The Opportunity for Sucess with Balance is Now
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” – Olson, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corp. ,1977
(American engineer Ken Olson on the need for the personal computer. By 2005 80% of Americans had a home computer.)
Once again, we are in the mode of rebooting the RAS. Do you even believe that a 5-hr workday is possible? Of course not, because you are programmed another way. You can reboot.
Once again, we are in the mode of rebooting the RAS. Do you even believe that a 5-hr workday is possible? Of course not, because you are programmed another way. You can reboot.
Scientific evidence for peak brain performance and company productivity contradict both these ideas.
When I worked in the Royal Navy, it was 4 hours on, 4-hours off, 4 hours on, 12 hours off. The navy aptly calls them Watches. Watching at sea takes concentration. Concentration diminishes over time. Even the regimented mentality of the military knew humans cannot maintain peak brain power for more than a few hours at a time.
When I was ‘On Watch,’ it was intense concentration. Exhilarating, it was also mentally tiring. When I was ‘Off Watch,’ I took a stroll on deck for some rejuvenating sea air. Alternatively, I went to my cabin to nap or read a biography of an adventurer, or worked out in the gym.
My next ‘full-time’ job was in a hospital radiotherapy department, which was very much 9 to 5. I worked either a 4-hour morning shift or a 4-hour afternoon shift, alternating the shift time daily. During the non-shift 4-hours, my role was to accompany patients for diagnostic tests or follow-up clinic visits. If they were in a wheelchair, I’d take them the long way around to their appointment making sure we both got some fresh air in the hospital grounds.
The shifts were set up that way because humans cannot concentrate on a highly technical task for more than a few hours. In ‘off’ periods I was often bored with having to do menial tasks, but patient safety was more important than my ego.
During the six years I worked there, however, doctors were sometimes required to work more than 24 hours without a break. I lost count of the number of errors I witnessed. In fact, sometimes during my down-times, I was able to prevent doctors from making them just by double-checking their calculations. Their brains were fried and mine was alert, simply because I was relaxed.
Then, I became a sales rep and never worked more than 3 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon. After a dedicated work period in the morning, I would have lunch and visit a nature area. In the afternoon, I headed home around 3 pm.
If my bosses had known, I would have been fired. Yet, I was the most successful sales representative, winning every prize on offer and getting promoted to district manager within 18 months. I kept my on-and-off schedule as a manager, secretly teaching my direct reports to change their habits and work the same way. My region won the top prize four years in a row, (an extra week’s holiday and £3000 in travel vouchers each year) in addition, each year at least two of my sales team won rep of the year. It was not a problem getting them to keep our secret.
Working this way I was ‘head-hunted’ three times by other companies and promoted from trainee sales representative to VP in Commercial Development in just under a decade.
None of that fast-track career was due to talent. It was down to understanding peak brain performance and the need to stay alert and fresh.
When I started my first company in 2002, I kept to the same scientific schedule of dedicated work periods and dedicated distraction periods. My reasoning was simply that a moment of insight is worth a lifetime of grind. Those insights only show up when we are in a deliberate relaxed mode. That doesn’t mean sitting on a couch watching a ball game. It means having the discipline to meditate, to nap, to walk in nature, and allow life to connect you. (To learn how life connects you see, The Transformation Experience)
It is essential to structure your workday and your ‘life-day’ in this manner of alternative periods. The on time and the off time are equally respected.
Otherwise, stress and burnout are inevitable, with that comes performance decline.
Here’s a great example of what happens if you don’t do it:
Erin Bagwell, producer of ‘Dream Girl’, a documentary about inspiring female entrepreneurs, had this to say about her experience starting her own venture. This is reproduced with Erin’s permission.
‘Here’s how it goes when you start a project and let it control you without a balanced schedule… One of the most important things I’ve learned through this journey is that as founders we need to surrender to self care. I use the word surrender intentionally because building your own business is exhausting and taking time for yourself can often feel like an anxiety-inducing luxury. As my business partner, Komal Minhas says in Dream, Girl, “There is so much guilt for every hour you are not working on building your business.”
This reality of working nights and weekends isn’t a new one for many of us, but the stress and pressure of being an entrepreneur is a unique blend that pushes the envelope on what one can take and without the balance of self-care, you are destined to burn out. Or at least, I was.
