80-Hour Weeks are Bunk

October's Fast Company cover story says "Balance is Bunk!" (FC subscription required until later in month) [As in work-life balance.] I agree. Not for the same reasons though. One cited reason for the 'end of balance' from author, Keith H. Hammonds:

"Finally, there was my trip to Bangalore, India, in 2002, where I was awed by the fervor of workers I met. These people who had tasted opportunity and desperately wanted more. The implication seemed clear to me and still does: If anything, we're all going to be working harder, not less."

Tom Peters is saying basically the same.

They say “Take a deep breath. Be calm.”
I say “Tell it to Wal*Mart. Tell it to China. Tell it to India. Tell it to Dell. Tell it to Microsoft.”

They say “Eighty-hour weeks will kill you.”
I say “Work 35-hour weeks, and the Chinese will kill you.”

They say “continuous improvement.”
I say “Bold Leaps.”

This talk reminds me of the late 90s. The dot-com period had to be one of the most wasteful periods I've ever witnessed. Working eighty-hour plus is, in fact, terribly UNproductive as hell. Although it might work on factory floors - but Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco, and author of Seven-Day Weekend would argue with that.

Throwing time and/or money at problems typically results in extremely inelegant, uncreative solutions that require even more time and more money to sustain.

If you're truly operating in a conceptual and idea age, you have got it backwards. You can't win by playing the game using the same rules as your opponents. That's yesterday's race. Where labor is cheap, they'll just throw more bodies at the problem. That's a crazy strategy to follow in a country where no one blinks forking over nearly $4 for a coffee drink.

Pierre Omidyar came up with the eBay system precisely because he didn't have the luxury of resources - he already had a full-time job - it forced him to think creatively.

I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback -- even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat. - Omidyar's commencement speech at Tufts

Google could easily have thrown money and time and hired translators left and right to solve the problem of globalizing and localizing their website. Luckily they used their heads instead of brute force. They turned their foreign visitors into a volunteer translation force.

If you want to see tedious, excruciatingly painful continuous improvement, just have creative people up their hours. Works for me every time.

I'll grant you that merely reducing work-time from eighty-hours to thirty-five hours is not a silver bullet either. Time is part of the equation but it's isn't IT. You can feel squeezed for time regardless of the reality simply by spending your life in the past or in the future.

I noticed that 90 percent of my best ideas arose when I was riding my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was in a balanced state of alertness - alert enough to be careful about how I was riding, and not trying to solve my problem of the day. I'd be playing with ideas at the back of my mind. That was when insights tended to arise. - from interview with Ben Schneiderman, researcher and inventor at University of Maryland, Breakthrough: Stories and Strategies of Radical Innovation by Mark and Barbara Stefik

It's not simply time. Why can one person go away for three days and come back renewed and fill up a notebook on their return to overflowing with new ideas to start tackling and another person takes off for two weeks and returns nicely tanned but certainly not brimming with any new ideas and as stressed-out as ever on that first Monday back. Hmmm....What's the difference? Ponder that for a bit.

About a week or two ago, I saw the movie What About Bob? This is a story of an extremely neurotic man, Bob played by Bill Murray, that stalks his therapist to his hideaway vacation home. Bob is insanely obsessed with the future going awry. Sure it's bit extreme, but he isn't that much different from most of us. Bob "cures" his neurosis only by forgetting to fret about what-horrid-thing-could-happen-next because he's having too good a time living moment to moment to worry about it. This capacity to be fully engaged is one hallmark of creativity.

Take a really bold leap and don't just take the "tried-and-true" approach of throwing money and/or time at problems. Do something radical. Challenge yourself to do less [highly recommend Seth Godin's Do Less manifesto] and accomplish more.

If you really want to grind away at 80-hour weeks looking over your shoulder at your global competition no one will stop you. But there is another way.

Comments

[Johnnie Moore]

Top blogging Evelyn. I wonder if these people who seem keen that I join them in panicking as a lifestyle would do better to pause and just acknowledge their anxiety instead of rushing around acting it out. Still, I find them quite helpful because their behaviour tends to trigger the contrarian in me. So, paradoxically, their determination to get instensly busy helps me to relax.

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

Great post Evelyn! One key to this approach, I think, is self-trust. When you are under the gun to meet a deadline, it takes courage to walk away from your desk, to go for a run, to do some needlepoint, play with your pets, go to the market, etc. To do anything to get away from the desk so you can free your mind to think differently.

I often have to force myself to walk away, to trust that the ideas will come. They almost always do, but it is hard going against the years of training/brainwashing that says you just have to plug away, be disciplined, etc. Self-doubt is a killer to creativity. Self-trust is the key.

[Katherine]

Heh. Thanks for the validation! I spent today not working, in spite of a painfully looming deadline. Here's hoping I'm rested and refreshed and ready to tackle it tomorrow.

[laurent bervas]

I spent time, in my office doing meditation.
I need to be creative : It's efficient.

But just think about "normal" jobs : a bus driver, a General Motors employee has no time for creativity (in fact a little bit).

I haven't the response to make a change for them ?

[Avi Solomon]

Fred Gratzon is right on the money about this:
http://www.lazyway.net