If you could work fewer but more focused hours, you’d free up time for true rest. Help each other focus, celebrate each other’s victories. It can help to do them in 15-20-minute chunks, with headphones and music, or for longer sessions to do it on a call with someone else who is trying to focus on their meaningful work as well. Once you’ve identified those tasks, set aside the time, block out the distractions, and pour yourself into them.
So if you were only to work 2 hours today … what would you do with those hours? What tasks would be most important to accomplish? What would make this day feel victorious? Spend less of it in avoidance and frittering away the time, cut back the number of hours you work, and be fully in those remaining hours. With a fresh slate … what would you do with your day? What would feel like an absolute victory?įor this camp, “work less” means have fewer hours, but more focused ones. Let’s throw all that out and start fresh. It’s toxic! We heap all kinds of expectations on ourselves, and then beat ourselves up when we fail to meet those made-up expectations. Well, let’s start by tossing out that guilt. We feel guilty for all the time we waste. In this camp, we don’t feel that the “work less” philosophy should apply to us, because we already feel we’re not working enough. But what if we used that time to be fully connected to the people we care about? Or to take care of ourselves, to read, to play, to do nothing? The Procrastinate Too Much Camp Most of us spend free time doing more work. Now ask yourself this question: if you had 2 hours of free time where you couldn’t work … what would you do with those hours? Then call it a day - a victorious day, where we got the important things done. Then, after we’ve reduced the number of things, we can practice being more fully in those things. When we ask ourselves these questions, it might become clear that there are some key items we could spend more of our attention on, and many other tasks we could let go of somehow. If you could only work 1 hour today, what would you spend that hour doing? What would you do with the rest of the things on your list? Working less would mean reducing the number of things we do - which would mean focusing on higher priority tasks.
So working less seems like an impossible thing … but if you recognize that we’re working too much, then it’s actually an obvious fix. Even when, by all external standards, we’re kicking ass. When there are things left undone (there always are), we feel like we haven’t done enough. This is the camp I’ve been in lately - we try to get everything done. Take from this post what might be useful to you, toss out the rest. Let’s look at this from the perspective of each camp.Īnd please note: I know that not everyone falls into these camps, and not everyone can change the number of hours they work. There’s no simple solution to this, of course, but I’d like to propose something here, to both camps: It leaves us feeling depleted, not alive.
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