As counterintuitive as it sounds, I have started to realize I get more done if I commit to closing my work laptop at 5 pm or 6 pm every day as opposed to letting myself work until 7 or 8.
This sounds like it could be easily explained with some vague notion of how capping your workday at 8 hours keeps you from entirely exhausting yourself, and that helps give you more energy between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm. That might be true, but it's really not at all a factor in my head.
To me, committing to capping my workday at 5 pm or 6 pm prevents me from brute-forcing my way through my to-do list, completing tasks inefficiently and failing to prioritize any of the activities I'm doing. When I have 10 hours of work and only 8 hours to do it in, I find myself actually asking the questions 1) what are the most important things to get done today and 2) are there any ways I can redesign these tasks so they're less time consuming in the future? If I devote 60 hours of my week to working, my workload will certainly balloon itself into filling all 60 hours. However, if I actually cap my workweek at around 40 hours, I always seem to find little ways I can save time and find minor efficiencies that help turn a 60-hour pile of work into a 40-hour fully completed to-do list.
Let me be clear; sometimes a 10-hour task is just a 10-hour task no matter how you splice it, and there is no clear way to "work smarter" and cut down on that time. Sometimes you just have a week at work that requires 70 hours of attention, and there's nothing you can do about it. But in general, I think the adage of, "Hire a lazy person to do your most important task because they'll find an easy way to get it done," holds true here too. It's valuable to have workhorses in a company who have no problem cranking through tasks one-by-one and putting in 70-hour weeks on the regular. But it's also valuable to have folks who really don't want to work much more than 40 hours and therefore have to seek out these shortcuts and little efficiencies. It's not a skill that I've mastered yet, but it's most certainly a realization I'm making.
Here's to the lazy ones, the misfits, the rebels...
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