Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity

Working harder IS a good business strategy, but only if you've correctly worked out what's worth working on. Once you've identified what tasks produce the highest value, it makes sense to work on those tasks as much you can (i.e. as many hours as you can put in without inducing burnout). Good business strategies are not always good life strategies of course...

Nothing in the article contradicts that, even if the article title implies it does. It was a really great article and I particularly loved the idea about assigning monetary value to your tasks. Unfortunately it's difficult for me to do at the moment since so many of my current tasks are based on all-or-nothing gambles.

One thing bothers me about this whole WorkHard / WorkSmart / BeProductive meme: it focuses too much on "the competition".

I know my approach is heresy in these parts, but bear with me...

I understand that there's always some potential competition, but I choose to not pay much attention to it. The only thing I compete with is another version of myself in another universe. "What would that other Ed have done?"

And that's awfully hard to measure. I've tried all kinds of metrics to keep my projects going, but the only one I use now is how much progress I make each day on my most important task. Pretty subjective.

I have seen tons of good software and services and have done a lot of work deploying them. What invariably happens is that there is no solution for something the consumer wants, so that's what I write. I like to think, "If I had good competition, I would just go out and sell it for them. But since I'm writing something no one else has, I won't worry about competing with anyone but what I would have been."

This may sound a little silly, but it works for me. Provide something that no one else is providing and working harder or smarter than the competition suddenly doesn't mean so much. I just have to be a whole lot smarter and better than doing nothing at all.

Slightly off-topic, but the cd-company mentioned (swiftcd.com) has a brilliant frontpage headline: "At SwiftCD, we create custom CDs and DVDs one at a time, and ship them world-wide directly to your customers."

Nobody that ends up at that website, accidentally or not, will be confused about what that company does.

"“Working harder” is a poor strategy which your competitors can trivially replicate."

Actually, working longer hours can ultimately lead exhaustion and burn-out, which leads to poorer quality work, less productivity per unit of time...etc. And, no, not everyone can replicate it. Some people don't have the physical energy and basic health to do that.

(Obviously, I am in the "work smarter" camp. :-) )

This was inspired by a recent post to HN about how "Working Harder Is The Only Alternative". I respectfully, but strongly, disagree.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858679

Everyone tries to work a smart as they can. You can't get an advantage over your competitors by working smarter if they're smarter than you are.

If you truly believe that working harder, while still working as smart as you can, doesn't significantly aid your efforts, you're simply deluding yourself, and self-delusion always leads to suboptimal results.

The public record is rife with minutely detailed cases of hard work leading to out-sized success. Hard work by people who were already working very smart, as smart as they could.

Yes, other people can work really hard, too, and so it can be an unwinnable race. Sadly (perhaps), that's life. That doesn't change the fact that working harder is under your control, being smarter isn't.

Yes, some people get burned out. Yes, taking a break can help some people find insights they wouldn't have otherwise. However, some people don't get burned out. If you don't realize this, you're fooling yourself.

Bobby Fischer is the only American to be world chess champion. Read about the complete immersion in chess that was required to achieve this.

It takes 10,000 hours of directed practice (directed practice means "working smarter") to become an expert at something. No amount of working smarter makes the 10,000 hours go away.

Perhaps words are confusing things. Instead of "working harder" let's say "working more". For some people what they're doing is not work. There are plenty of people who can work on something they enjoy almost every waking hour for 10 years on end. Burn out is a non-issue. So if you intend to compete an a business or field for which the bar is that high, and you don't really love what you're doing, you may be in trouble.

> I used to write my bingo cards myself, and I’m fairly good at it, but eventually I figured that while it was a worthwhile activity it didn’t really get all that much more worthwhile as a result of me doing it. Instead, I put out a call on my blog for freelancers, and eventually worked out a mutually rewarding relationship with a highly-educated American teacher. She bangs out the cards on her own schedule, and once a month I click “Post” on my backend interface and then mail her a check.

> The economics of this arrangement are so staggeringly efficient that people tell me I have to be lying about it. The pages my freelancer writes for me were visited 65,000 times in September, producing roughly $1,300 worth of sales for me through getting people into my various conversion funnels. I did less than five minutes of work to maintain the freelancing relationship in September. Do you want to do the math?

I find myself hoping that she sees this post and ups her prices.

