Last New Year, I made a resolution to work less.
I am an entrepreneur and know many traditionally employed and self-employed people who complain about working too much. Yet I don’t know many who consider working less. In my quest to understand why that is, I want to share my journey of what drove me to go from wishing to do it to consciously doing it as well as how it all turned out.
My resolution to work less came after several years of being my own boss. I chose to become self-employed after a failed stint at a traditional 9–5 (or more like 9–8) job. The job wasn’t making me fulfilled and I thought doing it on my own may be a better fit.
The first few weeks of being my own boss were pretty magical. I loved the work I was doing (I work in public relations) — it was new, exciting, and challenging, and I relished at having no bosses, no office to go to and no set schedule. I felt like I was living the dream. I could work whenever and wherever I wanted to, which was all the rage after the publication of Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek”.
Wi-fi cafes were springing up around the world, so I decided to take my self-employed freedom even further and left the U.S. to travel around the world, while keeping the virtual doors of my business open.
But after the initial surge of excitement, I began to notice something strange: because I suddenly had all the time in the world, I began filling that time with, you guessed it, work. Only later I discovered that this was the manifestation of Parkinson’s Law, which says that the more time we have, the more we fill it with work. It’s just that I happened to be falling into this law’s trap in the lovely city of Buenos Aires. Fail.
It took about two months before I finally broke free from the mysterious powers of Parkinson’s Law and found a better work-life balance. However, it came with a price: my business wasn’t growing and hence I wasn’t making much money. But at the time, far from societal expectations, I didn’t really care. I felt extremely happier and more balanced than possibly ever. I had enough to sustain me and keep me traveling around the world. Who would ask for more?
Turns out, I would. After a year of traveling and working minimally, I came back to the U.S. and quickly made the decision to grow my business and make a more respectable income. I chose the perfect setting too — New York City, where about 8 million people shared my ambition.
Growing my business meant spending more time working. But this time, I was glad to do it because growing my business gave me an opportunity to challenge myself, learn new skills, meet interesting people, and increase recognition in the industry — all things that at the time made me happy.
After a while, working long hours began to pay off: I signed on bigger clients, increased my income, hired staff, found a new office, rebranded my company. Colleagues in the industry began to know who I was. My mind was challenged, my social circle was growing, and my vanity was stroked. Working a lot was making me happy...
Until the last holiday season, when I wanted to make New Year’s resolutions for 2015 and noticed something was off. For months, I had been growing more grumpy, anxious and depressed. I wasn’t noticing it with all that busyness, but something about the slower pace of the holidays made me take notice of the strange fact that I was no longer waking up excited to face the work day ahead. I was dreading it, actually. Somehow, while my business and my bank account grew, my level of happiness plummeted and I felt something like this:
That’s when I remembered how much happier and balanced I felt while traveling the world. I was working less and making less money, but I was a much more fulfilled human being.
So I decided to reevaluate my own expectations of what I was hoping to get out of the eight or ten or however many hours I spent working. I sat down and made a list. It turned out that I expected those hours to make me:
- Feel challenged.
- Learn new things.
- Feel like what I did mattered.
- Make money.
And yet, in reality, the only thing I was actually getting out of that work time was money. The rest had somehow vanished. No wonder I no longer felt fulfilled. Waking up every day expecting to get four things and consistently getting one is the definition of lunacy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Money is a perfectly great value to get out of work and many people in many places go to work not expecting anything else. But me — the idealistic entrepreneur who quit a 9–5 job to pursue the “dream living” — I expected work to be more than a means to an end. I expected it to make me Fulfilled, with a capital F.
Now that I realized my work wasn’t making me Fulfilled, I had a choice: quit what I was doing or adjust my expectations.
I wasn’t ready to quit. I had put in too much time into my business to quit now. So instead, I asked myself how much time I wanted to spend on deriving one of four values I needed.
The answer was easy: a lot less. To be more specific, 50 percent less. If I wanted to keep myself from becoming increasingly stressed, depressed and generally unpleasant to be around, I had to get away from the generally accepted adage of Time = Money and start thinking that Time = Whatever I Need to Feel Fulfilled.
Deciding to work less required making major shifts in how I ran my business (which I’ll leave for another post). It wasn’t easy. But it was certainly doable. And it helped me develop a more honest relationship with my work. Now, I simply call work Money Time, which although it may sound crass, actually makes me feel much less delusional about what it’s all for.
In case you’re wondering what effect working less had on my lifestyle, it actually didn’t change all that much. I did higher quality work for fewer clients, I ate out a little less and cooked a little more, and I generally bought less crap.
What did I do with all that new free time? Looking back on 2015, I’m proud to report that by decreasing my work hours and by working smarter, not harder, I freed up what I call Fulfillment Time. That’s when I did things that challenged me, taught me new things, made me feel better about my purpose here and generally made me, well, more fulfilled. Things that I’ve been meaning to do for years, actually, but somehow never found enough time… Things like reading books, exercising, traveling, talking to faraway family members, and writing a book, which I had been putting off for like a century.
Keeping this newfound balance between Money Time and Fulfillment Time has been a constant challenge — in the summer, I took on a new client and for about a month and a half the balance shifted back toward working too much, stressing too much and doing everything else I had let into my life too little.
I know this balancing act will stay challenging. But I look forward to a 2016 full of good books, fun challenges, memorable travel, interesting people, and empty pages waiting to be filled.
Find more of my stories on my blog.
