I have a few friends and former colleagues that feel the only way to have a successful career is to work 80 hour weeks, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I often hear the quote:
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of examples of people being successful by adopting this formula, but I’ve always felt like it can’t be the only way to work. For some reason, that mindset to work 24/7 never really clicked with me and for a long time, I couldn’t properly convey why, until recently.
Back in 2016, I read a book called “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and it really helped me clarify my point of view on why rest is so important to being productive.
There’s a passage in the book where he talks about Scott Adams’, the creator of Dilbert, work schedule that I thought was particularly interesting.
Scott Adams, works about four hours a day on the strip and other writing; as he points out, “My value is based on my best ideas in any given day, not the number of hours I work.” Adams’s schedule illustrates two features of the working days of creatives who discover the power of deliberate rest: it starts early, and it follows a well-thought-out routine. Some writers and artists and scientists burn the midnight oil, depend on a looming deadline to help them focus, or wait for inspiration to strike before putting pen to paper. They accept that inspiration is unpredictable, creativity is unavoidably messy, and great work requires sacrifice and working under pressure. In contrast, many creatives who have long, productive careers take a different approach and attitude. They start work earlier, sometimes before dawn, even if they’re night owls rather than early risers. They concentrate on their most challenging work first, when their creative energy is likely to be at its peak. They believe in inspiration but don’t wait for it; instead, they find that work creates the conditions for inspiration. And they discover that rest improves rather than inhibits their creativity and can make them more productive, not less. Developing and maintaining a morning routine creates space in the day for rest, and makes rest more valuable.
If you have someone working 80 hours a week, aimlessly getting things done, but none of those things significantly move the needle forward, vs someone working 40 hours a week and making progress towards the right things, while also finding time to rest and spend quality time with family and friends, I truly believe that’s one of the best recipes for a meaningful and productive life.