Why Hours Are the Wrong Measure of Productivity?

Twenty-two years ago, when I started my career, we took it for granted that our working week was forty hours, and that in communications and events those forty easily became sixty. There was even a culture of pride in it, more hours meant you were better. Back then we barely had obligations outside work, no home or family to support. Little by little we burned out and we began to wonder whether there was another way to work, but it stayed just that, a thought.

And then you hit your thirties and you have a family. Inside me a whirlwind of ideas, emotions and changes of course. Did I want to be a superwoman, work forty hours or more, run a home and a family with my partner away at sea? Did I want to pick up my kids, enjoy the holidays with everyone, keep the house in order and have time for my friends?

Of course I did, I wanted it all. And who wouldn't?

But my subconscious, and even my own algorithm, began telling me other things. That CEOs work four hours a day, that putting in more hours isn't the same as being more efficient.

I believe each of us has to make a pact with ourselves and be consistent with it, because there isn't a single right path, but there is a way to be honest with ourselves and with our work. I don't want to warm a chair, unless it's at home with my family or in a hotel watching the sunset. I want work in which, whether I give it four hours or twelve, those hours carry meaning, passion and efficiency.

I understand the aim of labour regulations but I wonder whether the focus shouldn't be elsewhere. On cultivating passion, will and the pleasure of learning, rather than debating whether someone performs better by cutting their week by two and a half hours.

A read that helped me put these ideas in order was 𝗦𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆, by 𝗖𝗮𝗹 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁, because it not only reminds us that the system designed a forty-hour week for one particular kind of work, it also shows how to identify and measure by what you finish with quality, not by how busy you look. His conversation on Tim Ferriss 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄 goes into it too.