Work Hours

A great debate has been written about in the past decade as we modernize into automated and augmented business growth, personal career growth and simple day-to-day lifestyle growth ability.

They all want to define the 'perfect' level of work hours you should do, per week, for "success"

Personally, I refer to the 'everything is different seen in contexts' thinking: I'm not sure you can ever define one single number that would apply to or be best for everyone.

But let's make a framework and I can point to some of my own experience:

• We need some definition of what you're trying to accomplish, and how many hours that takes.

• We need some definition of what lifestyle choices you prioritize.

• We need some definition of how much you can even do / commit.

Number 2 seems like the most important there: what even do you prioritize?

Choosing Your Lifestyle Values

You can do anything you want, but not everything you want - at some point we simply have to choose from conflicting value sets because time is a finite resource. There isn't enough of it to do everything, and some choices are inherently counter to other choices.

I don't personally think many of them are strictly 'wrong' even as the internet roils with judgments.

If you want to be the next Musk, I think you should be allowed to work 120 hours a week guilt free in the pursuit of it. You may or may not have his brain or aptitude, but I won't stop you from brute forcing your way to something.

If you want to lay on the couch and do nothing for your entire life and then die, that's also your prerogative. Honestly, I think most people live that same lifestyle anyway if they have a job or not, so the hours barely matter at that point if your output is nearly the same.

You can see where I'm going with this: the hours don't really matter.

What matters is if they align with your priorities.

Lay on the couch and own it if that's what you want. Be a workaholic singleton if you want, own it. If you want a low stress job and a family with kids, awesome! If you want to convert a van to drive down the coast and surf every day, awesome! If you want to freelance or bar tend or fix bikes or be an instagram model or an accountant or a firefighter, like, rad.

What's sad is when you're an accountant who dreams of surfing, or a workaholic who dreams of a family.

You're not aligned with yourself, and that tension is misery. You're holding work hours that aren't truly reflecting of your personal priorities and possibly hurting the other people - those families or coworkers or employees or surf bros - who need you in the game with them.

Efficiency

So our resource is time and the other variable is getting whatever it is you're doing, done.

There must be an efficiency quotient here, right? Because if I can do X project in 20 hours and you can do it in 40 hours, but our output is the same, then working longer / harder isn't really a point of pride, it's just busyness - it's just inefficient.

This makes up, like... most of the working world. Most jobs are wasteful busyness or plain boredom. But you have to be chained to that desk, otherwise "what are we paying you for?"

This is how you make money as a freelancer, when you can unchain the hourly 'butt in seat' time with actual output time, for the same (or more!) income.

My Freelance Career (so far)

Year one was pretty slow, I spent a lot more time finding work than I did doing work - that's the 'hustle' of being a new name with no network. You have to grind to cold email and build knowledge and so on.

So I did maybe 10 hours of actual work a week and maybe 20+ of non-paying outward looking work.

Year two I did maybe 20 hours of real work a week, a bit of cold networking and that was basically it: I could sustain my old salary on half the hours, plus save an hour of commuting per day. We talk about work hours, but we should also talk about freeing up non-work hours. Commuting is a big number.

This past year, year three, was very busy with real work (sometimes 40+ hours a week) and very little networking time, because at this point more people know of / need me than I can actually schedule.

At the time of this writing, going into year four, I think my new challenge will be scheduling projects in a world where I actively have to say no in order to not work too much. This will be a new skill and I'll have to learn new tricks to figure it all out.

And that too is a priority thing: do I even want to work 40 hours a week? Is it worth doubling my salary? I genuinely don't know yet.

Patterns of Work (micro)

Something I did play with at the micro level is how the week gets divided up: if you're doing the same number of hours per week (let's just call it 40) would you prefer 4x 10 hour days or 7x 5.7 hour days?

I personally sort of hate weekends and prefer to do errands and things while the city is less busy during the week so I opted to have the same day every day and flexible: I did work on saturday, but I also might not work on tuesday and that's a great trade sometimes.

The funny thing is, it never feels like a chore. Sometimes you have a nap on a sunday afternoon and wake up with an inspiring idea and spend all sunday night hacking away on something - that's awesome! People might bemoan "oh, he has to work on a sunday" like that's a punishment, but I'd much prefer to work when I'm inspired and nap when I'm not vs the forced schedule of a weekday / weekend distinction. Humans just don't hold rigid patterns like that very well. It'd be more sad to have an idea on a sunday and not act on it, or be tired on a monday and begrudgingly go to work - those too are forced anti-optimal patterns.

Also, I mention my preference to work in the morning here.

Patterns of Work (macro)

This is where we get into retirement planning, or the Tim Ferris style sabbatical type "mini retirements" throughout your life. Like the micro patterns, we get a choice: work in one solid chunk for 40 years in order to retire for the rest, or intersperse a few months or a few years here and there at the cost of either other material expenses (fancy cars, house choices, etc) or retirement date pushing itself.

Pushing the retirement date back used to be impossible because physical labour became too demanding for increasingly weak elderly bodies, but I suspect our brain-work age has less of a problem with that. Still, personally, I intend on having cash just the same: who knows what state my body or mind will be by then.

But we can make those other choices. Just the other week I was thinking about this: the rental market in my city is softening and I could sign up for a much swankier place for a few hundred a month more than I'm paying now, and live downtown instead of the suburbs. There's pros and cons to this, but I won't bog us down.

The other side of the coin is like: $500 a month more is $6000 a year. That's 2-3 Japan-costing trips per year extra I could take - do I want the nicer living arrangements, or more travel? Or you could make a case for sabbaticals: instead of travelling, for $6000 a year I could live for 3-4 months not working at all, just taking time off locally and doing hobby projects or whatever. Write a novel.

I'm not sure I'd enjoy that, since I sit around the house so much as it stands, but it's one of those things to think about and compare once we can put an accurate dollar value on time.

Conclusion

All that to say, I don't care how many hours a week you work. Both high and low numbers aren't really pride points if you're sacrificing stuff to get there. If you're unhappy with where you are. Personally? I've had a lot of 4 Hour Work Weeks over these past years and they're pretty hellish. I hate having that much time without a project. I'm good for about 10 days of holiday before I'm hungry to come back and start something, even if you have the money to sit around it sure feels (to me) like a holding cell.

If you genuinely want to be a workaholic because you love your projects, great. If you're a workaholic because you're addicted to some egoistic bragging rights, or you're trying to outrun your brain or something, there's deeper problems that need addressing. Certainly, there's enough people out there who are blinded by golden handcuffs so long they genuinely can't see reality around their work / life.

What matters most is that you're doing the amount that you want to be, and feel like you should be. I do think there are just driven people and un-driven people - if you don't want to be Musk, don't be. If you do, great. I wouldn't expect that you can run three world-leading companies like he does on 40 hours a week, with a "balanced lifestyle" - he's just doing so much.

But also, you can make a great living with 40 hours a week. The idea that you should need more just to get merely rich or whatever is silly. You don't have to be running three huge companies in order to do cool things in your life, or for the world.

Like I said, I was making my old salary with 20 hours a week. With my rates these days, it'd be something like 3 hours a weekday. That's enough to carve out a very comfortable life with time AND money. You don't have to be a billionaire to have enough. My lifestyle has been the exact same level of comfortable making less than minimum wage and six figures. Figure out what you want, figure out how to efficiently get there, work as much or as little as you prefer.

They're your hours, no one else's. Spend them wisely.