You Don’t Need More Time, You Just Need to Spend It on What’s Important
There is a common misconception that everything in life comes down to time. Every day I slide down to the same statements: ” If I had more time.” I just need a few extra minutes. A couple of hours of work. However, it seems that we all work longer without doing more.
This post originally appeared on the Crew blog .
We believe that everything we want can be achieved if we had more time . We mistakenly believe that our problems are quantity. However, Americans are already working some of the longest hours in the Western world .
So is more time really the answer?
Shackles of freedom
From the earliest days, we are taught the importance of a daily time-based structure . School days are 8 hours long and classes are built around time intervals, not things to finish. We are taught that it is important to “take the time” and not necessarily complete the job.
However, we are drifting further and further away from this standard practice.
More and more people are working remotely or in non-standard ways as auxiliary workers, contractors or shift workers. The 8-hour working day has been supplanted. But is this really a release from the structure we were hoping for? The freedom to do our job whenever it supposedly gives us the freedom to create our own schedule — whether that means 9-5, 7-2, 2-10, 1-4, or whatever works for you.
It also means that we can spend the same (or less) time at work until it is completed. However, research shows that those who can work less end up working significantly more .
A comprehensive study of hours worked and productivity by the International Labor Organization found that the average worker who had the freedom to set his own hours worked 54 hours a week, compared to 37 hours a week for those who had a set schedule.
That’s 17 additional hours of work per week, simply because of the “freedom” to choose your own hours. Worse, those extra hours don’t translate into quality and productive work.
When the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development studied the productivity impact of increased hours of work in 18 European countries over a 60-year period, they found that our hourly productivity always decreases with increasing hours of work. Not only that, but the payoff decreases faster as the working time increases.
The more we work, the less efficient we become. And as soon as we cross a certain threshold, it only gets worse.
This means we need to spend more time working the next day to catch up and correct the mistakes we made. This means that a total of more hours worked. This means even lower performance. And so on and so forth. So why are we doing this? I know we have all experienced moments when we feel dead, but we continue to work hard, only to redo most of it when we are fresh and rested. Maybe it’s pride. Or a sense of responsibility.
One of the answers that I find most understandable is Parkinson’s Law :
This “law” was introduced by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as part of a humorous essay in The Economist . As one example, Parkinson explains how:
“An elderly lady at her leisure can write and send postcards to her niece in Bognor Regis all day. It will take one hour to find a postcard, another to hunt for glasses, half an hour to find an address, an hour and a quarter to a song, and twenty minutes to decide whether to take an umbrella with you during the trip. to the post on the next street. Thus, a collective effort that would take a busy person three minutes could cause the other person to prostrate themselves after a day of doubt, anxiety and hard work. ”
The more time we spend on a task, the more time we spend on it. And the more time we spend on a task, the worse we perform it.
We cannot work on all cylinders for hours. Motivation, willpower, and focus are all limited resources that we need to use sparingly throughout the day. Spending more time only kills motivation and weakens our work.
So if we work less, we’ll be happier and more productive?
I always felt that I just didn’t have enough time to see friends, keep in touch and do what I wanted to make me happy. While spending time with friends and family is one of my core personal values, I still saw the issue as a problem. I just didn’t have the time to make it work. Less work opens up more time for communication as we do things that help our personal well-being. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Spend less time at work and more time in leisure and visiting those we love. However, this is not quite true.
A study by Stanford University’s Cristobal Young and Chaeyun Lim found that among 500,000 workers, our overall happiness is closely related to the work week . We are happiest on weekends and least of all from Monday to Thursday. Obviously not?
What was surprising is that the study found the same pattern in the unemployed. Even those who didn’t need to be somewhere during the week were less happy during the work week. Young and Lim associate this with the idea of a networked good – communication with others is more important to our well-being than just time for ourselves. You just can’t get “more days off” just by taking yourself an extra day off.
