Ever since The 4-Hour Workweek, I’ve been hearing a lot about the wisdom in working smart rather than working hard. I work quite a lot, smart enough I think, but with plenty of mistakes as well. What bothers me about the “work smart, not hard” mantra is that it implies that hard work is necessarily an undesirable weakness to be overcome or cured.
I have a few responses.
1. Sometimes you need to work hard, even when you are working smart.
Creative work rarely goes from good to great without some hard work. This doesn’t mean that every job needs to take 500 hours, but some just do. And the ones that only take 5 minutes often take only 5 minutes because you’ve worked hard at similar tasks years ago and now they come easy.
There are plenty of other legitimate reasons to work hard, even when you’re working smart: your partner is out sick, you made a mistake, someone else made a mistake, you’re on a roll, etc.
2. Who wants a 4-hour work week?
I have no interest in a 4-hour work week, I love my job. I work in a comfortable office with people I respect and care about, doing projects which are enjoyable.
If the idea of a 4-hour work week is attractive to you, you’ll probably have better luck at happiness by looking for a better job or looking to make your current job more enjoyable than by searching for a way to get rich quick, get other people to do your work for you, or whatever other snake oil this book is selling.
(It seems like the easiest way to achieve the 4-hour work week is to write a book about the 4-hour work week. Except that someone already did that.)
3. Working smart is not a bad idea.
Of course it’s not. But it does mean different things to different people and professions. For me?
- Regularly asking myself if I’m going in the right direction and knowing when to start over and when it’s time to push further
- Knowing when good enough is good enough and when it isn’t. (* story on inside of box)
- Knowing when shortcuts are going to end up taking me longer to fix than doing things the right way from the beginning
- Knowing when asking others for help will save time and when it will cost time
- Knowing when doing something today will take half the effort it will take tomorrow, and when it will take twice
I learned (and am learning) most of this stuff through experience gained while working hard, as most people probably do.
Hard work is not necessarily a virtue and certainly not for everyone, but some people (myself included) enjoy it. We may change our mind someday, but in the meantime, skip the lecture and let us get back to work!
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* In my college summers, I used to work light construction with my father and uncle. One morning my uncle gave me a tiny closet to paint, and left me be.
He came back a few hours later to check up, shocked to find me still in the closet, sweatily struggling to get the paint strokes to all go in the same direction. He boasted about how he and my dad used to compete for who could get more apartments painted before lunchtime, and then he told me my closet was fine as is.
I protested and pointed to the uneven brush marks, when he smiled as his eyebrows arched upwards.
“I have just the thing to fix that.”
Then he reached up and pulled the little string hanging from the light bulb in the ceiling and the closet went dark.
Oh how I agree with the bit about “if you yearn for a 4 hours work week, maybe you need another job – one you love” bit.
Sure, I’m not the happiest person in the world when I have a very long weeks with deadlines falling in place at the wrong time, but I do love what I’m doing, I do respect and appreciate the people I’m working with, and I do think my work actually is making the world a little bit better.
Any time I want to whine about “too much work” I remind myself of the two months I worked in a factory. A modern factory, mind you, and with decent pay too – so I’m not talking about slave-like labour in parts of China – . There, I learned that there are jobs that will make me happy and inspired, and others that will make me unhappy, sick, miserable.
All that said, and especially in the context of the Japanese workforce, it is always important to remember the distinction between working hard and working long hours. 3 hours of incredibly intense technical work can be a hard day’s worth in my book. Droning at a desk doing nothing until 11pm every day, not so much.
The 4hr work week fits in Slavoj Zizek’s decaffeinated culture idea. Drink as much coffee as you want coz it has no(?)caffeine; Work as little as you want, coz you can do anything in no-time.
Interesting you’re touching upon this today, I’m just reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, which had been seating on my shelf for ages, without me being aware of its contents, while I’ve been looking for some philosophy of work.
And now I have a history of ideas/philosophy of labor, work, action, which I’m looking forward to going back to reading, as soon as I do some work here.
Very thoughtful stuff. I’ve got two points to make about 4 Hour Workweek:
-the title is so provocative that many people miss what he’s actually talking about for the bulk of the book, which is primarily how to outsource operations at an online supplement store. Sure, many of the outsourcing concepts are made generic, but that’s what it is at the core.
-he worked his ass off for a long time to acheive his success. The world doesn’t owe any of us anything and things that come easy aren’t very rewarding, unless they are in the form of cake or ice cream :)
I think this concept only truly works for the self-employed… the realisation of your efforts are tangible in comparison to be told you did ‘great’. I think the ppeople who are ultimately successful ARE the one who work smart and also tirelessly.
Who’d have thought it.
Tony,
Maybe it’s a little more tangible for the self-employed, but even inside a company, the realisation of efforts can come in many forms. Promotions & raises, the opportunity to take on more interesting projects or make your own projects, etc.
There are always different view points when looking at something to examine and to understand. My understanding of “4-hour workweek” is different from viewing it as a struggle for avoiding hard work. To me, achieving 4 hour work week is like improving businesses processes by managing human resources in the most productive manner. It is like deploying right people in right job roles. By outsourcing you improve two things at the same time. First, you improve your cost structure to stay competitive. Second, you improve your productivity by delegating a part of your work to people who can perform it even better than you. As a result you get the free time. From here onwards you don’t have to follow Timothy Ferriss’ footsteps. Now it is up to you how to use these hours. either you can use it for socials or you can use it to perform even better/complex tasks.
To me, getting time to learn and to perform new, creative and more complex jobs is something like hard working. By outsourcing, what you already have learned and performed, you can open a window to explore new horizons for hard working and smart working.
Andrew Brown of Small Business Guru had written an interesting article as a critique of “4-hour workweek”, where he compares Timothy’s suggested outsourcing companies with some randomly selected company. And he finds the unknown better than the well known. you can check smallbusinessguru.com for “my 4-hour work week experiment”. So, it is worth getting form Timothy Ferriss what he offers and it is smart to use it in one’s own interests.
Just discovered your blog through Hitotoki > AQ > iixxii, while I need to work on my graduation thesis from which the deadline is looming. Talking about not working smart ;-)
Anyway, I agree with your points. But unfortunately working smart is so much harder than working hard…
Like your blog, keep it up!
Ushan and Rogier,
Thanks for the kind and insightful comments. In case it wasn’t clear in my original post, I have not read 4-hour work week, and am not criticizing it directly. I brought it up as a recent spark that has ignited a lot of interest and writing in the subject, not all of which I think is particularly useful.
you’re one of the lucky ones if you love your job and don’t mind working hard for it. i agree, working hard and working smart are not mutually exclusive…
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