10 lessons on how to increase productivity, which I learned by working 90 hours a week for a month

How many hours a week do you spend on work? About 40, right? What do you think will happen if you work 90 hours a week?

Chris Bailey decided to conduct such an experiment. What did it lead to? Read about the 10 lessons he learned in our translation of his article.

On average, people work about 40 hours a week or more.
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On the surface are two solutions to this problem:

1. Continue to work 40 hours a week and do not succeed.
2. Work more than 40 hours a week and try to increase productivity.

However, in practice this choice is not easy. Even though it seems that working for a long time will allow you to cope with a large number of tasks, this is obviously a wrong argument: not because you have less time to rest and recover, but because in the long run, labor productivity will decrease significantly . This has been proven many times, so the thesis is completely obvious.

I consider myself a person with high productivity, despite the fact that once I was idle for a whole week. But now I cannot even remember when I was as unproductive as working 90 hours a week.

In February, I had an alternative: work 90 hours a week to work only 20 hours on the next one. I wanted to see how extreme work will affect my productivity. Further - 10 major lessons that I learned during the experiment.

1. Many hours of work will increase your productivity, but only in the short term.

This is perhaps the most important lesson that I learned for myself: you can achieve more by working irregularly, but this will not last long.

In the long run, many hours of work leads to greater procrastination and lower productivity. It is for this reason that you begin to do less, even without always realizing it.

In fact, after a 40-hour work week, as the study showed, marginal productivity begins to decline until “work for eight 60-hour work weeks equals the productivity of eight 40-hour work weeks.” And if we work 70 or 80 hours in 7 days, the break-even point will be reached already in the third week.

When I worked 90 hours a week, I managed to do a lot, but only during the first days of the week; after which I did not have the time or emotional strength to recover, so my productivity really dropped. I made sure that sleeping and going to the gym every morning helps me recover energy, but it still went down by Wednesday-Thursday.

It is easy to deceive yourself that the long work week will make you more productive, in the end, it happens, but not for long. But personally, I believe that there are fundamental limits on overall productivity, and they can be overcome if you work smarter, not more.

Most studies show that the optimal number of hours you need to work during the week is about 40. After my experiment, I tend to believe it.

2. If you are busy all the time, this does not mean that you have high productivity.

There is a big difference between employment and productivity, but it is sometimes very difficult to catch.

From my point of view, productivity does not depend on how much you work; it depends on how many cases you complete. So, you can start to perform many tasks and none of them are completed within a week. For example, if you have a 60-hour work week, but you always communicate with colleagues, check your mail, perform minor tasks all day, you will be far less productive than a person who works 30 hours a week, but is really involved in important processes. .

Productivity is not how much you work during the day, but how much you do.

3. The feeling of productivity does not mean its presence.

Even if you feel that you have high productivity, this does not mean that it is. In fact, sometimes things are exactly the opposite:
• When you work in a multitasking mode, you feel more productive than when you do one thing, but research confirms again and again - this is not the case;
• When you use caffeine, you feel more productive as coffee affects the brain. However, the body becomes accustomed to caffeine, and this substance can reduce your productivity in solving creative problems;
• You feel more productive checking emails 10 times per hour, instead of preparing a report, because you receive feedback. But you don’t get paid to view your mail, but you’re paid to work and achieve certain results.

The same applies to continuous processing. I think that working for long hours makes you feel more productive, and you feel less guilty because you don’t have time to do all the work on time.

4. Plan your time when you are not busy.

I believe that planning time, when you are not busy, allows you to more effectively address the issue of quality of work, which allows you to work smarter, but not necessarily more. As a simple example, if you work as an accountant, you can use yourself for the whole day to sharpen pencils (or the modern equivalent of checking mail), or you can think about abstracting from the routine for a while and understand what will bring the best result, and then this work.

Intellectual activity makes us more creative, concentrated, energetic, because it allows us to see the work from a bird's-eye view. It allows you to see what you need to do differently to achieve more in less time. And although you may feel less productive, but as in the one-task example, you will achieve greater success.

When I forced myself to work 90 hours a week, I constantly noticed that I worked less efficiently, doing nonsense, but I did not achieve significant results at the end of the day: I noticed all this after analyzing my work a week after the end of the experiment .

5. Every minute devoted to planning will save 5 minutes of work.

Here is my favorite productivity quote from Brian Tracy:

"Every minute devoted to planning saves 10 minutes of work."

I would argue about 10 minutes (I think a little less), but the principle is absolutely correct.

