They Say to Work Less and You’ll Be More Productive

The last few years have brought on this “work less and be more productive” movement which got a huge boost in momentum from Tim Ferriss’ best seller 4 Hour Work Week book.  I read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It got me thinking about a lot of concepts and I even tried implementing some into my life and work.

This was several years ago and now that I can look back on some of my successes and failures over those years I have concluded that the periods where I’ve had the largest influxes of revenue and success have come after long, extended periods of putting in A LOT of work hours. By a lot I mean many days of consecutive 9am – 2am work days.

The first few periods that I went through weeks or months of this schedule it really wore on me. I burned out several times from this schedule and had uncertainty of whether I’d see the fruits of this labor pay off. But almost each time I put myself through these stages, for the months that followed I saw great professional gains (usually monetarily).

Of course to many people this type of work hour schedule is simply not worth any amount of fortune it brings but to me it did not feel like “work” most of the time. I’ve heard more than once from my 9 – 5 friends “Omg what are you thinking working that much” or “Wow you must be really busy with work”.

The thing is, it’s not about “am I busy with work or not”. It is about the fact that when you run your own company and love being an entrepreneur you rarely do any of this “work” because you have to. You do it because you want to and because you know the great satisfaction and reward you will feel upon seeing your efforts come to fruition. And although the financial payoff is nice, it’s not always about that either.

So to conclude and answer why I’m writing about this now – I’m coming off a period of working these types of hours after many months of taking it easy and traveling. Right now putting all of my energy into the business feels really good and I’m seeing great advances. Ones I did not see when I was enjoying life and traveling for the past 6 months.

How do you guys feel about this topic and have you seen more advances when you work crazy hours or when you try living the 4 hour work week?