7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science

Working smarter, not harder, is the key to better results

Cammi Pham
11 min readApr 29, 2014
Tim Gouw on Unsplash

When I was 17 years old, I used to work and study for about 20 hours a day. I went to school, did my homework during breaks and managed a not-for-profit organization at night. At that time, working long hours landed me countless national campaigns, opportunities to work with A-list organizations and a successful career. As I got older, I started to think differently. I realized that working more is not always the right, or only, path to success.

Sometimes, working less can actually produce better results.

Consider a small business owner who works nonstop. Working hard won’t help him compete with his corporate competitors. That’s because time is a limited commodity. An entrepreneur could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but his or her competitor can always spend more money, assemble a team and spend a lot more collective man hours on the same project. Then why have small startups accomplished things that some larger corporations couldn’t? Facebook bought Instagram, a company with 13 employees at the time, for one billion dollars. Snapchat, a startup with 30 employees, was turning down offers from Facebook and Google. Part of each of…

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Cammi Pham

Unlearner. Marketer. Partner @ Growth + eCommerce Marketing Agency @ThinkRenegade | Write www.cammipham.com hi@cammipham.com