Here’s What I Do To Have a 5-Hour Workday
I hope my boss doesn’t read this post. I work as a contractor and have a side hustle — and I’ve never been so productive.
I’m not a detractor of 9–5 routines, honestly.
I just believe that, for a specific group of professionals, it no longer works.
With the rise of digital and creative work, this group is increasingly becoming less specific, encompassing more and more people.
I believe this is my case. I have — technically — an eight-hour daily contract as a Product Manager, while also working at my own SaaS company.
Initially, I thought that being an employee and running a business externally would be a grueling adventure.
However, over time, I learned to optimize my effort and reduce this journey to an average of 5 hours a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
None of this was done with hacks or miraculous techniques, just organization and experience. It was a natural consequence of my process, which I am sharing with you now.
8-Hour vs. 5-Hour Model
In economic units, productivity can be calculated with a simple ratio between output and labor hours.
Today, this calculation is extremely reductive and simplistic. For an industry, for example, this can serve very well: you produce X parts in Y hours, etc.
When we’re talking about the creative economy, software, technology, design, writing and others, it doesn’t work that way.
In these cases, the outcome is much more important than the output. What matters is customer satisfaction, not delivery per se.
Another weight on this scale is the disparity of productive moments. There are situations in which we enter a state of flow, in which we can perform tasks in high number and complexity.
On the other hand, there are situations where we simply spend time without producing almost anything, in useless meetings, unimportant emails and social media.
So here’s what makes an effective workday in less than eight hours.
Work During Your Mental Peak
With defined work hours, your biological balance makes no difference. After all, everyone is at the same time, in the same place, always.
Once you recognize your moments of greater mental fluidity — and therefore greater productivity — you increase your barriers to distraction and procrastination.
Being able to choose where and when to start is the key for you to organize your work to finish it in less time than scheduled.
If you are an early bird, reserve your early hours of the day for your most important activities. If you are a night owl, do the same thing for the end of the day.
Be Realistic With Workloads
When creating a to-do list, it’s easy to get carried away. We have the bias of overestimating our capability during the planning and underestimating it during execution.
It’s easy to leave a huge workload to your “future self”, who will regret it when you become the “present self”.
This increases the tendencies towards self-distraction, procrastination. After all, as I’ve already shown here, lack of initiative at work comes much more from an emotional charge than a physical one.
When we know we have a lot of work and tight deadlines, we automatically activate a mental defense mechanism that prevents us from facing the problem directly.
So, remember the estimation bias when planning.
It’s better to set a modest (but doable) routine and — if you have time — run the extra mile, than to push a lot of work into the future.
Prioritize by Similarity
Transitioning between tasks is one of the things that hinders productivity the most.
That’s because changing subjects change our focus, our way of thinking. And whenever we lose focus, it takes an average of 20–30 minutes to return.
So, if you have a pre-defined sequence of tasks, preferably aligned in terms of similarity, you can maintain more focus time.
The idea here is not to make your brain realize that you are doing different tasks, but just downstream a continuous cycle.
Have a Performance History
If you want to have a realistic workload, you need to make estimates, right?
It’s normal for people to make estimates in hours. I, however, prefer to estimate by task size.
Next, I analyze how much time I spend on tasks of different sizes to then have a reliable probability of time spent.
There are several sizing patterns you can adopt, such as:
- Fibonacci: 1, 3, 5, 8 etc.
- T-shirt sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL.
Or any other.
The important thing is to create a framework that works for you.
Obviously, in the beginning, you will start with a blank history. For a while, you will not have accurate estimates. However, over time you will populate your history and have the best type of work estimate possible.
Shift Your Mindset
It took me a while to understand that I don’t need eight hours to complete a workday.
Also, remote work helped me to realize how senseless this logic can be (as I said at the beginning, for specific cases).
I prefer to have fewer hours of work that are very focused and agile, instead of a specific time to be fulfilled. As they say, you can clean your room in three hours or three days. It all depends on the deadline you have.
What I’ve done is get my brain used to working to tight deadlines, even if it’s not. It helps me make faster decisions, ignore useless stuff, and be more action-oriented.
This way, I can work with my maximum energy, when my body is at its most vigorous, focused and sharp.
That’s more than enough to get things done.
Work More if You Want
I’m not saying I only work for five hours under any circumstances. Today, a normal working day is five hours for me.
The difference is that now I have the advantage of being able to advance future work, dedicate myself to less important subjects, study, etc.
I use the time on my behalf instead of being its servant. Working more than five hours a day is an option, not an obligation.
