When I ask people what they’d like to spend more of their work hours doing, I hear the same things over and over again. Mentoring. Nurturing relationships with colleagues. Reading industry literature. Sharing the great work you’re doing. Dabbling in ideas that may lead to major breakthroughs.
We want to do all these things, but we assume that we just don’t have the time.
Or do we? I’d argue that a well-structured 40-hour workweek has space both for the "stuff" of a job and the soft side, too.
Before you assume differently, consider this: working 40 solid hours doesn’t mean being in the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. From tracking my own time, and doing my own time diary studies, I know that it is very difficult to log eight productive hours in less than 10 hours allocated to "work." You can and should take breaks. So we’re talking 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. many days, and if you cut out early on Friday, that means some other night you’re working until 8 p.m. People who work until 8 p.m. at least once a week don’t think of themselves as working 40 hours. But they probably are.
With that in mind, here’s how to allocate a 40-hour workweek in order to create maximum sustainable progress. This formula creates a career that’s on fire without you getting burned out.
How do you figure out what to do with your time? This takes time, and the irony is that people get so busy with work that they often don’t pause to consider whether they’re doing the right work or not. An ideal workweek would have space for this.
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