…But after a couple of weeks of working my 24/7 schedule, I started running out of steam. I didn’t have the space or the energy to be excited about all the exciting things that were happening to us. I felt too tired to be happy. Too tired to make plans. And on my days off, my husband would watch me curl up into a ball and sleep or binge watch The Good Wife. A week before our White House screening, my body finally gave out and I got both the flu and a sinus infection that forced me off my computer and into bed… It wasn’t until three weeks after our premiere that I was able to take my first work-free weekend in five months. I had a full-blown panic attack before we left the city for the Berkshires for three days and packed my laptop — just in case an emergency were to pop up. It didn’t, of course, and I was able to unplug for a little while. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but it felt like the start of something better. Every weekend since, I have tried to be really intentional with the time I need away from work to regenerate. I am spending more time with my husband, more time with friends and I’m saying yes to plans and events (non-work related ones, I should note) that I would never have gone to six months ago (dinner parties, hang-outs in the park, weekends out of the city). I don’t feel like I have totally mastered unplugging. This is definitely a work in progress, but stepping away has kept me excited by our work, and it gives me the space to play and build on our next phase of the film — sales and distribution.
It’s really easy as an entrepreneur to get lost in the climb — to work so hard for something you have built. And oftentimes we trick ourselves into thinking goal-setting will work for us. “If I just get that next level of investment,” or “If I just hire that one person,” our life and our company will shift and settle down. I don’t think that’s true. I think as we grow, so do our expectations, and it’s up to us to carve out the time now to make it worth our while. Surrendering to self-care is the first step.’
‘Dream Girl’, the full documentary is available for free on YouTube.
When I was growing up, my relatives and teachers instructed that to get to the top required hard work, then even more hard work to stay there. My father was fastidious about this fact. The irony, however, is that he was a very lazy man preferring to sit in an armchair all day reading and smoking. How could he possibly have known that fact? I still smile today when I reflect back.
My mother was a hard worker, but she earned a pittance for it. No matter how hard she worked, it never made a material difference to our lives. To my young observer eyes, neither approach to life paid off very well.
In all the biographies I read back then, it was clear that the heroes were determined, thick-skinned, and risk-takers. Also, none of them worked particularly hard. Their life-changing moments of insight came while sitting quietly.
In Henry Ford’s case he sat in a rocking chair on the porch of his old farmhouse.
Madame C.J. Walker sat in trees, mostly day dreaming.
Colt weeded the family’s vegetable garden.
As a teenager, I wanted those moments of insight. I wasn’t afraid of hard work but it didn’t seem like it would amount to much of an adventurous life. Then, when I started to work for a living I enjoyed success doing the opposite. Although I enjoyed rapid promotions in all my careers, each income upgrade came with a tax-bracket upgrade that sucked away all the benefit. It felt a bit like quicksand.
As an entrepreneur, I started out sitting at my desk all day waiting for emails and phone calls to arrive. When they didn’t I started to think I must not be a very good entrepreneur. I took to pacing and stressing and very soon, I started to feel a bit burned out. That is when I decided on the 5-hour workday.
It is also true that I have met entrepreneurs who are successful in business working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Most, however, are on their third or fourth marriage, estranged from their families and friends, and can’t remember the last time they lay on the grass staring up at the sky.
I have always desired success with balance.
By breaking up the workday into dedicated productive periods and dedicated relaxing times, you can be more successful AND have a fun, balanced life. Dedicated relaxing periods are vital for those moments of insight that end up undoing so much unproductive work.
The proof of the pudding is always in the eating of it. In 2002 to 2003 my first company was struggling to survive. When I switched to the 5-hr workday, it took off. The difference was due to one moment of brilliance while sitting in a swing chair that hung from a tree branch. I will always remember, it hit like a blinding flash causing me to jump off the chair and dance a happy jig.
My company sold a few years later for over $100 million. In that moment, I knew I was onto something, a way of working no one else believed or was ready to hear. Since then I have built seven very different companies and created enterprise value of more than $600 million. Now, many entrepreneurs have adopted this disciplined, scheduled way of working and creating because success with balance is so fulfilling.
So much so, I have no intention of stopping.
In his book Brain Rules, John Medina lays out how hard it is for the brain to stay on task for more than 10 minutes at a time. Here are some snippets:
‘We are not used to sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while we walked or ran as many as 12 miles a day. The brain still craves this experience. Exercise boosts brain power in sedentary populations like our own. exercisers outperform couch potatoes (sic or a guy stuck at a computer all day) in long-term memory testing, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving tasks…
People don’t pay attention to boring things. You have to grab someone’s attention and you have only 10 minutes to keep it…
Your brain wants a nap. In one study a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performances 34%…
We have created high stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive than a non-stressed brain…
Schools are designed so that most learning has to occur at home. If you tried to create an educational environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle set up.’
