40 Hour Work Weeks Are Dumb

It’s time to acknowledge that hours spent doesn’t equal results. Results come from one thing, and one thing only: making work that matters. I don’t care if this takes you one hour of your day, or twelve hours a day. If you’re not creating work that matters, you aren’t moving forward as you're not creating value.

I Put in the Time, I should Get The Reward. Right?

Not if the work you're doing sucks. I spent 5 years trying to make money from websites, blogging etc before I had any real success. The reason for my failure was simple.

You have to learn and get good at something. Just because you made a bunch of videos for YouTube or you blog all the time does not mean you're entitled to people's attention.

To think that money equals time is a mistake. This idea is a throwback to when we all worked in factories. We had a certain number of set tasks to complete, widgets to push out, and we knew that it would take around 8-10 hours a day to complete the assigned tasks.

The world we work in now is much different from that. The people who are making the most money aren’t widget makers —actually, people working the factory line never really had a chance to make any sort of money anyway, but that’s beside the point.

A number of remarkable people, such as Seth Godin, Timothy Ferriss, and Daniel H. Pink have recently begun the difficult task of asking us to unlearn the association between time and money.

Companies Want You To Be Busy All Day

Even if you have nothing to do. They want to extract every penny of value from you they can.

Think about it. How many times have you stayed at your job until after 7 pm just keeping busy, because you can't leave until your manager leaves?

What if instead you went home and spent time with your family?

What if instead you had clear and specific objectives to meet and if you completed everything by 3:30 PM you're reward was to bounce for the day?

What if instead you worked for just one hour a week, but with that time you make the difference that brought in thousands or even millions of dollars?

What if you eliminated every stupid repetitive task from your day?

What if you just stopped checking email and Twitter for half of your day, just to see what happens?

The point is that 8 hours of work per day does not make a successful business. Time can be spent in bad ways, and not all time spent is spent equally.