Why spend 50 hours in the office when you only work 10??
Glad the title got your attention. I’ve spent the past 14 years of my life thinking 80–100 hours a week was the solution to entrepreneurial success.
Over the past months I’ve relocated from London, UK to Spain. This transition have forced me to try think different. Suddenly my days was shorter, so I had to work some evenings. I realised that in 3–4 hours in the evening I could do more than I usually did in 12 hours.
I had to try to analyse why my evenings are so productive — and there is only one answer. My phone is not ringing — and I get very limited emails.
This made my put the past 14 years of my working life into perspective. What have been in the office so much for? Why have I even been doing 6am to 2am working days (20 hours). Admittedly even when I did that I accomplished the majority of the work after 6pm.
When we go to the office, when we have our emails, chat, phone open to demand our immediate attention — it simply means that we can’t focus on what we tried to accomplish.
Literally through out my life I’ve had many days where I work from 6–7 am then colleagues are interrupting from 7am-6pm and then my actual work day can start after 6pm.
No doubt, I’ve enjoyed the company of the people I’ve worked with over the years — but literally it takes away any chance of focusing on anything but work.
Why do we allow us self to get to work, read our email — the email demand our attention and we don’t get started with our to-do list. Minutes after the first hour is over — and now it’s 10 am. First meeting of the day. 10 people spend 1 hour together — no decision is made on the subject. Half an hour left until lunch to talk to colleagues about why we can’t seem to solve this or why the boss to the wrong decision when he forced something through out of desparation.
After lunch we may have an hour to work before the 2pm meeting with a client in town which we have some transport for. And yay — it’s 5pm.
How many actual minutes did you work that day? Alright, we will try again tomorrow.
Let’s be real. Let’s focus on what really matters. It’s not to waste time on meetings, social medias etc.
If you work alone and still feel distracted you may feel like you visit Facebook, News sites quite a bit. If you work on Mac I can recommend a program that helped me tremendously.
It’s called HeyFocus. Also you should check out Rescue Time that helps analyse your bad habits.
Go and do something about it!
