Conventional wisdom states that, as an entrepreneur, I should be slogging 12-16 hours a day.
Yet, on any given day, I never exceed 4-5 hours of real work. Of course, I work beyond that as well – e.g., on administrative work, emails, etc. But I don’t do long hours or late nights.
And not because I am lazy but because 4 to 5 hours is nearly the human limit for intense focus. After that, we go brain-dead.
I am convinced that we can create incredible value without working insane hours.
These days, most of us neither work in factories and warehouses, nor do we do mechanical repetitive tasks (e.g., data entry). We create value through problem-solving, creativity, and our specialized knowledge and cognitive skills. This kind of work is called ‘knowledge work.’
And in knowledge work, overwhelmingly, value is created from just one thing – Deep Work.
And given how demanding our work is, most of us can do no more than 4-5 hours of deep work a day — even that is a stretch.
Then why this obsession with long hours?
The short answer is that we are still thinking like the managers of the assembly line factories, where the hours were proportional to the value created.
Times have changed but our thinking hasn’t.
We don’t need sweatshops — we need focus dens.
– Rajan