The Future Of Work Will Be A 25-Hour Workweek

When I tell people I work 25 hours a week, they look at me skeptically: “How can you manage a business working part-time only?” or “I couldn’t do that, I love working too much”.

Funny enough, I love what I do more than ever.?

It so happens I do.

Let me elaborate on this.?

In most countries, the workweek is around 35 to 40 hours a week, so around 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Now looking at the 25-hour workweek, that means 10 to 15 hours less per week. That makes it 3 hours less per day, so 5 hours of work per day when working for 5 days a week.

What does this mean in terms of work productivity?

The more working time you have, the more space left for distractions, and the more time you spend on pointless tasks. It becomes easier to get sidetracked and lose focus.

The challenges here are to project manage your own time and use your efforts strategically.

Better manage your to-do list

So why do so many people struggle with managing their week? There are several reasons, the easiest one is that “we have always done it that way”. Another one has to do with the journey of leaders, still today, some leaders adopt a parenting style, rather than coaching and mentoring one. Putting out fires rather than coming up with long-term solutions.

Here’s a simple exercise to begin with.

Look at your list of tasks for today and predict how much time you need to allocate to each of them. Make a note as you go through your day of the things you have completed, and of any distractions and breaks you took. At the end of the day, reassess that list and note down which tasks you effectively completed and how long it took you to do them. Be honest with yourself.

After that, have a look at the things you do every day, which one of them are things that it makes a difference if you do them? Are these things that you love, you excel at? The mantra for me we should be spending 80% of our time doing things that we excel at. Unfortunately in the past, that wasn’t always the case for me. More than that, when I look around at my peers, I see a lot of them also struggling and sinking into tasks that shouldn’t be on their plate in the first place.?

Here are a couple of questions I ask myself on a frequent basis when evaluating tasks I do.?

• Does it add value to the business?
• Will it make a difference if it’s done by me??
• Will I be quicker, more efficient??
• Is this the best use of my time??
• Is it a one-off or a repetitive task?
• Do I like doing it?
• Is there potential for growth??

We often prioritize tasks that are the most pleasurable or interesting for us instead of really focusing on those that will bring the best results for the business. It’s only natural that we are this selfish when we have to spend many hours working. Pleasurable and interesting activities, however, keep us engaged and energized. Hence this is questionable but not the worst situation. The opposite, however, is. I am talking about taking up a lot of our time for repetitive tasks, not our strengths.

This, in exchange, makes people want to be as effective as possible with their time, understand the business better, know and use their strengths, hunt for opportunities to be successful, and drive value by submitting high-quality work.?

When I did this exercise with a CEO a few months ago and analyzed where his time was spent, we realized that out of his 80+ hour work week in the best scenario, he spent 15 hours doing things that he is good at and passionate about, and that makes a difference if he makes them.

Understandable we won’t always be in the position to remove tasks from our task list immediately, especially if we are working within a corporate setting. But it will give us a a guide, an understanding, even a goal maybe. If you have the possibility to use your entrepreneurial spirit , figure out how to best remove those tasks from your to do list. Is it by the use of technology? Maybe you can outsource it, maybe a colleague is better suited and interested to preforme. It might be their opportunity for growth.

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