Article - Work Less, Achieve More

READ: 5 mins

AUTHOR: Robert Craven

We are endlessly told that hard work creates more profit. Work harder to create more profit in your agency.

Does more work mean more profit? Do we have to put in ludicrously long hours to be successful?

We have been brought up to believe that working more equates to being more successful. More input equates to more output. Well, I am not sure I agree. I think the logic (and many of the assumptions behind it) is flawed.

Sure, if you are a one-person agency, charging per unit of time, then more units equal more money. But most businesses try to grow by employing people to spread the workload. Or, maybe you should simply charge more per hour! But even that is not scalable.

For those of us who are not charging by the hour, then I would argue that it may well be more profitable to work less. 

I repeat… to work less. Fewer hours… less stress… less banging your head against a brick wall.

I shall be more specific.

Jim currently works five days a week. He contributes 20% of a week's value on each working day. He admits that if he only worked four days a week (ie took Fridays off), then he could easily do ‘25% days’. In other words, with a Friday off he could and would work more productively on the other four workdays.

But the maths deceives us of the real benefits of the extra day off.

If Jim spends Fridays doing whatever it is that he wants to (gardening, household/DIY chores, playing guitar, walking the dogs) then he will spend much of that time ruminating and reflecting on the days that he does work. Consciously, unconsciously, or subconsciously, he will be thinking about what he does on the working days. And this is where things get interesting.

With a bit of space from the work environment, Jim returns on a Monday with a new zest and vigour. But that is not all.

While Jim spends his Fridays doing his own thing, he will come up with great ideas for the business. So, he comes back to work refreshed, reinvigorated and ready to go. Except now he has a freshness and an intensity about himself. He has more focus. More focus on what is required.

FACT: You never come up with great lightbulb moments when sat in front of the computer.

MORAL: Spend time away from the computer.

ACTION: To help your business, book more days off! 

To be more effective you need to work less. My challenge to you is that you can achieve more by working less.

Working harder creates burnout. Working harder satisfies the voice in your head, the monkey on the shoulder, who says, “If you are not working long hours then you are short-changing yourself". What utter tosh. 

We have been sucked in by the protestant work ethic (which did apply to factory workers where longer hours equalled more pay). However, most of us are not factory workers, we are knowledge workers, and our pay is proportionate to the quality of ideas rather than the number of hours that we work. 

So, what's holding you back?

Admittedly, you have to put in the hours in the early stage of your business to get the enterprise off the ground. If success is a consequence of the number of people who know about you then you need to meet as many people as possible. However, I would argue that there is no point in being a busy fool.

Once the business is up and running, the quality of your time is more important than the quantity. You need to spend as much time working ‘on’ the business as possible, stepping back and making sure you are doing the right things. The risk of spending too much time ‘in’ the business is that you might become a busy fool where you can’t see the wood for the trees. You don’t want to build a business that is 100% dependent on you 100% of the time. You want to create a self-sustaining machine that will survive without you.

Taken to its logical extreme, anything that is a repeated task should be handed over to someone else. If you can give a task to someone who can do it for £10 per hour then you holding on to that task means that, in effect, you only value your time at £10 per hour. Surely it is worth more than that.

You need to do more £1,000 per hour sessions and less £10 per hour sessions. And what about some £10,000 per hour sessions. How about some of those?

Here are my one-liners, to print and put by your computer screen:

“ONLY DO WHAT ONLY YOU CAN DO”

“STOP DOING £10 PER HOUR WORK”

“WORK THE 80/20”

“PRODUCE 20% MORE AND WORK 20% LESS”

Let others do the rest.