You don’t need more time
Next time a friend brags about how much they work, look them in the eye and say, ”What can you delegate?”
Next time a coworker stays at the office after you leave, give them a pat on the back and say, ”I’m sorry the office is so distracting that you can’t be effective.”
Next time anyone mentions how busy they are, threaten to slap them and say, ”Stop making excuses and decide what’s important.”
Next time you do any of those, look in the mirror and say, ”You’re an idiot.”
You don’t need more time. You need better time.
That’s the conclusion Jory Mackay came to in his essay You don’t need more time.
Every day I find myself slipping into these same statements:
If only I had more time.
I just need a few extra minutes.
A couple hours of work. That’s all.
We believe that everything we want can be achieved if only we had more time.
Me too. Not a day goes by that I don’t think “If only I had more time”. And every day I’m wrong. Wanna know what I actually do with all that time?
I’m tired and I waste time online. The more I work, the more time I waste.
The funny part is that we seem to want this. We want to spend more time working because it makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we’re killing it. Like we’re working hard even though we’re not at all.
Mackay cites a study that found that the more freedom people have to choose their own schedule, the more freedom they have to work less, the more time they spend working.
A comprehensive study on hours worked and productivity by the International Labour Organization found that the average worker who had the freedom to set their own hours worked 54 hours per week, versus 37 hours a week by those with set schedules.
That’s 17 extra working hours a week, just from the ‘freedom’ to choose your own hours.
To make it worse, all that extra time spent working leads to worse productivity, not better. I’ve written about this before on the Nightowls mailing list — working more than 40 hours per week leads to worse overall performance. Not worse per hour, worse total.
When you work long hours, your errors compound.
You work more today to “just finish one thing quick”. Then you come back tomorrow and see that you’ve made a mistake. You spend an hour fixing it. Now you’re an hour behind. So you spend an extra hour at work. But your focus has faded, so it takes an extra hour and a half.
The next day you come back and it takes two hours to fix the mistakes you made. So you spend two and a half more hours at work.
Then … you get the picture. It’s bad.
I spent all of Friday fixing bugs that wouldn’t have happened if I cared just a little less about catching the deadline. Now my next deadline is a whole day shorter.
The worst part about having poor boundaries and allowing yourself to work too much is Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted.
Spending more time only kills motivation and weakens the work we’re doing.
Choose to make time for the work that matters
The goal is to focus on efficiency, rather than output.
Mackay cites several studies showing that how we think about work is all wrong. There’s one that found that no matter how you twist and turn, it makes no sense to measure productivity by output. It doesn’t matter how long it took you to get something done. Taking more time doesn’t make the result any better, and taking less time doesn’t make it any worse. What matters is that it got done.
Most people and many managers see studies like that and think that it means ”Get shit done at all cost! Burn the candle on both ends! Come to work first, leave last!”
No.
What matters is how efficiently you got the thing done. Because the more efficient you are, the more things you can get done. Three things shipped are better than one thing shipped perfectly. One thing shipped is better than no thing shipped.
Set a deadline. Cut everything that’s in the way. Ship.
Time spent working is a vanity metric.
The problem of quantity is one we can’t change. There just is no way to get more time in your day. And the compound effects of working long hours and late nights means that you always come out on the bottom.
So it’s a matter of quality. Efficiency. Choosing how much time to spend working and deciding what’s the best way to spend that time.
When we choose, we stop thinking of time as the only measurement to our day.
So what are you to do? Mackay has four suggestions:
- Schedule for tasks, not time (take half-day, finish the thing)
- When you find value, keep working (if it’s going well, for the love of god don’t stop)
- Focus on being better. Faster. Stronger.
- Ask for help (sometimes a 5min conversation can save 1h of work)
It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
~ Henry David Thoreau
Read Jory Mackay’s full article. I loved it.
Got opinions? Write me an email (swizec@swizec.com) or tweet me (@swizec). I promise to read it.
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