If you’re like most business leaders, work is all you know. The idea of a 9-5 is a thing of the past, as you work from morning to evening, seven days a week.
While you may think this is just part of running a successful business, many people in your position are finding that they’re having happier, more successful lives by scheduling in time off.
As well as having weekends for yourself, M Business Club recommends that its staff and Members take Mondays off as well.
Why are you working so much?
Business
leaders and managers often feel like they have to work hard to get
ahead. You might do this because you think that if you put in more
hours, you’ll get more out. And you’re not alone in this thinking. But
while it sounds good on paper, it can actually be bad for business (and
for your personal life).
By spending so much time at work,
you’ll likely find yourself getting stressed, tired and overrun. While
it’s possible to work like this in short bursts, it’s not ideal. Working
tired often means you’re not working optimally. Things can be sloppy,
or they can take longer than they should. A study by the University of
Warwick in the UK found that happy people are 12% more productive than the average person.
It
also means there’s less time for the important things in life. Instead
of being at work, you could be learning new skills, spending time with
your partner and being there for your kids as they grow up.
We
all have limited hours in the week and we won’t live forever. At the end
of it all, would you rather look back at the time you spent in meetings
or the hours you spent doing what you loved?
How to reduce work hours
The idea of only working four days a week may sound scary, but if you think of it as giving yourself three days a week for you, it can become a lot more appealing.
You may, however, need a bit of help getting to the stage where you can decrease work hours so drastically. Here are a few tips to increase productivity.
Delegate more
If you want a job done
well, you have to do it yourself, right? Wrong. While you have your
particular skillset, there are others who are experts in what they do.
Often,
we fall into the trap of thinking we have to do it all, but this is the
wrong way to think. Time-consuming admin work can easily be outsourced,
while specialist work like graphic design, social media management and
customer service is often better done by someone who specialises in
those fields.
Work smarter
Parkinson’s
law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion”. If you give yourself a day, a week or a month for a task,
that is how long it will take. By working four days a week instead of
five, you’ll often find that you get more work done even though you have
less time.
Another way of improving your output is to change
how you work. Many have found that by adopting something such as the
pomodoro technique – where you work hard for 25 minutes then take a
break to refresh yourself for five minutes – they get a lot more done
during the day.
Minimise distractions
While email has obvious benefits, your inbox can be a huge time waster. Stats show that we spend between 2.5 hours and 4 hours every day on emails.
In
Timothy Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week, the author suggests that
you only check your emails twice a day. By constantly looking at your
inbox, you’ll often find yourself distracted from your work and adding
new tasks to your day, and often these are ones that can wait. Ferriss
checks his emails at 11am and 4pm, with an autoresponder replying to all
emails explaining this process and that anyone with an important
enquiry can always call.
Join like-minded people
At M Business Club we practise what we preach and pay all our employees to use Mondays for themselves.
To find out more tips to streamline your working week so that you can spend time on what you love, and to network with other successful people, join M Business Club. Find out more about how you can benefit here.
