Work Hours

“I believe that people who work twelve hours a day should go home with bigger loaves of bread than people who work eight.”—Michael Leviner
No, no, I disagree! I enjoyed a lot of Michael Levine’s Lessons at the Halfway Point, but this one I take exception to. Success cannot be a matter of how many hours of the day you work. At some point—namely twenty-four—we run out of hours. What then?
Late one evening in the fall of 1985, I was hard at work with running the business management firm I co-owned with two atto
eys. We shared office space, and Merv, one of the partners, was working late that night, too. He came by my desk to say good night and I looked up at him in frustration. “There’s so much to do!” I exclaimed. “I could work every hour in the day and never get it all done!”
“That’s right, Chellie,” he said, “Work will expand to fill the time you’re willing to devote to it. At some point, you just have to say, ‘That’s enough’ and go home.”
I thought about that many times in the next few years as I tried to find how many work hours were “enough” for me. When I was president of the National Association of Women Business Owners Los Angeles Chapter, the first motio
I put on the table at the first Board of Directors meeting was this: “I move that there will now be thirty-six hours in every day.” It was seconded in a heartbeat, and passed unanimously, amid riotous laughter.
Would that we could solve our time-management problems so easily! But even if we could make thirty-six-hour days a reality, we would have the same problems managing our time as we do today. We spin like tops trying to do too much. There is so much to do in the world! We want to do all of it and we want to do it today. I see people on the overwork treadmill every day, and it isn’t pretty. People have the equation wrong—they think more work will equal more money. They look at some successful people who are working twelve-fourteen hour days and mistakenly draw the conclusion if they want to be successful, they will have to work twelve-fourteen hours per day, too. But what they fail to notice is that the successful person isn’t working that many hours because they have to. They’re doing it because they want to—this is their fun! Don’t put more hours in your work—put more fun in your work hours. It’s the passion and drive that’s fun, and that’s what creates success.
Even if you enjoy work and work a lot, at some point you’re going to run out of hours. Everyone has only twenty-four hours in a day, but we are all making different amounts of money. Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Stephen Spielberg aren’t making more money because they’re spending more time at work than you. They’re making more money because they’re leveraging their time differently. What can you do today to work lighter instead of longer?
Today’s Affirmation: “The more time off I take, the more money I make.”