A lot people seem to think that the longer the hours you work the more important you are. I whole-hearted disagree with this. It is very easy to waste 12 hours inventing tasks, browsing the web, playing games or chatting online.
If you are super efficient and productive, if you do not get distracted and if you put all your effort into the work you do, an 8 hour day is more than enough time. As I have written about before most people will fill their day regardless of whether they work 2 hours or 15 hours.
If you are in a job where you need to:
- Be creative
- Make tough decisions
- Manage a team of people
- Evangelise
- Develop strategy
- Think deeply
- Communicate
Chances are that you will be a lot more effective if you are well rested and have real work life balance. But is this the case in reality?
The shorting working day experiment
Historically I was a real workaholic, I often would work 14 hour days and because I love what I do I could tell myself that these kind of hours were ok. Now I have a family my time seems a lot more important and I wanted to address this issue without impacting my business profitability.
So over the last month I decided to see how much effect it would have on my productivity if I experimented with a shorter working day. Here were my rules:
- Arrive at the office no later than 8am
- Leave no later than 5pm
- No personal browsing or personal tasks during the day e.g. editing photos, Facebook etc
- No working in the evening
- Keep distractions to a minimum
- Focus on what is important not what is urgent
- Remove non-essential tasks
The results
What I actually have found is that instead of my productivity going down, in fact because I am well rested (assuming my son does not wake up at 5am like he has a habit of doing!) I am actually getting more done in less time.
There are other massive benefits as well:
- More time (and more importantly more attention) with my family
- Huge increase in enthusiasm during the working day
- Time for personal hacking and coding projects which allow you to improve your skills
- Better well-being
- Reduced stress
- Better decision making
- Better communication and patience
Some very well publicised case studies including 37Signals and Carsonified have actually moved to a 4-day working week and they have not seen any loss in productivity or profits.
I would urge you to try it for yourself, keep a record of how much you get done in a normal working week, then have a look to see how many of those tasks actually needed to be done. Then try a few weeks working a shorter working day with increased focus and efficiency. I would be interested to see how you get on with your own experiments!
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Tags: balance, rest, working hours
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 9:02 pm and is filed under General.You can trackback from your own site.
I really enjoyed this article – it makes a lot of sense and, when I worked as a teacher, would aften remind myself of these kinds of rules. I fully believe that most of us faff about for the last hour at work OR faff about in the morning and then work like Billy-Oh in the afternoon because we haven’t got everything done we wanted to.
There’s just one thing I didn’t understand though – what do you mean by focus on important things rather than urgent ones?
Thanks for your comment Heather.
For me the difference is; an important task is something that you have planned in advance and will take you closer to reaching your objectives, where as an urgent task is something that has to be done right away and usually is initiated by someone else.
For example an important task for me today was to finish a big proposal that I have been writing. During the day a client rang and asked for help with his server, this was an urgent task, and took me away from my important task.
This is where the power of no comes in, but you have to be professional and explain your reasons, most clients are very reasonable when you communicate well.