How much should you work?
It’s a boring question. And yet I can’t remember the last time a question like this dominated our social and professional discourse.
Every other day it seems like a billionaire or a CEO wakes up and chooses to get on this bandwagon.
Recently we had a prominent executive in India talk about 90-hour workweek and the pitfalls of staring at your wife during weekends, which tells me that he never listened to music while growing up because “aankhon hi aankhon mein ishara ho gaya, baithe baithe jeene ka sahara ho gaya” is a well-known song from his time and it clearly encapsulates why staring at your wife might be helpful.
Previously we had a billionaire talking about 70-hour workweeks and prior to that we had an eccentric global billionaire and world’s richest man enthusiastically mandating work from office and long hours.
Since everyone except the billionaires has gotten riled up at the prospect of working hard for peanuts, I thought I will come up with my own set of laws of how much should you work, which explains why ‘how much’ can never be a number set in stone.
Share this article with your manager next time he delivers a sermon on why working long hours always makes sense.
The Law of Passion
Work feels like a breeze when you’re passionate about it. Everyone knows this. One doesn’t need to urge someone who loves their work to work hard.
They will work till their bones hurt. They will work because they feel a sense of bliss in that state of flow. They will work because they care about the quality, the small details, the nuances.
People passionate about their work will work because they want to.
Telling such people to work X number of hours makes no sense. It usually backfires and drains the motivation out of them.
It’s important to throw your perception of hard work out of the window when you’re dealing with a team member who loves their work. You’re not looking at a factory worker here. This is not an assembly line. This is knowledge work. The word ‘knowledge’ is more abstract than it is definitive. You should not expect the work involving it to be definitive either. Focus on the output, not on how and when the input happens.
The law of passion: Don’t set work hours for people with a drive for their work. Let them deliver their own way.
The Law of Optimization
Optimization is the low hanging fruit in every work that’s the sweetest and yet nobody cares to pluck.
Irrespective of the kind of knowledge work you do, your passion for it and how disciplined you may or may not be, if you are not optimizing your workflow then it simply means that you are losing valuable seconds and minutes (which add up to hours and days) in tasks that you should not be doing.
Every company, manager and employee is guilty of this. We get too trapped in the daily grind to question how we are doing what we are doing and how to do it in less time.
Work teams need to be like sports teams. What do they do before starting a match? They huddle. They go through the strategy and the tactics while pumping each other up for the big day. What do they do at half time? Again, they huddle. Players are constantly looking to play the same game better.
How can you emulate this in your work?
Here’s how.
Every week set aside 30 mins for a review of how you worked that week. Not the what, but the “how.” Figure out how to make this how faster without compromising on quality.
Some questions to ask yourself:
Is there a way to skip a step? Is there a tool that can help you skip a step?
Should this task be automated? Can it be automated? How to automate it?
Is this task being done in the best way possible?
Don’t ask yourself or your team members to work longer hours without optimizing your workflows.
The law of optimization: Optimize your workflow to produce the best work in the shortest possible time.
The Law of Momentum
There are times in your professional life when the work feels so exciting that you get goosebumps when you begin working. The sense of energy is palpable, the feeling of joy is evident and the state of flow is easily achieved.
You feel like you are on a roll. You complete weeks worth of tasks in a matter of days.
Your mind and body are aligned and focused on the goal you want to achieve.
This is what I call momentum and it doesn’t come often. It’s as elusive as the snow leopard in the Himalayas. Maybe once or twice a year will you get to see it.
But when you do, do not stop. Leisure and rest be damned, hours be damned, this is the time to work. This is the time to produce, this is time to shine.
The law of momentum: When you sense you have momentum, hold on to it and move. Put all your energies into your work during this time.
The Law of Energy
I feel life is more about managing your energy than anything else.
This applies to your work as well. If you are low on energy, the work will suffer and number of hours you stay glued to your computer screen won’t matter.
When you’re high on energy, you can get even mundane work done happily.
Energy varies in accordance with our mental and physical states. Few of us are willing to make the effort needed to manage our energy. Raising energy levels requires good habits and environment.
The workplace can certainly help with the latter. An office design that prioritises ergonomics and optimal lighting goes a long way. There was a reason why Google pioneered the modern office with its colourful backdrops, cafeterias with gourmet lunches and conveniences like massages and laundry at office. People balked at Google and chastised it for its extravagance. But Google wanted to replicate the high-energy environment of a university and it did it successfully.
You might think this requires capital but there are hacks that can be implemented at fraction of the costs. For instance, having a few standing desks with monitors doesn’t cost a bomb.
Demanding your team produce exceptional work from a workplace that doesn’t inspire only works when your mission is extraordinary. Nobody at Space X or NASA ever worried about the aesthetics or ergonomics of their office. No staff member at Red Cross will complain about the food at the canteen.
There are firms where the vision and the mission overshadows and overpowers everything else. The people there derive their energies from the mission. Such places are few in number.
Every other firm must prioritise creating an environment that contributes positively to employee energy. That’s how the number of hours will be most productively used.
The law of energy: Create a high-energy environment that makes work fun and inspirational, an environment that doesn’t bore and tire you.
The Law of Results
If there is one irrefutable truth of business and capitalism, it is this: you must get results.
Your work must produce the output that achieves the goals it set out for.
There is really no way around it unfortunately. We all know it and yet the problem remains that we lose sight of this simple truth. The number of hours debate is a perfect example of this.
Instead of scratching our heads over how many hours one should work in office, the primary focus needs to be on how to ensure the work drives results. That needs to be the north star.
The law of results: Do not lose sight of the main thing. Focus on what can bring the results.
So, how many hours should you work really?
We are talking about knowledge work here. We aren’t talking about workers at the assembly lines and neither are we talking about professional athletes. The number of hours matter when it comes to the latter.
Number of hours also, almost certainly, matters in knowledge work. But not so much as our beloved leaders think it does, if they care about quality work.
You may decide to stretch it out but your brain will give in after a point and start doing subpar work. Subpar work never yields great results. And great results are what we are all after, aren’t we?
It’s not about the number of hours. It’s how about how you utilize those hours.
Whether you have optimized your work to fit those hours.
Whether you are letting passion take centre stage and whether you are optimizing for momentum.
Whether you have created an environment for functioning at optimal energy and whether you care more about the results than the process.
If you value work and want to do it well, these 5 laws must be kept in mind.
This applies to both individuals and firms.
Firms who follow these 5 laws of how much one should work will attract and retain happier employees. And in my experience, happier employees generally get results.