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Email ThisAs any college student will tell you, scheduling classes is an art form. My first semester I didn’t have much choice and had to take whatever was available. My second semester I loaded up on Monday and Thursday and had the rest of the week off. It sucked - Mondays and Thursdays wore me out and the rest of the week I had to spend 10 hours doing homework. My third semester I put large gaps between my classes so I’d have time to get work done during the day, but all I did was bone around on ESPN.com and AIM.
My fourth semester I finally got it right: 1 - 3 hour breaks between classes, equally spread out throughout the week. I got the same amount of work done in a 2 hour break that I’d get done in a 5 hour break the previous semester. I didn’t mess around and waste time because I was under a time crunch. A 2 hour break really means like 70 minutes of work when you factor travel time and setup time into the equation. You don’t have any time to mess around with 70 minutes: you’re always under a bit of pressure and that’s why you get so much done. You’re focused. This one lesson has stuck with me ever since.
Read the following excerpts and stop and think for a few minutes before continuing the post.
If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault. There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission. The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9 and 5, and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill the time. Time is wasted because there is so much time available. It’s understandable.
Most entrepreneurs were once employees and come from the 9-5 culture. Thus they adopt the same schedule, whether or not they function at 9 AM or need 8 hours to generate their target income. This schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results-by-volume approach. How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary.
Since we have 8 hours, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and suddenly need to leave work in 2 hours, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours.
Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Workweek, pages 73-74
ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.
In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.
One of the misconceptions about ROWE is that it’s a work-from-home program. It’s not. If you want to work in a cube, that’s great. If you want to work from a coffee shop, then that’s great, too. The question in a ROWE is not “where is everybody?” but “is the work getting done?”
Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in an interview with Tim Ferriss
The United States leads the world in two categories: work and waste. American employees put in more hours and take fewer vacations than just about anyone else in the industrialized world, and our individual ecological “footprints” are much larger.
Coincidence? I think not. The way we work drives our habits of consumption and waste. The more we work, the more we drive, the more energy we burn, the more styrofoam to-go containers we use. At the end of the day, we’re so tired, we devour more takeout and TV, often falling asleep in front of the latter. If we want to accelerate the recent trend of reducing waste, it may be time to consider the radical step of, well, relaxing more, consuming less, and living fuller lives. May the Wall Street Journal editorial board strike me down.
Naturally, most businesses blanch at the notion of giving up any competitive edge in a globalized economy. But it’s not as if moving to a four-day (or 32-hour) workweek would simply lop 20% off the economy. Cutting hours may actually raise per-hour productivity. France, home of the 35-hour week, creates more GDP per work hour than the United States ($37 versus $34, as of 2003). Norway spanks us too ($39), and Norwegians work 26% fewer hours a year than Americans. It’s a myth of modern hypercapitalism that an overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed-out workforce is a necessity. Studies have consistently shown that longer workweeks increase productivity only in the very short term. In a recent survey by Salary.com, workers copped to wasting about 20% of the average day Web surfing and gossiping. Sound familiar?
Companies can take the first step by reinventing the workweek. Then it’s up to us to devote our increased leisure hours to activities with low environmental impact — and not to driving around gas-guzzling cars or booting up power-hungry electronics. Then we could enjoy both continued wealth and improved planetary health.
David Roberts - Reinventing the Workweek, Green Business Practices - Fast Company: May 2008
OK, soak those in for a second…got it? Here’s what I think when I read excerpts like that:
The Logical Thought
So if I’m not an employee, and we’re in long term growth mode (past the start-up phase), and 9-5 is completely arbitrary, and it’s shown that less time working will make me more productive per hour spent, and if I’ll be healthier/happier by spending more time on things outside of work, and it’s better for the environment, why the f*ck am I working so many hours?
In the startup phase there’s a “cavalier” attitude that you have to have. Life = work and work = life, and that’s OK. But I’ve been doing that for two years and I don’t want to become that guy who works 24×7 for their entire life and misses out on everything else. I enjoy new experiences and new people. I enjoy experiencing life. A large part of that is being an entrepreneur, but there’s also a lot that has nothing to do with running a business.
I spent a lot of my engineering days in college, on internships, and in the work force working on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing projects and always thought to myself “why can’t these principles be applied to areas in business outside of manufacturing?” What 4HWW did for me was validate that increasing effectiveness and efficiency not only can be applied to all areas of a business, but in all areas of life too. Like everyone else I have become conditioned to 9 -5 and needed a little push to realize that I didn’t have to stay a part of it.
