Why Working Harder Isn’t Always The Answer
Many of us pride ourselves on hard work, and of course, more is better, right? According to the media, in order to be successful, you have to hustle and grind and give up life outside work. To be fair, for most people success doesn’t come on a silver platter and it does require hard work.
But does hard work mean you have to work 12-14 hours a day? Avoid taking breaks? Never go on vacation?
More working hours don’t improve productivity
If doing some work is good, then doing more work must be better! Popular culture assumes a linear relationship between hours of work and results. If you work for one hour and produce X, then naturally working for two hours brings 2X the results.
And so on, which is part of the reason why many business owners end up working 12-14 hour days. Put in 12 hours and get 12x the results, right?
Wrong.
After a certain point, there’s no linear relationship between hours worked and results. In fact, for a twelve-hour day, you could end up with less than if you’d worked a four-hour day.
Why?
Humans are not machines. A computer can spit out 12x the results if it runs for 12 hours. Yet although brains are often compared to computers, human brains have specific needs and limitations. In many ways, they’re more powerful than computers. However, they need plenty of downtime, including regular breaks during the day and sleep at night.
Due to the way our brains developed over thousands of years, we don’t get more than about four hours a day for concentrated, cognitively demanding work. This includes things like working with numbers, spreadsheets, legal briefs, tax returns, financial plans, business planning, strategizing, and so on. Making the most of those four hours turbocharges your productivity.
Being able to accomplish more in fewer hours gives you more time to spend with friends and family and other activities that you enjoy. That not only makes you more productive but also makes you less likely to burn out.
Improving productivity does not include overly long days
One of the factors in overly long days is doing a lot of busy work without getting important tasks accomplished. A lot of that is linked to having too many distractions.
Interruptions are all around us. I’ve seen so many financial channel TV screens in financial planning offices, which I don’t understand, frankly. It’s not like watching those channels is going to provide insight on any one person’s financial life. It only serves as a distraction.
When you have social media and news on the phone, there are constant beeps and buzzes and chirps and rings. You may feel like you’re getting important information, but you’re not absorbing any knowledge.
Some offices are open-plan, which means every worker is subject to the distractions of everyone else in the office. Being available to colleagues has morphed into meaning that everyone must drop everything they’re working on as soon as someone else pops into their email or office.
All these distractions mean that you lose focus on a regular basis. Once you’re interrupted, it takes a while to get back to where you were. So a task that should take half an hour could take an hour or two, or even stretch out all day.
Focus is the key to improving productivity in the workplace
Being able to concentrate on one task at a time and prioritizing the things that move your business forward is the most effective way to boost your productivity.
Eliminating or managing distractions can help prevent 12 or 14-hour days. When you’re able to focus on one key task at a time, you accomplish the important things in a reasonable amount of time. Your business will be profitable and you’ll still have plenty of time to spend on the things you enjoy outside work.
Recap (tl;dr)
In knowledge work, it’s not the case that results are linear according to how many hours you put in. Human brains need rest to be productive. Eliminating distractions and focusing on critical tasks helps business owners stay profitable without burning out.
If you’re a business owner who needs help improving productivity without burnout, schedule a free call here to see if we’re a good fit to work together.