How important are long hours?; Efficiency tips; 'C.A.V.E.' people: 'Coworkers Against Virtually Everything'; 'time plus effort' versus 'insight plus efficiency'; Big wall climbing
1) In my February 6 e-mail, I included a link to this article, Why hard work is so important (and still under-rated), and said:
There's no substitute for hard work, especially early in your career. Trust me, you are far more likely to get ahead if you are the first into the office every morning and the last to leave. You will learn and accomplish more in 10 or 12 hours than in eight. You'll also send a powerful signal to your employer that you're a dedicated employee – and thus are more likely to get promoted.
I've never forgotten what Hollywood executive Peter Guber said when he spoke at Harvard Business School during my first year there in 1992: "I've gotten ahead by working half days. And you know what? It doesn't matter which 12 hours a day I work."
There's simply no substitute for a lot of hard work – at least in the first few decades of your career.
One of my readers, Paul G., took issue with this... and we had an interesting exchange. I learned a great deal from him, so I asked for his permission to share our conversation. Here's his initial reply:
Hi Whitney,
I'm going to strongly disagree with you on the whole "you need to work insane hours to be a success." Maybe in certain lines of work (doctors, lawyers, etc.), but not most (I work in the IT field). Everyone I know who has ever worked excessive hours was not only miserable, they later regretted devoting so much of their life to a company while their life passed them by. "Work to live, don't live to work" I say.
When I was a manager, if I saw someone who was the first to arrive every morning and the last to leave every evening, my thought was never "Now there's a hard worker! I need to keep them in mind for a raise/promotion!" Instead my thought was always "Why does this employee feel the need to work so much longer than everyone else? What are they doing wrong? Why can't they get their work done in a reasonable amount of time like everybody else?"
And that was usually the answer: either the workload was unbalanced in the department (which I quickly corrected), or they were working terribly inefficiently. Usually the answer was the latter. I've observed inefficiency to be so widespread that I feel it's almost an epidemic. Judging by everywhere I've worked during my career, most companies aren't successful because they are efficient, they're successful in spite of being inefficient!
It's because I've learned the art of efficiency that I've become a valuable employee and amassed well into seven figures of retirement savings (I'm still 13 years away from my full retirement age). Hours worked had nothing to do with it. In fact, for the past 20 years I've generally worked no more than 30-35 hours per week, and yet I continue to advance because I deliver quality work in less time than anyone else around me.
The last time I interviewed for a position I told the hiring manager that he could give me any job in the department and in three months I'd be doing it at least as well as anyone else, within six months I'd be doing it far better than anyone else, and within a year I'd be generating twice the output of anyone else.
So he hired me, and literally after ONE WEEK of seeing my job performance he terminated one of the other employees in the department after realizing I was capable of handling both responsibilities. I've now been here four months, performing double duties, and I have yet to work more than 35 hours per week and I still have bandwidth to take on even more work.
Work briefly and efficiently, not endlessly and wastefully: that's the mantra smart workers adopt.
Paul
I replied:
Hi Paul,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and congratulations on your success.
I'm sure it depends on the job and industry, but my experience and observation is that in high-level professions, those who rise to the top work at least 60 hours a week, not 40.
Best,
Whitney
2) I then followed up by asking:
Could you tell me what exactly you do to (1) generate efficiencies and (2) how you disaggregate job tasks?
He replied:
Hi Whitney,
I'd be happy to. Every situation is different of course, so I'll first give you a high-level overview and then some real-life examples. Some of what I do involves my Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training, but mostly it just comes from instincts and experience and my natural knack for this sort of thing.
To reiterate, the vast majority of people perform most tasks in terribly inefficient ways. That's due to a couple of factors:
- They do things the way they were taught to do them, assuming they have to do it that way because it's what's expected (the old "this is how we've always done it" mentality). Nobody is going to get criticized for doing a job the way they were trained to do it, and so most people just play it "safe." They never make the intellectual leap that what's important isn't necessarily the process, it's the outcome. There are exceptions to this of course, such as regulatory requirements to follow a prescribed set of steps in order to create an audit trail, etc., but those tend to be fairly rare in my experience.