What I Want us to Become
I badly want us to become a model of efficiency and effectiveness. I want it because it makes us a more valuable company. I want it because removing the mundane and repetitive improves the quality of our lives.
In my head, all of this starts with our business processes. Unless you’ve got a ton of money (we don’t) you need to do the equivalent of hiring people by automating anything that is repetitive and can be done without human input. It started with our shopping cart software that automates inventory and shipping (side note: we had the owners of a large e-commerce store that’s been running for twelve years come visit us recently. The founder turned to George and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside). It continued by moving all of our data to the web and automating backups and with George automating his accounting. In the future we’ll automate more of our marketing - while things like Google Base submission are automatic, niche newsletters based on customer behavior aren’t quite there yet…but they will be.
Once the business processes are set we can move on to us. We all want to work less hours. Some tasks - like packing and shipping - cannot reasonably be automated with technology so the way you “automate” them is to hire employees. I feel that by the end of ‘09 we’ll have the 2-3 people in place that we need to allow us to work 20 hour workweeks. That’s my personal goal for each of us - the other guys might be thinking less or more, but that’s what I’m pushing for.
How did I come up with 20 hours? In 4HWW Tim Ferriss asks the question “If you had a heart attack and had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?” He asks the question to challenge you to think about what you really need to do to successfully complete your job. However, he bases this on the premise that you don’t like your job and want to work as little as possible. That’s not me/us. I love this stuff. One of the things I really want to do a lot this summer is white water rafting - I’ve been twice and it was fun as hell so I want to officially make it one of my hobbies. I’m pumped. But I equally want to expand upon an email marketing system that we recently launched (right now we send follow-up emails to everyone who makes a purchase asking them to review their products on the DI blog or TD forum, but there’s a ton of growth potential there). I also equally want to hike every state park in the Albany area. Of course I also equally want to bulk up my AJAX skills and improve the user experience on our cart.
Clearly I love our company as much as I love non-work related things. It’s a good place to be in life. 20 hours limits you just enough so that you get excited to work. If I can only work 20 hours the intensity in which I work will be multiplied many times over. I’ll also really look forward to those few hours a day instead of letting my mind drift to things that I might rather be doing.
What I’m Doing About it
I realize that this all starts with me. I’m the one usually “proposing” these wacky things to my partners so I have to prove the concept before I can expect them to get on board. 20 hours isn’t realistic right now because we don’t have an employee and won’t for a while. However, I’m always looking to make progress and prove my point so I’ve decided to limit myself to 35 hours of work each week. After a few months, I’m going to make it 30. Then I’ll stay at 30 until we have our 2-3 employees in place and trained.
What counts as “work” you ask? Good question. I’m counting everything that is related to running Pure Adapt with the exception of:
- Commuting time
- Blog posts on this blog
- Time spent reading business books or business magazines
- Time spent learning (for example, I have a few AJAX books that will take a lot of time to work through…those don’t count)
Everything else is fair game. I purposely waited until the end of Thursday to do this post because I wanted to test my limitation this week. This week is the perfect test week - if I can do it this week I can do it 95%+ of the time. Being that I got NOTHING done last week with our server mess, my to-do list was backed up a ton. On Sunday night I took all 20 action items and split them up equally among the days of the week. In my head I said to myself “you’re only going to have 6 or 7 hours to do all of this, so you better be focused”. It has worked. Every day I knocked each item off. I am getting at least as much work done in far less time. Some days I worked right up to the last second and others - like today - I was done early. Thus far here are the hours I’ve worked:
- Monday - 7 AM - 2:30 PM (7.5 hrs)
- Tuesday - 7:30 AM - 4 PM (8.5 hrs)
- Wednesday - 7:30 AM - 1:30 PM (6 hrs)
- Thursday - 7:30 AM - 1 PM (5.5 hrs)
That puts me at 27.5 hrs through Thursday. We each have four days at the warehouse and one “off”. My off day is Friday, so I generally do the most work Monday - Thursday. 7.5 hours for Friday - Sunday sounds just about right. I’ll probably work about 4 hours tomorrow, 3 hours on Saturday, and just check email on Sunday (Indy 500 baby….anyone else pumped!?!?!).
