Are you lazy?

Are you lazy? You’re working 80 hours a week? Chances are you are lazy – not in effort but in thinking. I don’t mean to provoke but I really think there are different levels of laziness and as an entrepreneur, founder or however you want to call yourself you have the possibility to do better.

My house, my boat, my 60-hour work week

Somewhere along the way “I work 15 hours a day” became the new “I partied till 8am and left with the barkeeper”. Something you say and despite the stupidity get heads nodding in approval and jealous looks for. While this seems expectable for high-profile lawyers or investment bankers it’s also surprisingly common under entrepreneurs and founders. Maybe bragging by the hours of work you put in is the founders way of saying: Look how real this job this! This is serious business! Society rewards personal sacrifices more than smart behavior.

The habit is dead – long live the habit

As an entrepreneur working hard is a necessity, working smart is a quality. Working long hours is the result of choices you made. One of the ironies of the startup world is that people who always hated the work culture of big corporates have a very hard time to change it when they start on their own. I have friends who pushed through their law studies by slipping Ritalin before locking themselves prior to important exams. The strategy worked for 4-8 weeks but unless you want to upgrade to crystal meth you have to stop and recover at some point. Being completely focussed and concentrated for 14 hours a day simply doesn’t work. So why not build your company about 7 hour day (breaks included)? If your work so long that you don’t see sunlight anymore, you should see it as it is: a habit you can change and replace.

If you don’t aim too high you aim too low

When my co-founders and I started erledigungen.de we set ourselves a goal: To be able to leave the office everyday at 4pm and take Fridays or Mondays off. What do you think how many weeks did we actually stick to that idea? Exactly, not a single one. In fact we work long hours a lot – does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe it does, but are all hypocrite on some level. Trying to reach for the high-hanging fruits constantly reminds us how imperfect our processes are and how much room for optimizing there still is. Trying to reduce working hours will not only improve your quality of life – it will als0 prevent you from getting lazy in thinking and from stopping improving workflows and processes.

Why reducing working hours is essential for most startups

I’m writing this article from a business perspective. If shifts from 8am – 11pm are beneficial for you social life, your hobbies or your relationship or not is a decision everyone has to make for themselves. More important in a business sense is another point: Overlong working hours are often a sign of a lack in automatisation and too much manual work. If you are required 14 hours in the office chances are good that you are the bottleneck for too many decisions, micromanaging your employees  and will have problems to scale up your business later.

To begin is always a good way to start

If you at this point agree with some of the things I said but have no idea how to start here’s my number one recommendation: Set up three working days in a row  on which you will leave work at 5pm sharp. Treat this as seriously as if you’d have an important doctors appointment, a funeral or a date with Jessica Alba (private not business). Spend a few minutes on each previous evening to define a plan for the next day based on a to-do list. As you go along you might need to think about delegating tasks, limiting meetings, arrange new procedures with suppliers and clients etc. but for now just try to make it work for three days.

I know there are a lot of books out there on the topic – some better then others. I don’t want to promote any lifestyle here but rather give an impulse to rethink you own business. Thinking about working hours had a tremendous effect on the way I think about e

ffectiveness and maybe it has for your too.

Note: English is neither my first language nor do I have a proofreader (or do it myself excessively) so please apologise mistakes in spelling, grammar or expressions. Also I don’t license the photos I use – this is a privat project I hope no one will sue me.