Take time for important work
Therefore, we cannot work more hours to do our job better, and we cannot spend more time to become happier. So what choice do we have? The goal is to focus on efficiency, not output.
We fall into the trap of justifying the work with the time and resources spent on it. “I spent 60 hours / 4 months / 8 years on this. I deserve success. “
A modern proverb in the workplace says that it’s not about the clock, it’s about the work. However, for many telecommuters or those who work non-standard hours, this means getting the job done, no matter the cost. But celebrating X hours spent on a task versus 10 times that time is ridiculous. If we only measure what is done, ignoring the context of how long it took to complete the task and how effective someone was, we miss the whole picture.
Measuring performance by volume is simply unrealistic, explains Lynn Wu, professor of information management at the Wharton School. Productivity isn’t just about what you do. How efficient are you at these tasks.
A recent study by Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School found that most knowledge workers – engineers, writers and those who “think to make a living” – spend an average of 41% of their time on work that we could easily transfer to others. …
Instinctively, we cling to tasks that keep us “busy” (and therefore important). We feel good with a full schedule and card to avoid getting out of jail for all of our life responsibilities. Paradoxically, as we all strive for more time, we are holding onto something that takes up most of our time. So vanity, again, is the reason why we lose our productivity. The need to seem busy and important.
However, working to improve efficiency is incredibly difficult. The initial investment in skills, planning, or training others always leads to long-term effectiveness , freeing up time for the work that matters. Unused tasks.
A new understanding of how we work and live
In all aspects of our life, be it work or personal life, quantity almost never matters. Time taken to work is an indicator of vanity . And spending time with yourself without communication with friends and family is almost pointless.
The problem of quantity is a problem that we cannot change. It just isn’t possible to set aside more time during the day. And the combined effect of long work and late night means you’re always at the bottom. So it’s a matter of quality. Efficiency. Choosing the time to spend at work and deciding how best to spend that time. When we choose, we stop thinking of time as the only dimension of our day.
Here are a few ways to help you choose how to spend your time, which I discovered while researching for this article. Each of them can be used as a filter to decide if you are performing well or not.
Schedule for tasks, not for time
In his essay on the relationship between creator time and manager time, essayist Paul Graham suggests that workers like writers and programmers work at least half a day, rather than hourly or half-hour chunks in managers’ schedules.
Personally, I do my best when the tasks I have to complete do not require a strict timetable or timetable. Reading, writing, editing … they all work best for me when I don’t have to strain or strain to meet my schedule.
Working through a problem to the end gives you a measure of success — something you can use to answer: Am I doing it effectively?
When you find value, keep working
Motivation and energy are limited resources, and wasting them negate our chances or doing meaningful work. In Dr. Steele’s experiments with procrastination and motivation, he found that value is one of the most important aspects for keeping us motivated . When the work we do matters to us, we are more motivated to keep working. Then why stop?
Meetings can be nudged, the stream cannot be easily replayed.
Focus on being better, faster, stronger
As Henry David Thoreau wrote:
“It’s not enough to be busy. Ants too. The question is, what are we doing? “
As creative business coach Mark McGuinness explains, we need to focus every day on one big thing that makes us feel fulfilled . Don’t sit at a table just to be there and pat yourself on the back. Focus on completing your daily work and feeling good about it. Then go away.
The only way to change the way we work is to change the way we think about how we work.
Ask for help
Often we are so engrossed in our work that we forget that we can ask for help. Especially in small teams, where you know everyone’s plate is full, the idea of stepping in and interrupting someone’s day is something that few of us really want to do. But that quick question or short conversation can be the difference between spending an hour or 5 minutes on a task.
Use the knowledge of those around you to be effective when you work.
You don’t need more time. You need a better time. And that only happens when you approach your work and life with the understanding that long hours at work are beneficial. As Seth Godin aptly put it, “You don’t need more time … you just need to decide.”
Time almost always depends on quality, not quantity. So decide what’s important and do it.
No more time needed | Crew