A July morning. Before heading out to harvest tea, something dawned on me: at some point, my week had settled into a shape of its own — Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off; farm work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.

A three-day farming week. It is a way of working I had aimed at for a long time, but until now it was something I had to fight to protect. This week, for the first time, it felt like something that simply happens on its own. Five years of work have finally taken shape.

Not simply doing less, but changing the quality of the work

When I say I only farm three days a week, you might picture a leisurely life. In reality, it is probably the opposite. We are a nuclear family with four children, so working in an open-ended, unfocused way was never really an option. I cannot leave my wife to raise four children single-handedly.

With seven days, “I’ll do it tomorrow” always works. Limit yourself to three, and every single day becomes a question of how precisely you can time each task in the fields. The shortness itself has become a device that forces us to think about quality.

So on our Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we are out in the fields, working — together with friends from a local welfare workshop and people who come to join us from all over the world. We think and think until every piece of farm work converges on those same three days; it is a rather dense design. In exchange, the remaining four days are deliberately left as margin — time to enjoy with family, time to do nothing, time to study.

Lately I have come to feel that creating this margin may be the most important part of the new way of working we have in mind.

Only two months of exceptions a year

Of course, farming follows nature’s rhythms. In May and June, when the tea harvest and rice planting overlap, we break the three-day rule and work.

But put the other way around: the exceptions fit within two months. For me, that was no small milestone. The part where we follow nature, and the part we design ourselves — the line between them is slowly coming into focus.

Running on as little work as possible

People tend to assume that a business owner’s job is to keep adding more of everything.

My recent conclusion is the opposite: the most important job may be making things run on as little work as possible.

The more gears there are, the busier each one looks — while the friction between them grows, and the number of places that can break keeps increasing. The three-day week is not really about reducing hours; it is about reducing gears. And if you think of a company not as a machine but as a plant — an organism of living connections — then time to rest slowly is necessary too.

On that foundation, this is how I picture a company’s growth: there is a concept, then a foundation, and on top of that you keep adjusting the mechanisms and keep producing results — the way a plant grows larger of its own accord. That kind of growth feels free of strain.

Look at the ecosystems of the natural world: a world of such richness keeps running on astonishingly few principles. Standing in the field, I am taught this every day.

The moment I knew this way of working was the right choice

Finally, a small story about family.

The other day, our eldest son and eldest daughter were each told by their teachers at school what good kids they are.

To be honest, I do not particularly wish for my children to “turn out well.” I only hope they will be kind people with real hearts.

Kindness is not something you drill into a child; it seeps in from the air of daily life. If that is true, then perhaps this life — working three days and spending four in the margin with family — is quietly leaving something inside them.

Under a gaze that demands no results, kindness grows as a result. It is exactly the same structure as natural farming, and it felt like the deepest confirmation of the way of working we have chosen.

Today is Friday. I am off to work with good company.

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