How good is the work you’re producing now?

Would you be willing to sell it to your closest friends? If the answer is no, why do you feel okay about selling it to other people? Do you think they won’t be able to notice what your friends would?

All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. If your work isn’t up to the quality level you feel comfortable sharing with friends, it’s not going to bring you success.

Why’s that?

Your friends cut through your own delusions. You can lie to yourself, and pretend what you’ve created is great, but when it comes down to it, you can’t fool your friends with what you produce. They are an honest reflection of yourself. If you’d feel awkward sharing what you’ve done today with your friends, you’re probably not producing the quality level you know you’re capable of.

For Buddhists, an integral part of the Eightfold path is Right Work, or Right Livelihood. Right work is optimal work, work that doesn’t hurt or harm any living thing. Work that brings happiness to both the worker and the people who recieve the work.

Is your work Right Work? And what sort of a job nowadays would really fit as Right Work?

It’s a process of discovery. Each person is born with unique talents and gifts, and under a different set of circumstances. It’s our job as humans to figure out what those gifts are, to build upon them, and then find a way to share them with the rest of the world. Once we’ve done so, the whole world falls into alignment, and the process of becoming successful becomes effortless.

You’re only doing what you would do for free.

And that’s a huge leap in your thought process. When you’re producing out of love of the process, you’re producing in a genuine way. It’s not a rushed job, and it’s not “just to pay the bills”. People notice when you put your heart into your work. Everyone appreciates someone who excels at what they do, regardless of what it is. Just watch a professional athlete who loves their sport, and you’ll see why.

So why waste your time on this earth in mediocrity. Why settle?

If you know what your talents are already, what are you doing to develop them further? Humanity benefits most when everyone develops to their true potential and finds happiness within their work.

If you haven’t discovered them, give yourself the time to discover them. Taking a long trip to a foreign country is a great start. It’ll make you realize just how ingrained and relative your social values are. Then you’ll think about what you really want. And that’s the start of everything.

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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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