Find the Right Balance Between Work and Play
I’ve always had a tough time balancing my work and play time. I would either work grueling 14 hour days on my computer or do nothing but play for days or weeks at a time. Because I never had a balance between work and play (I’ve been self-employed for a while), I could never quite reach optimal efficiency. I’d work in spurts of amazing effort until the money came in, and then quit and take time off to relax as soon as it did. This wasn’t productive, and obviously needed to change.
I recently came to the realization that as a self-employed individual, it’s up to me to create a work / play balance I can live with. It doesn’t matter if I’m working 2 hours or 12 hours a day, as long as I’m satisfied with the balance right now. There is so much work that goes into starting your own business. It’s easy to get burned out by everything that has to get done. But if you take it in small, easy steps, and make consistent progress, there is no room for failure. Your consistency ensures you keep moving towards success.
So be honest with yourself. Nobody is going to judge the amount of work you efficiently and happily create in a day. In fact, if you’re struggling with 14 hour days over and over, it’s impossible to do work that really gets you in a direction you’d want to stay on. You’re burning yourself at both ends, and you can’t do that for long before you break down, no matter how strong you think you are.
Start building a balance today. Most people would benefit from working half the hours they’re already working. If you’re already in a mentally challenging job, you know that there are really very few productive hours in a day. Computer programmers, for example, really only get about two productive hours at a time. After that, it’s time to take a break and let your subconscious work on the problems at hand. Once you’ve spent enough time (generally an hour long break if you go for a walk or play a video game) away from the challenging task, you can face it again as productive as you were before. But you can usually only do this cycle once a day comfortably. So the real limit on productive programming is about four hours a day.
But is four productive hours really that bad?
No, four productive, concentrated hours is not that bad. In fact, it’s really all we can ask in any truly challenging occupation. The rest of the time in our day can and should be devoted to purely distractive and unimportant tasks. Why shouldn’t they be spent having fun? (Also known as Play)
Of course, most people who already overwork already have a distorted idea of what constitutes play. Drinking heavily tends to be play for overworked people, because they feel like they’ve earned a whole lot of play and only have a little bit of time to do so. That’s even worse for their health and their productivity, and ultimately, their happiness.
Balanced play is much more fun and challenging than unbalanced play. Instead of short term, instant gratification play, we can give enough time to have long-term ultimate satisfaction play. Want to be a great musician? Want to have your own band? Want to start your own business, want to spend time fighting global warming? Working more efficiently and giving yourself a limit to your work gives you the time to pursue what really matters to you. And because it’s just play, you can do as much or as little as you want.
There’s so much that happens in an eight hour day, how could I possibly accomplish everything in half the time?
Just start. Give yourself four hours to do all of the work you’d normally accomplish in an entire day, starting tommorrow. Your brain and your subconscious will start to look at work differently, and instead of asking yourself how you can work more, you’ll begin asking how to work more efficiently. And that’s the begining of a powerful series of questions that will get you in total control of your time and ultimately, your life.
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