Interesting post, but I wonder if even when you are working smart, sustained intense effort isn't sometimes worth it. The late Randy Pausch, in a lecture on Time Management mentions the importance of working smart but also refers to the years he worked late into the night working on his research.

I suspect regularity/ sustaining effort maybe the key. Work a solid 8 hours a day every day without fail for a few years might be a "harder" thing to undertake than a couple of months worth of eighty hour work weeks. You still use metrics to optinmize what you are working on of course, though it maybe harder for something like a research effort or a PhD thesis to get meaningful metrics.

My response to Patrick's post on his blog, which I am replicating here

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Hi Patrick, thanks for writing a detailed post which you say is an anti-thesis to my post. I agree to most of your key points here that measuring the output for each unit of effort put in is ultra important and that there can be no real progress without measuring productivity.

However what I fail to see is that it cannot be an excuse for not working harder. In fact measuring productivity makes you even more motivated to put in more hours as you can (and often do) clearly see that the amount you derive from a business correlates to the hours you put into it. Of course there are gazzilion other factors which determine eventual success such as vision, rightness and smartness of effort, big competitors like Google, intellect, funding. However, somehow I fail to comprehend why such factors should be considered a case against hard work.

Regarding your point of “working hard” as a bad strategy because it is easy to copy, that is my point exactly. One may not be subscribing to “working hard” strategy, but that doesn’t guarantee that his competition also doesn’t adopt that stance. Irrespective of his beliefs, competition will work as hard as they can. So you have no other option but to take the best guess (and worst case) and work even harder.

No doubt your points on outsourcing, automating and delegation are valid and make sense. Good thing about such activities is that they free you from sub-optimal activities such that you can work harder on the stuff that matters. You can make an exponential dent to your chances of success, if you put in MORE efforts doing things that really matter.

Anyhow, I thoroughly enjoyed your post but I still subscribe to my philosophy of working harder. Of course, one should realize when he is bordering at insanity. Mental and Physical Health first. Work later.

PS: Google being my competitor gives me even more kicks to put in more effort. I know I can never match them in resources, that is why I avoid working average hours which would eventually spiral to not working at all because, hey, I am competing against Google and of course I stand no chance.

Re the Warren Buffets and such of the world. I think if you find something you love doing and can arrange to do it largely on your own terms, spending a lot of hours at it isn't going to lead to burn out. This is where I have issues with the mantra of "work harder". It implies that your job is about sweating and suffering. Those folks who have found their calling and love what they are doing may be putting in very long hours, but it isn't remotely the same experience that your typical worker has of their job. They also typically built themselves a custom niche. Warren Buffet used to work from home and arranged his work life such that he didn't have to do any of the things he didn't want to do. He found that, legally, as long as he kept the number of investors below X (I think 100), then he didn't have the reporting requirements, registering requirements, etc that most funds have -- ie he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted without answering to anyone else. So that's what he did (kept it below X number). I don't know what he is doing these days, but I seriously doubt he has some supervisor standing over him and cracking the whip.

You see the same thing with a lot of very successful people: They act like "rock stars" long before they "make it" and are infamous for indulging their personal peccadilloes. If I can work on my own terms, in my own home, at my own pace, on things I want to work on and love doing, you betcha I can put in much longer hours than if I am a wage slave.

My company has always pretty explicitly discouraged working nights or weekends, though obviously some people will always end up working more because they want to.

While burnout and recruitment are both good reasons (you don't want core people to burn out and leave, and people don't want to come work for a bunch of slave-drivers), the less-often-cited reason to not work "harder," and one of our explicit motivations for it, is because often times saying "we'll just work harder" prevents you from having to make tough prioritization decisions, and that can mask bad decisions that have been made and that are costing you time.

As with all rules, there are exceptions, and there are times when you just need (or want) to crank hard on something. But in this case, we've found that the constraints imposed by working normal hours helps to improve your decision making and focus your priorities.

article should be titled "increasing hourly productivity to improve life balance" - working more hours do not have any negative impact on having less productive time

maximized hour/efficiency-productivity * maximized #hours/week = maximized output(not necessary value). The rest depends on how much you are willing to sacrifice to balance your life with other activities.

What matters is being better. How you are better changes from one individual to the other.

There is however a certain amount of work necessary to deliver appealing products.