Orient Your Life Around Results Not Hours
We’ve been trained by our corporate overlords to care about giving our hours, even though we’d all be better off organizing our lives around progress.
I have been brainwashed!! And it’s probably cost me the better part of a decade of my life. Seriously. It’s entirely possible you’ve been brainwashed, too. Usually, my tips are things I’ve tried and can vouch for. Today, you’ll get to hear a tip that’s still untried. It’s an attempt to unbrainwash myself and not make the same tragic, horrid mistake again.
For the last decade, I’ve been self-employed. “Oh, goody!” people say when they hear that, “you have complete control over your time! You get to take time off and travel the world in your private jet, with minions standing by to give you shoulder massages and every time you lean back, drizzle chocolate sauce onto your tongue for your enduring pleasure.”
Alas, that’s a slightly mistaken impression. While I may only spend 8 hours a day in the office proper, I am usually thinking about work for most of my waking hours. Even on holiday, there’s a back-of-the-brain feeling that time away from work is letting something drop and everything will explode at a moment’s notice. If you count the time and attention work occupies in my brain, it’s probably 12 hours a day, every weekday, and most weekends. That’s somewhere between 60 and 84 hours. Every. Single. Week. That’s one heck of a work ethic, right?
In corporations, it’s different. You work 40–50 hours a week. The more hours you work, the more you build up vacation time and sick time and benefits. Then finally you can use a certain number of those days to rest and relax.
And therein lies the problem.
What you measure, you manage
They say in business school “what gets measured, gets managed.” (They also say “Time for a beer party!!!” but that’s not relevant to today’s episode.) “What gets measured, gets managed.” Did you notice anything about my description of work? It was all about time. Hours per week. Days of vacation time. Hours during the holiday. Productivity geek or not, my brain measures hours. My worries are all about time, not doing enough of the right tasks to get results.
The problem is that hours don’t matter. Results matter.
I think “In X hours, how how many results can I get?” But that’s backwards it promotes filling time. Yeah, culturally, a work week is 40 hours. But why? There’s nothing magical about 40 hours. What’s magical is results. My brain should be asking, “in order to achieve results, how many hours of effort must be worked, and when can that happen?”
What would it look like to live in a world of results? Come be that person and find out.
Measure results, and only results
Now that we’re thinking in terms of results, we ask: what results do we want? Then work backwards to get the time. In our normal world, we know how many hours we’re going to work this week. In the new world, we would instinctively know what results we need to produce this week.
We’re finally going to write our Great Non-fiction Book! “Neti Pot Sculpture for the Complete Beginner.” No one’s written a book on the topic yet, so we’re sure to dominate the field!
We’re self-publishing (oddly, none of the big publishers accepted our proposal), and we want to launch in four weeks. By then, we need to have the copy written and laid out. It takes one week for a designer to lay out a 126-page book, which gives us three weeks to write a final draft.
Twenty one days to write a 126-page book. That means we need to write six pages per day. A day’s work is not eight hours. A day’s work is six pages, whether we can do it in one hour or a dozen. And as soon as our day’s work is complete, we can go home and feel good about a day well spent.
We would concentrate on results, and manage our schedule accordingly. Here’s how you can start shifting your own mindset.
Track your time
First find out how you’re currently using your time. In episode 288 “Make Better Estimates through Time Tracking,” I provide a time estimate tracking sheet you can use to very quickly track your time use. That will show you the actual tasks you spend your time on. You can find the episode at getitdoneguy timetrack.
For each task on the list, ask whether it’s getting results that really move you forward. If not, stop doing that task from here on it. Otherwise, rate how quickly it moves you towards your goals. “Wrote pages of book” would get a high rating. “Rehearsed Neti Pot and pet cat example to make sure it will work for readers” gets a medium rating, since you really could have chosen a simpler example. “Spent 30 minutes on Facebook to get the name of the restaurant that kicked me out for demonstrating my neti pot at the table” gets a low rating.
Your highest rated tasks give you the most progress. Your medium tasks are next, followed by your low tasks.
The key is thinking of work in terms of results, not hours.
Take out a week calendar and decide how long each day you need to spend on each task in order to get your results when you need them. Just write in the tasks to complete on the days of the week. For example, “Write six pages,” “Rehearse one example,” and “Have assistant look up name of restaurant.”
Now mentally redefine your day not as a certain number of hours, but as finishing the daily task lists you just created. If it turns out that you can’t finish each day’s tasks in eight hours, then you’re overworked, and are being exploited by your late-stage capitalist oppressors. Very sad. Write a book about it, and if it becomes a best-seller, you can quit that horrible job and hit the lecture circuit.
Otherwise, once you’re done with the daily task list, you’re done. A day’s work is defined in terms of results, not hours. You’ve gotten the results. Consider the day over and go play!
Speed date your tasks
Of course, our daily task lists probably contain several tasks that, well, you just don’t want to do. Attack those using speed-dating, described in episode 149, speed date your tasks to build momentum at GetitDoneGuy.com/speeddate It’s a way to rapidly cycle between tasks you’ve been procrastinating until you build up the momentum to finish.
The key to today’s tip isn’t the specific techniques. Tracking your time, filtering your tasks, and then speed dating, are just icing on the cake. The cake, which is definitely an Oreo ice cream cake, is to learning to think of a day’s work in terms of results rather than hours. When you’ve achieved the day’s results, you’re done. When you’re on vacation and thinking about what needs to be done, you can mentally check off all the results you’ve achieved, and you will have added results that are needed to future daily checklists. It’s all about results, yes results, not hours!
I’m going to start working this way and will let you know how it goes. With luck, my life will become oriented around results, both professional and personal. And if I define today’s work as finishing my Get-it-Done Guy episode, then I’m done! Bring on the chocolate sauce. Drizzled!
This is Stever Robbins. If you want to know more about me (and of course you do), visit SteverRobbins .
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
