If you are a fan of the brand or at least an admirer, working at Apple must seem both beautiful and demanding. Especially this second and even more so in the era of Steve Jobs, known for setting the bar very high. However, It wasn’t all hard at Jobs’ AppleIt was a magical day for the CEO and his loved ones.
“Thursday is our day”
Many people know the peculiar character of Steve Jobs. When it came to work, he had one mania or another. For example, I used to end job interviews in a bar with a beer. It is also known that he hated PowerPoint or Keynote presentations and, in general, he also had very phobic of meetingswhether or not they are in person.
For one of Apple’s co-founders, meetings “interrupt work, break momentum, and kill creativity.” This is something that can be extracted from the authorized biography of Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. However, this does not mean that they never met. Sometimes it was necessary or he simply had no choice.
So Since his time at NeXT, he has imposed a “day off”. Meeting break, of course. It wasn’t Saturday or Sunday. It was Thursday, when Jobs declared meetings (unless strictly necessary) banned. He often called it “our day.”
“We close the doors to the outside world”
For Jobs, Thursday was the day when “we metaphorically close the doors to the outside world and work quietly individually.” It was a philosophy he later applied to Apple when he returned as CEO in 1997.
As we said before, this doesn’t mean that meetings couldn’t take place on that day if something unexpected came up. However, everyone close to him knew that unless it was urgent, it was best not to call Steve to a meeting on the fourth day of the week.
By the way, this idea of doing introspection for professional purposes This also helped to increase productivity. Not only did Jobs miss meetings, but so did everyone else. Having to devote one hundred percent of oneself to a work task caused individual and overall productivity to skyrocket in an era when everyone was focused on their own task.
It is not known for sure whether this rule was applied until the end of his legacy, in 2011, or whether he had to change his plans in the meantime. In any case, it remains ultimately just one rule among many that, with more or less success, Steve Jobs applied in the company. And although successes have many parents and many motivations, a good part of them probably comes from the work done on Thursdays. Thursdays without meetings.
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