The 5-Hour Workday
Switching from working insanely long hours, often in an ill-disciplined manner, to the self-discipline required for a split-day schedule is not an easy thing to achieve. I have convinced many people to do it, and the transition can take several months. Though they could never go back to the old schedule, they had difficulties adjusting to the new one for a while. It goes against everything we’ve been taught and contradicts how we were conditioned with early starts to school and nights filled with homework. It certainly goes against the typical workday of a traditionally-structured company, a culture of countless and pointless meetings.
Entrepreneurship today requires a complete shift in mentality and with it, an even stronger sense of self-discipline. Discipline is not an easy thing to master.
Think about it.
When was the last time you switched off your mobile phone, locked it behind a door and walked away, knowing you wouldn’t touch it again for at least 17 hours? Dare you try it?
When did you last take a whole weekend off-grid? When did you last deliberately avoid catching up with messages before starting work at 9 am? Instead spending time meditating, walking in nature, then eating a hearty breakfast. When was the last time you sat under a tree or lay on a blanket watching a cloud-filled or starlit sky?
K. Anders Ericsson, an expert on the psychology of work, says performance flat lines after 3 hours of continual work. All you’re doing after that is working for the sake of working. Ericsson has made a career of studying the most successful people on Earth and figuring out what exactly helps them rise so high. He says that work does not mean productivity or performance. Additionally, toward the end of the day, performance begins to flat-line, even worsen. “If you’re pushing people well beyond that time, they can’t really concentrate maximally,” Ericsson told Business Insider in 2016.
Other studies show that over the course of an eight-hour workday, the average employee works for only 2 hours and 53 minutes, most of which is in meetings that have a questionable purpose. The rest of the time, according to a 2016 survey of 2000 business offices, people spend time reading the news, browsing social media, eating food, socializing about non-work topics, taking breaks, and searching for new jobs.
This is all ‘good to know’ and while the history is fascinating and the science compelling, they don’t really help you figure out how to get that balance back in your life. Going from working ten hour days to simply working five hours a day is not very likely. In the next activity, I will give you practical steps that over time can help you start to reduce your hours.
Meanwhile take some time to consider your workday. How much is obviously a waste of time? How many meetings are run inefficiently? How many are unnecessary? How much time could be saved simply by not having to commute?
Then imagine what it feels like to have a schedule like this:
7:00 AM – Wake. Morning routine (see later) followed immediately by meditation and time in nature.
8:00 AM – Get ready for the day.
8:30 AM – Relax in kitchen with family while all get breakfast coffees. No electronic devices. No TV. No news. No online time.
9:00 AM – Enter Office. Check white board for the first task. Do the first task no matter what.
9:30 AM to 11:00 AM – Now is the time that electronic devices are allowed.
11:00 AM – Leave office. Lock electronics behind. One hour in nature. One hour for lunch.
1:00 PM – A 30 minute nap.
1:30 PM to 4:00 PM – Work.
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Time in nature and exercise.
That’s it.
I think in my heart I am a lazy man. I prefer doing nothing to doing something. I love nothing more than swinging in a hammock under the trees on a balmy afternoon. Perhaps that is why I have always resisted the 9-5 life. My Uncle once sang to me the virtues of the 9-5 life. He was a Quantity Surveyor. His reason was that he was visiting us one day and horrified to see the squalor we lived in at the ramshackle farmhouse that had become our home. In contrast, he lived in a suburb of Liverpool, a higher-class middle-class type of detached house overlooking a cricket ground.
As he described the financial advantages of such a regular routine, I was horrified. At the time I spent all daylight hours and many night hours wandering through the fields and woods around our farmhouse. Of course, I was aware of the condition. My mother was dying and my father kept us alive on welfare checks, or rather what was left over after he bought all his cigarettes. All our furniture, clothes, kitchenware was second-hand. My parents didn’t regulate me. They taught me manners but they didn’t insist that I kept regular hours. I was so happy to be a free spirit. The thought of having to work regular hours 9-5 depressed me and I think from that moment I always sought ways to avoid it.
Funny thing about the RAS is that it helps us get whatever we want.
Homework time:
Because everything we do involves reprogramming the R.A.S. for success, let’s have some fun homework.
Find a quiet spot in the home or garden. Take a pad and pen (electronic devices are shown to be less effective than writing with a pen for memory and neural pathway creation). Spend some time getting relaxed and comfortable.
When you are ready write out your ideal schedule. Imagine that anything is possible (because it is) and that there are no impediments. Now plan out your day and imaging the feeling of that schedule.
Resources
A word about self doubt.
This is a comparison of the habits of the successful with the general population.