- It never occurs to them that there's a potentially better way to perform the same task, because they either assume someone else has already determined that the current process *is* the best process, or they just never give any thought to the matter whatsoever (i.e., "intellectual laziness").
#1 comes down to mindset. I often tell my wife (only half-jokingly) that I'm successful in my field because I'm fundamentally lazy. By which I mean that I don't want to do any more work than is absolutely necessary to accomplish a given task, so I put a great deal of time and energy into finding the absolute fastest, easiest, most accurate, most cost-effective manner in which to do it. What's more, even after I've already improved a process I'm always looking for ways to further improve upon it (in Lean Six Sigma this concept is called "Continuous Process Improvement").
The initial investment in time and effort is often disproportionate to the task being analyzed, but the gains begin to snowball once you implement the new approach, because then you can apply the same approach to other tasks, thus saving more time and effort, which then frees you up to find even more opportunities for saving time and effort. This cycle continues in a sort of feedback loop, where each improvement in efficiency leads to more opportunities to find still other efficiencies.
#2 comes down to motivation. Let me share an example with you: recently I was asked by our CFO to assist one of her staff accountants with a manual process that she (the accountant) performs each month. She was spending probably two hours each month downloading a file from one of our vendors and then manually manipulating the data in Excel to create a number of different reports. Then the next month she'd do it all over again. That's repetition, and it's a prime candidate for automation.
So, after I watched her perform the task, I went back to my desk and within 90 minutes I had completely automated her process to the point where she literally did not have to do anything beyond downloading the vendor's file; the reports refreshed themselves automatically, saving her two hours each month while also eliminating the potential for human error. It was also very easy now for someone else to fill in for her during an absence because almost no training was involved (since there was no longer a time-consuming, multi-step process to follow).
Added bonus: she also no longer needed to e-mail out the reports and have the recipients wonder which file version had the most current data, because we gave all recipients access to the automated Excel file, which they could open whenever they wanted since it automatically refreshes with the latest data. Even better, they could also easily filter for various metrics they wanted to see. Better still, the accountant can now download the vendor's data file multiple times throughout the month if she so chooses, and the report users will always see the most recent data she has downloaded rather than having to wait until the end of the month. Less time, less effort, less confusion, with more accuracy, more timely data, and more usability.
It's a win-win-win, right? I thought so too, so imagine my surprise when I proudly demonstrated the new process to the accountant, showing her how she no longer had to perform this tedious, repetitive, manual, error-prone process each month. But her reaction was not one of relief and thanks, but rather fear! She actually exclaimed "This is my job!" It was then I realized she actually LIKED having to perform all of these tasks, because it made her appear productive and useful, when she was actually just performing "busy work" (and in the eyes of the CFO, wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere).
So, rather than viewing it as gaining two extra hours each month that she could now use to focus on more important things, she instead viewed it as a threat to her job security. She literally had no motivation to find more efficient ways to do her job because then it might call into question the necessity of her position. She was even willing to work extra hours, coming in early, leaving late, and coming in on weekends to perform tasks that were completely unnecessary and prone to mistakes. Not only was she not "getting ahead" by working overtime, she was very clearly "falling behind."
I've seen this same pattern too many times to count over my career. Some people embrace the change I bring, because they realize it makes their work easier and removes the tedious, demoralizing aspects of their job. But others outright reject change because they've become so comfortable with "their job" that improvements to it are viewed as disruptions. They jealously guard their work process and resist showing anyone else at the risk of calling their approach into question and exposing their weaknesses. I call them "C.A.V.E." people: Coworkers Against Virtually Everything.
This is just the most recent example. I've done similar things to save people far more time and effort. About five years ago I took a process that an accountant spent a day and a half performing each month and reduced it to about 30 minutes. Incidentally, I did this without programming of any kind – I use only the existing software tools that users already have at their disposal but lack the knowledge of how to fully exploit their capabilities. They are like Ferrari owners who never take it out of first gear, whereas I've learned how to shift into the higher gears and can thus drive circles around them. We've all got the same vehicle, but I'm screaming down the race track at top speed whereas most of my co-workers are perfectly happy as long as they're moving forward no matter how slowly.
I don't know if I answered your question or not (probably not), but I'm at work so I had to type this out quickly so I can get back to being efficient. :-) But feel free to ping me again if you want me to elaborate on anything.
