Think you should always work long hours? Read this!
Many professional service industries and sometimes people’s entrepreneurship journeys put a huge value on putting in many working hours in the process of achieving an end goal. There is nothing wrong with working extra hours for something that you love or to get something done on a tight deadline. There is something wrong however, with working many hours just to say you worked many hours. Today we're going to examine something an old friend of mine said to me that changed my perspective on work in these types of environments. Here's what he said:
“Don't make extra work for yourself! If you sit there and make dumb mistakes for the next 2 hours, you're just going to have to clean it up tomorrow, so just go home and take a fresh start in the morning.”
This really resonated with me because at the time I was an entry level professional and a public accounting firm. At the entry level, people will make tons of mistakes in the process of learning how to do the work. For me, each review comment was another thing to worry about on top of the long hours and heaps of information I had to absorb to keep up. It took me a while to get what he was saying, but once I did, I was able to alleviate some of my biggest stressors: long hours and getting review comments. When I was able to focus and acknowledge when I was not being effective, I put everything down and picked it up later. Doing this allowed me to learn faster and continue working efficiently while making fewer mistakes.
So What?
The key thing to take away from my experience here is that many people experience diminishing returns to productivity as they work longer hours, to the point that those returns become negative.
For example, my productivity is an entry level staff probably looks something like this:
For the first three hours or so every day - I was between 90% and 100% productive. (I'm a morning person)
For the next two hours I was probably between 60% and 80% productive depending on when lunch was.
Following that lunch period, I was probably 70-80% for two hours.
After the 7th hour, I could have been anywhere between 20% and 70%
After the 9th hour, it was probably no better than 60%
Once I hit the 10th hour, I began to crash and would say that I had a good chance to be -20% productive, which would manifest in me making mistakes that I would need to clean up before my manager saw, or review comments from my manager for sloppy work.
What Can I Do with This Information?
If you made it this far thank you for reading. I like to invite you to do the following:
Figure out when you're most productive over the course of a workday and identify the point at which you start making more work for yourself.
To mitigate the risks of this decreased productivity, see if you can separate your working tasks into complex and not complex areas. Take on the complex areas when you are more refreshed and ready to focus on work, leaving the non-complex areas for when you're inherently less productive. By doing this you can minimize the number of big mistakes you make.
Never work for the sake of working more hours! Understand that working extra hours is okay, even if they might not be as efficient as you’d like. But working extra hours that end up causing you to work more hours will be a harsh cycle of never-ending work.
Companies and professionals on social media tend to glorify working many hours to get something done, and you now know that's not always the best way of doing things. I challenge you to take a look at your workday and see if you can break out of the mindset of working hours for the sake of saying you did. Instead, focus on being productive while working so that when you do need to work those long hours, they will really mean something!