This past four days has been the best of my life in terms of work-life balance. There’s nothing outside of work that I wanted to do that I didn’t. That’s huge for me. I’ve also stopped doing work at home - I do most of my work at the warehouse and the rest at Starbucks/other local coffee shops, which helps me mentally unwind when I walk through the door of my apartment. Continuing this schedule will go a long way to ensuring I get the fulfillment I’m looking for out of both work AND life.
I’ll definitely continue to post updates as this unfolds…should be interesting.
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Adam,
I have to say, I’m quite impressed with this post. Well reasoned and thought out. Nice work.
As a cube dweller, my bosses are mainly of the Boomer variety, and have a tough time understanding us Millennials anyway. Do you have any suggestions for the best way to explain this process to a generation where it was expected to put your nose to the grinding wheel and ‘pay your dues’?
Thanks.
I was actually planning on writing something similar to this next week.
We just started half day fridays, today is the first day. Guess what, by 9:30 90% of my job was done, and the other 10% is me waiting for a few things to clear the bank account. This usually takes me all day to do because I’ll screw around, read blogs, send e-mail, all while waiting for other departments (presumably also screwing around) to ge me the info I need to do my job. By 9:30 I had everything in my hands and was able to finish my job. Today has been my most efficient day at work!
-Daniel
Awesome blog. Its just so natural to move toward this, and like you said and put it in words so well, the world somehow agreed to shuffle papers from 9-5, for one-third of their lives, and that never made sense to me because there’s just no rational reason. And you’re right that most entrepreneurs I know haven’t gotten themselves out of that pattern, either. In fact, they’re often worse about demanding it from those who work for them.
I know what efficiency can do. When I was teaching, on a salaried contract, the first two years I was there 40, 50, and 60 hours a week. I got tired of it because my body was tired of it, and I decided - commmitted to change. So the third year I was there, I made a commitment to being efficient and prioritizing and getting out of there on time. It took some work, but, by midyear that year, I was working no more than 33 hours a week and doing a good job because I was more energized than ever.
-John
Love the post. I also loved 4HWW. I just finished it a couple weeks ago. As an entrepreneur, I find it extremely difficult to get my work done in less than 12 hours per day. Mostly, because my employee’s are always looking to me for leadership and direction. I do this for 8 hours and then spend the other four ours working on my work. I think one of the ways that Tim recommends to improve your hours worked is outsourcing. I could not agree more, because the company I own is a fulfillment outsourcing operation. If you need help fulfilling or distributing a product we can help. By outsourcing your fulfillment, you can focus more on growing your business and leave the 12 hour days to us. SBC Fulfillment can help you. We are a third party fulfillment company. We do e-commerce fulfillment, literature fulfillment, product fulfillment, warehousing, pick, pack, and ship. Check out our website at http://www.sbcfulfillment.com
Thanks for all of the comments guys.
@ Colin - hand them a copy of 4HWW and tell them to read it over and over until they internalize it and believe every word :). Seriously though, it’s a huge challenge. I think the best way to approach it is to focus solely on your relationship with your boss. First off, make sure your goals are well defined and you meet regularly. If you review goals monthly I think you should pick a month and only work the minimum (9-5 or whatever your office does) and show your boss that you hit all of your goals. From there you can get a bit more aggressive and try some wackier stuff: tell your boss you’d get more done if you sit out of a meeting (then make it a regular occurrence), ask if you can work one day a week from home because you’ll get more done (and then make it 2, 3, 4, 5), or take a week vacation but work the full week for 5 hrs a day and prove to your boss that you got more done by being off the radar. Most boomers will warm up to it if they see you doing it to increase your productivity and not to skip out on work (even though you’re doing it for both).
@Daniel - exactly. Anyone who actually thinks about productivity will realize that it can be drastically improved in today’s workforce. Everyone has had days like yours today.
@John - most people and most businesses never ever have that same thought that you did after 2 years. Makes you wonder huh?
@Brian - thanks for the comment turned plug for your company :). Fulfillment businesses are definitely on the rise for the reasons you mentioned. Go after the 4HWW crowd as your target market!
If you are working only 20 hours a week, how many hours do the 2-3 employees have to work? And as it gets busier -when more widgets need to get packed for more orders, I suppose you just hire more part-time employees who also only work 20 hours a week? But in order for the work to get done someone has to be there to do it, so you can’t get “more efficient” sometimes, unless they move faster packing those boxes.