Paul
3) Paul then added in a subsequent e-mail:
Hi Whitney,
One more thing I wanted to add on this topic. I was talking with my wife earlier tonight, and when I told her I rejected the idea that working crazy hours is to be encouraged, she raised a good point. (She works in the investment advisory industry, on the accounting side.)
She said that in accounting, newly minted grads are expected – scratch that – *required* to work long hours early in their career. Accountants are generally required to work for one of the big audit firms, especially if they're going for a CPA. And in order to meet corporate audit requirements and deadlines, you have to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. Sometimes even more during certain times of the year.
After pondering it briefly, I don't disagree (after all, is it ever a good idea to disagree with the missus?) For employees new to the workplace it can often be very advantageous to "make their mark" by churning out large volumes of (quality) work. It's not only paying your dues – it's a crucible that shapes your work ethic and helps you acquire the real-world skills that will serve you well throughout your career.
But I still stand by my overall thesis: once you're established in your field, you rarely need to continue putting in ridiculous hours. After 10 years or so you should have acquired the skills, wisdom, and experience that will inform and guide the rest of your career.
Thinking back to my own career, I realize I was an outlier. I didn't come out of college with a defined "career path." I bounced around through a variety of different jobs, but there was always a singular thread: I watched, listened, and learned. I was a human sponge. And I always took on any work assigned to me, eager to show my boss I could accomplish anything they threw at me. I'm a natural born "people pleaser," so wherever there was a problem I wanted to be the one to solve it. And I was good at it.
And yet, thinking back I am hard-pressed to recall more than a few instances where I put in more than 40 hours a week. I remember one instance about 15 years ago where I had no choice, because I was supporting a Corporate Payroll Department and a system problem was threatening to prevent them from paying over 8,000 employees in a timely manner. I buckled down and figured out how to work around the problem, which required a lot of manual effort over most of a weekend. But I saved the day, and was even recognized by the company with an award.
But as I said, instances like these have been rare during my career – so rare that they stand out as anomalies in my memory. Once I had reached "terminal velocity" (for lack of a better term), I was pretty much just cruising along effortlessly (okay, so maybe not exactly "effortlessly", but you get my point).
Case in point: in 2003, with no prior programming experience or computer training, I went back to school and earned my Master's degree in IT while working a full-time job. It took me six long years, chipping away on one class at a time, but I'm proud to say that in 2009 I finally graduated summa cum laude with a 4.0 GPA.
I don't mean to toot my own horn, because I'm about the most humble person you'll ever meet. But I was determined to develop the skills that I have, and I've been fortunate enough have the opportunity to use those skills to help other people do their jobs better.
In fact, that's what I told the interviewer at my last job. He asked me what I would do if I could have any job I wanted. Without missing a beat I answered: "I'd just go around and sit down with every employee, watch what they do, asking them questions and taking notes, and then re-tool their processes to save them time and effort. Because there's nothing that pains me more than watching people wasting time and effort when there's a much better way."
I guess they liked what they heard, because they extended me an offer of employment the next day.
I've rambled on long enough. In summary, I would never tell someone NOT to put in long hours if they really feel that they needed to in order to meet expectations and deadlines. I just don't like to see people who feel *compelled* to do so because they assume that's the only way to get ahead. Because I'm living proof that very often there's a much better way.
The equation for success is not "Time + Effort" – it's "Insight + Efficiency". I'll take an insightful, efficient worker over an exhausted workaholic any day of the week.
Thanks for lending me your ear Whitney, and I'll look forward to reading your daily e-newsletter as I always do.
Regards,
Paul
Thank you, Paul!
4) I can't decide which blew my mind more: the scenery or the climbing at Yosemite.
I spent the entire flight home yesterday from San Francisco writing up everything I learned about big wall climbing, which I posted on Facebook here (along with a few more incredible pictures). If you're interested in learning the difference between aid climbing, free climbing, and free soloing... what jugging, a pig, and a chicken rope are... and the challenges of cleaning gear, rappelling, and doing a lower out... then this post is for you!
Here are a few final pics from The Nose of El Capitan – we climbed about 20% of the way up on Monday, which was excellent preparation for climbing it later this year.
Best regards,
Whitney