instead of that old adage of working smart.

The 6-Week Work Cycle is a Game-Changer for Agency Productivity

Jeff Tomlin: Joe, what is a six-week productivity plan, and how does it work?

Joe Martin: Yeah, our agency switched to this idea of, work for six weeks, take off for two schedule, which sounds crazy, cause it’s outside of nine to five, but the results we’ve seen are absolutely through the roof, and I’ve helped agencies implement this, and the key principles that make it work are, if we can get 6.7% more productivity per day, we can justify that two week time off in between. We can use Parkinson’s Law to even drive further results on this. Oh, so much.

Rethinking Work with the 6-Week Cycle

Jeff Tomlin: How’d you come up with the idea?

Joe Martin: It’s an idea that I actually first heard from Jason Fried at Basecamp, and it was the idea of how they were running their development team, instead of two-week sprints, that they called it cycles, and it was six weeks and it was all planned out, and I was like, oh my God, that’s amazing. You can do that? And I was looking for a better way to work, and I’d already witnessed firsthand how burnout, as an entrepreneur, that everything just piles up on you. Everything you have to do just continues to shove on your back, but it feels like there’s no way out of it, and so I wanted to flip that script and then wanted to see, is there a different way that we can treat this. Is there a way that we can actually treat people a little bit better instead of saying, “Hey, employee, you work for me, and you owe me 100% of your time every day?” Like, ugh, is there a way that I can treat them as human and we can all get stuff done, and there can be time off to be with their children and still work? I just, at the end of the day as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, I didn’t care how long it took them to get stuff done, necessarily, I just cared that it got done. That’s the part that I needed. Did these things get done today? If they did, cool. Go home. Go home. Nice job. Why should your reward be more work if you just worked your ass off all week? It doesn’t make sense.

Supercharge Productivity with the 6-Week Cycle

Jeff Tomlin: What a refreshing way of thinking, so some might say the breaks could hurt productivity, so how do you address that?

Joe Martin: I believe it’s Daniel Pink who has a book, “When,” and he talks about some concepts about when productivity happens at work, and the way he breaks it down is he breaks it down into quarters, and he talks about how productivity is high at the beginning of a quarter, dips off in the middle of a quarter, and then picks back up again at the end of a quarter, and I think when you take that concept and instead of doing it in quarters, you do it six times a year, you actually get to supercharge your productivity. When you’re constantly working without stopping, what are you doing to people? What are you doing to creativity and energy instead of giving them the things that refuel them again? And if you look at the life of a parent, I’m not a parent, but I look at it from the outside, and weekends aren’t free time. Weekend isn’t, I am off and then having a wonderful time enjoying my life, not working. There’s parties to go to, there’s things to do, there’s errands around the house, things to take care of, and then I expect that employee to come back in Monday morning refreshed, ready for work? Give them more time off. People need more time off. So sorry, sorry.

Take Control of Your Day by Mastering Email

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. You’re passionate, I love it, you’re passionate, and by the way, I saw that research about productivity throughout a quarter, and so it’s sounding like there’s more and more science to this idea here. So what are the first steps to start seeing immediate improvements in a work-life balance with your six-week model here?

Joe Martin: Start small. Define boundaries. I think one of the ones I go to, if you can get email under control, suddenly, you can start to get the rest of your day under control. It’s one of those things I think a lot of people let email run them, and they use it as their to-do list for the day to feel like they’ve been productive because they got through all these emails, but I’d actually encourage you to start treating email as a task. Block off a time port, close your inbox, start getting control over that part of your day to be able to say, this is when I’m gonna work on stuff, and there is a really great book that stuck with me. It was “The War of Art,” and in it, one of the small pieces that I took away was this concept between a professional and the amateur, and one of the things he says is that the amateur allows creativity to strike them when it strikes them, and they ride that creativity streak until its very end, whereas the professional knows when that creativity streak is gonna happen because he set aside time for that to already happen, to be creative, to be productive, and that’s where he’s gonna be able to shine doing that, and I feel like I took that concept as part of this and really just leaned into that to find happiness and find productivity.

Why Clients Don’t Care About Your Availability

Jeff Tomlin: I love that concept. Okay, so my burning question is, how do your clients respond to the model?