There is some point, and are some jobs where a longer work day means more work gets done, when they working at top efficiency or not - hamburgers get flipped, boxes get packed, the bus to pick up rafters gets driven.
Balance IS something worth striving for. But, work is not something to fear.
Hi KC
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
I would think we would establish a 35-40 hour work week for our employees. We want them to be “full time” but certainly want to ensure they get the balance and flexibility they need to live their lives.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s not a requirement for owners to work the same as their employees. Sometimes the owner is the workhorse and is around all day long, and there’s something to be said for that and setting that example for your employees. Sometimes in other businesses the owners are in and out and not involved in day-to-day operations.
I think a true entrepreneur strives to be the latter. Like most business owners I’d like to think 10 years down the road and see myself owning several different businesses. Obviously to do that you eventually need to remove yourself from the day-to-day.
And I would argue that you can get “more efficient” at warehouse work. If someone has their job clearly outlined as “pack all of the outgoing orders, stock shelves with incoming inventory, and clean up every day and you can leave as soon as you are done” don’t you think you’ll get more efficiency than if they have to work 8 - 5 every day? Now that can’t be done in 1 hour, but you might be looking at the difference between a 6 hour shift and an 8 hour shift.
Some jobs certainly have restrictions, but there aren’t any that I can think of for us.
“Balance IS something worth striving for. But, work is not something to fear.”
Certainly no fear here, I love what I do. Hopefully our employees will - at a minimum - enjoy their jobs and the flexibility and open-mindedness that my partners and I have.
I also recently read 4HWW and liked your post. I personally strive to be more focused and efficient with what I am doing but there are some big assumptions that go into the 4HWW and your post which don’t always hold true.
The main assumption is that people are goofing off or getting distracted and stretching tasks that would really take 10 or 20 hours into 40. I personally work at a former job where we really had the freedom to only spent a few hours in the office and work whererver or when ever we wanted as long as deadlines were met. Sounds great right? But actually it took 50-60 hours a week to do the work assigned while consistently staying focused and finishing tasks off efficiently. I agree with your statistics that people may be not working while at work 20% of the time but to really cut out 50% or 90% of your time is a serious stretch without making major lifestyle/job changes. Tim Ferriss has many specific ways to do this in his book but I don’t think those are realistic for everyone or even the majority of workers.
Matt,
Thanks for commenting. I agree with everything you said. You pretty much have to make a “major lifestyle/job” change to put 4HWW stuff into play (telecommute, start your own business, hire assistants to do part of your work, etc).
One thing I try to do with my blog (sometimes successfully and sometimes not so much) is talk more about MY situation and what I’m going through instead of telling others what they should/shouldn’t do.
I left my job and have 2 spent years working to get to this pt where I can start making these changes. It’s not for everyone necessarily, but it’s the lifestyle that I am striving for. I never expect people to completely agree with me or follow my lead on things I do, I just want to show people a different and unique side of attacking their career in hopes that it makes them think a little bit more about what they really want from a job.
Adam
have 2 spent years = have spent 2 years (really more like 2.5 now that I think about it…)
Awesome article! I haven’t read the 4HWW yet, but I’ll definitely have to check it out!
One of the things to remember in all this is how different people define work. The trouble when you work for a big firm is as the book says: “you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill the time”.
I’m looking forward to seeing how you manage to implement this in your life/business! Good luck!!
Adam:
Great post. I agree with you completely. It looks like you are a morning guy, since you have decided to start working pretty early. That’s something I have found. If you work at your most productive times, you can crank out a lot more work in a lot less time. My most productive time is 1-3:30 p.m. or so. I realize I am the only person in the world that is more productive after lunch, but that’s me. I hate mornings.
Since I have a VERY flexible schedule and able to set my own hours, I, too, am having the best work/life balance of my life.
GenerationXpert - glad to hear you are also enjoying the best work/life balance of your life
What you said is very true - if you aren’t a morning guy like me than don’t freaking do work in the morning. Do it in the afternoon or at night. One of my partners cranks out work in the 9 PM - Midnight time period. IF I’m even up at those times I’m certainly not working, but for him it’s his “quiet time” to rip through work. To each his own. That’s something that the corporate world will probably always struggle with, but many people just aren’t that efficient in the 9-5 time frame.