hedgehoglab

Techcrunch has an interesting [sic] post about start-up executives using prescription drugs to sustain 20+ hours of work in a single day.

While this comes as no surprise, I am still baffled at the lengths people will go to squeeze another hour into their working schedule. I am personally no stranger to working long hours, mostly because I enjoy doing so. However, I certainly don't believe that working longer = greater productivity.

The reality is that probably 70% - 75% of your working time is probably wasted in trivial non-productive tasks like gossip, reading the news (or feeds if you are a geek), fighting over who makes the coffee, and if you are really unlucky, in boring marathon meetings that suck the life out of you and never end with any real decisions.

If you are a developer or an entrepreneur in software, the best thing you can do is "work less but work smarter".

• Why not try working for only 4 or 5 hours in the day but focus that time entirely on the task(s) at hand. So whether you are writing code, content for your new site or designing the next home-page, give it 100% dedication with short breaks to keep you fresh.

  This means you still get time in the day to do the things that interest you, like reading your feeds, catching up on e-mails/calls and any gossip around your workplace.

• Turn off your instant messaging software or at-least make it obvious you are busy. When was the last time you had an important conversation on IM?

  I know that IM has become an important communication medium at work, so if you have to use it, make it obvious to colleagues when to use it.

• Turn off your e-mail notifications (unless you are in a job where all you do is respond to e-mail). Again, it is unlikely that most e-mail you get is urgent enough to warrant an immediate response. Using the phone for matters of urgency is definitely a quicker and less time-consuming way to communicate.

• Don't do meetings. Seriously!

• Spend money on tools to boost your productivity. Open Source (as in free and open source) software is great but unless it is one of those rare systems that is magic, your time is better spent focusing on your business, whether that be writing more code for your product, or your clients.

Whether you have a work-life balance is your choice but the fact is, in the software business (and probably many other fields), the longer you work, the less productive you are.

Let's stop propagating this myth of longer hours and corrupting the next generation of budding entrepreneurs!

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