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!