When all you do is work and you never spend time planning, it’s hard to work smartly. Even if you always work more than others, without working rationally, without performing super-complex tasks, you will never reach the level of productivity of other people who can work half as much, but achieve the same results.

When you stop work and plan your activities, you will become more focused, be able to direct your time and energy to several concentrated goals, achieving greater productivity.

6. To achieve more in less time, set limited deadlines for completing tasks.

Allocating a limited amount of time to complete tasks is a direct way to increase productivity. Want to catch more? Spend more energy on tasks.

My favorite way is to spend less time on the tasks I need to handle.

The fewer days (hours) are allotted by the plan for the task, the more you push yourself, spend more time to do the work. And on the contrary, if there is a lot of time, then a person can take decisions longer, sit idle.

During the experiment, I had an alternative: work 90 hours one week, and the next - only 20 hours.

It's funny, but when I only had 20 hours for 40-hour tasks, I found ways to do more in less time. Since I had a lot less time than I needed, I had to use all the energy to achieve the goal.

The more you need to do, the more time it would seem, you need to spend on work. This is what all people understand, and what, at first glance, seems to be correct. But, as my experience has shown, the less time you devote to a task, the more you will do in this limited period.



7. Take care of your energy and do not forget to replenish its reserves.

As Brian Tracy, the author of the fantastic book Eat this Frog, said, “if you want to stay happy and have high performance, take care of your energy and don't forget to replenish its reserves.” For example, when you need to do a lot, and you sleep only a couple of hours, the level of productivity will decrease. But if you lie down early in bed and sleep, you can quickly cope with their tasks.

Energy is the fuel that you burn all day long to cope with work, and during the experiment I got rid of many things that charged me with energy, simply because I didn’t have time for them. And if you want to do more in a shorter period of time, you need to think carefully about energy replenishment.



8. Recycling will empty the stock of willpower.

Every time you force yourself to work when you don’t feel like it, you use a little willpower — a mental resource that can expire.

Forcing myself to work 90 hours a week, I spent a huge amount of mental resources, more than with any other experiments. This led to a number of negative consequences:
• I put off important business more than ever before: sometimes for 3–4 hours;
• My productivity dropped on Wednesday and Thursday of my 90-hour work week, while my brain simply refused to do its job;
• I realized that I was concentrating on secondary, foolish tasks (checking Google Analytics, Twitter, email) instead of real work.

You can not force yourself to work 90 hours, but each time, forcing yourself to work more than you need, you deplete your reserves of willpower, which enters into a confrontation with energy and motivation, the main components of productivity.

9. One of the worst (and least productive) things you can do is be dishonest with yourself.

The question I often want to write about on my website is the need to be honest with yourself, because any tactics of productivity become useless if you lie to yourself. For example:
• Do you do what you need to do or just carry on for later?
• Do you set high goals for yourself, and then throw them in a few weeks, or break them up into several stages and still do it?
• Do you wake up from the first time with the alarm clock or rearrange it 5 times before getting out of bed?
• Do you listen to your brain or when it says that you are tired of work and want to rest?
• Do you spend a few hours in front of the TV, and then try to figure out where the time went?

Throughout the experiment, the more I pressed myself, trying to be productive, the less honest I was with me. I tried to put my vigilance to sleep, trying to be productive when I didn’t have the strength, which made me postpone things, look for excuses to do less today. Instead of being honest with myself and thinking about how much energy I spent, I pressed myself too hard, and that reduced my productivity.



10. In life there are more important things than productivity.

Without a doubt, every second of work is a second that you have not spent on anything less important, but more beloved.

When I spent some time with my girlfriend, working 90 hours a week, I felt much better. There are things on the list of obligations - important, but not urgent, and we most often refuse them in the conditions of high employment. I face this as much as other people.

When you recycle, this extra time, which needs to be taken from somewhere, forces you to give up simple things that give energy (for example, spending time with loved ones). As soon as you stop wasting time on things for the soul, you start a knowingly losing battle, become irritable and less productive.

In particular, the work has shown for many hours in a row that it does not differ in performance from the 40-hour work week (especially in the long term).

The important thing you can do to be productive is to plan your activities correctly. This will help replenish energy, work smarter, find interesting solutions, get rid of secondary tasks, and most importantly, control your work.

Good luck to you!

PS Want to read more articles from the same author - we recommend “10 lessons that I learned after I started using my smartphone 60 minutes a day” or “Everything that is needed to develop“ dynamic thinking ” . ”