Joe Martin: Yeah, clients care about the results. They don’t care about your availability. As long as you’re delivering high-quality work, they don’t really mind if you take a break. I actually think some of my clients like not meeting with us over those two weeks, and every agency that I’ve seen adopt this has seen that increase in productivity. The organization, the concepts of what measure gets improved, and we start applying those inside an agency, we see that, we see more happiness, we see a significant drop in turnover, because we have people that are getting a break. If you’re trying to recruit A+ talent and you’re each offering the same salary, but one offers the ability to work in six-week cycles, which company do we think that person is gonna choose?

Is Burnout Actually a Sign You’re Working Wrong?

Jeff Tomlin: What are some of the common mistakes that people make when trying to be more productive, and how does your method help avoid them?

Joe Martin: I mean, I hate to break it to agency owners, but if you’re experiencing burnout, it could just be that you’re working hard instead of that old adage of working smart, and this is where we chase it down to the very business model and the value that your salespeople are saying you deliver on. It’s one of the things that we help companies do in terms of rewriting their first sentence on their website, and there was a company we worked with that was a cannabis delivery company, and the first sentence on their website was, “Cannabis delivery in 30 minutes.” Every day, the company was beholden to that first sentence to hurry, hurry, hurry, rush, rush, rush. The owners are pulling out their hair every day trying to rush, move everything around, and everything is go, go, go, go, and it was on a value that they made up! No one told them you needed to deliver this in 30 minutes, and when we identified their one target customer who’s Sharon, who’s 57 years old and lives in a wealthy neighbourhood, it turns out she doesn’t care if she gets that stuff in 30 minutes! That’s so low on the value to her, and so it’s important for agency owners to look at, what am I really delivering? What is the value that I’m bringing to a customer, and how am I fulfilling on it? Instead of saying, here’s all this stuff I can do. I’ll answer every email for you immediately. I’ll answer your phone call as soon as you call in. You may not need to sell speed and urgency. You may be able to sell moderated, paced results.

Why Personalizing Productivity is Key to Agency Success

Jeff Tomlin: So Joe, you’ve worked with some major brands. How do you adapt your productivity hack for big companies like McDonald’s or Microsoft?

Joe Martin: Everything that we kept learning about conversion rate optimization came down to personalization and really, to stop talking to people in groups and talk to the individual, and I feel like it’s a lot of those same marketing concepts that we built on with six-week cycles of looking at what’s important to our employees, what’s important to them, how do they work best, when do they work best? And so it’s really, I think that the productivity is a very personal question for a lot of people, and I think that managers kinda like to manage from a distance a little bit when I’d like to see a little more managing of really understanding what the work entails. Don’t just understand the project, don’t just understand the deliverables and the task, but what is the work that this person’s really going through to get these things done? And one of my ways to try and always stay tuned in about that is, every Friday, when we’re in cycle, we have what’s called a checkout meeting, and so we get no more than five of us together, we spend two minutes in silence, write down everything that went well that week and share it, spend two minutes in silence again, write down everything that didn’t go well, and then we share that. That one small meeting has such a tremendous impact on my ability to have empathy for my team, to know what they’re going through, to know what annoys them. I learned so much about what’s happening in their lives from that and ways that I can help of the things that are more meaningful to them, that maybe it’s not, I need to pay you more money. Maybe it’s someone who works at a public building in Chicago, and they just want the pee cleaned out of the stairwell that they have to walk past every day. What are these things that we can do to actually help? And that’s where I think productivity becomes so personal, because it’s really down to the person, and what does it mean to them to help them?

Why Productivity is a Practice, Not Perfection

Jeff Tomlin: What is one key habit or mindset shift needed to see lasting results?

Joe Martin: I think looking at it more like meditation, I guess, that this is a practice. It’s not something that’s ever perfected. I just had a two-week off time that wasn’t an off time for me. We had a couple of things that bled over into more projects, and so it never goes as planned, and it’s just about having the systems in place to then be able to accommodate when things go off-track, and it’s one of those areas that I think people get scared of planning. They get scared to put something out there, ’cause they say, well, it could change! Things could be different, and I’m okay with that, Jeff. It can change, but let’s have a plan. Let’s have a path for where we wan to go. Let’s have a plan for how we wanna spend our next day and try to continually work towards a predictable workday instead of an unpredictable one, that there’s a world where the workday can destroy parents and beat them down and send them home unmotivated and feel like nothing is worth doing in this world, there’s a version where a job can do the opposite of that for someone. Let’s explore that world a little more.