This summer at CharityCAN, we’re trying something a little different. We’re taking a break.

Well, that’s not quite true – we’re taking a lot of little breaks. 8 of them, to be exact.

This summer, we’re turning every weekend into a long weekend for our employees. Every Monday that isn’t already a holiday between Canada Day and Labour Day becomes a paid day off. No time to make up during the week, just a long weekend for every weekend of the summer.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a summer of long weekends ever since I read It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work by the folks at Basecamp. You can read up a little more on their four day summer weeks here.

But to be honest, I was a little frightened as the owner and operator of a small business. Would we really have time to finish all the things we need to get done? Would we fall behind somehow?

This summer though, the math has changed. We’re all tired and worn out after living through more than a year of a global pandemic. As we slowly emerge from lockdowns to summer weather and safer outdoor conditions, we need spend more time seeing and reconnect with the people we’ve been separated from for so long.

I can’t sit here and pretend that this is some brave decision or that I’m a trailblazer, either. It’s much easier to jump on the bandwagon when even larger tech companies like Hubspot and LinkedIn are giving their employees “burnout breaks” in the form week-long company shutdowns, or when Microsoft Japan goes to 4 day work weeks and sees a boost in productivity of 40%.

It’s still not going to be perfect – our co-op students have to work 35 hours a week to get a co-op credit, so they’ll have to work 45 extra minutes on each of the four working days (or flex those hours however they wish), but it’s as close as we can get for now.

I’m hoping that if the experiment goes well this summer it’s something we can look forward to here every summer from now on.

We here at CharityCAN hope you have a great summer, however you spend it.

And if you happen to email any of us on a summer Monday starting this week, here’s what you’ll get back: