The 4 Hour Work Week Experiment

Two months have passed now, it’s new years eve and I’ve decided to re-write the goals for the experiment.

I have totally convinced myself that my level of income is NOT directly related to the hours I work.

As you probably know, one of the reasons I began this experiment was because I was working between 10 -12 hours per day 6 days a week. A habit that had already caused me a lot of grief in the past.  The 4 hour work week experiment was a way for me to get that under control.

The original goal was to work only 4 hours per week. whether that was one hour per day, 4 days a week or 4 hours, one day a week. The goal was a grand total of 4 hours per week.  My focus on setting the goal was predominantly the number of hours that I worked.

I started the experiment by going cold turkey and cutting down my hours from 12 hours per day to 4 – a pretty big step, and I wasn’t really sure whether it would work…

… to my surprise it did! I was able to work only 4 hours day 6 days a week without any negative impact on my income. In fact what I observed was actually in slight increase in income…

The next step was to start cutting down those hours to 3 hours per day. That’s when I began to notice a change within myself. I started feeling unhappy, unsatisfied and a bit bored. At first I didn’t know why, but as I explored my feelings further it suddenly became clear to me. I was feeling unhappy because I was denying myself something that I enjoyed.

I began to appreciate just how much I enjoy my work, and here I was purposefully limiting the amount of time I allowed myself that enjoyment. You see I would happily do my work even without getting paid simply because I LOVE DOING IT.

So why should I take that away from myself?

This led me to re-consider the goals of this experiment, to re-write exactly what is it I wanted to achieve and then set new parameters for the experiment.

Here’s the result and the goals for the new year…

My Goals

• To Keep work FUN – I want to enjoy what I do ( and I do enjoy it) while at the same time making sure that work doesn’t take over my life and become a burden on myself and my family
• Have both the time and money to do more of the things I want to do on a daily basis – This would mean working between 2-4 hours per day on average (and some days not working at all). Leaving plenty of time to for personal activities. What I really want is flexibility and freedom to enjoy life even more.
• Be able to take more regular holidays and travel while only having to ‘check in’ a couple of hours per week
• Generate enough income form my business to support my family on an ongoing basis.
• Continue to provide great products that really HELP our customers.
• See the business continue to grow as we continue to provide products that bring value to our customers and really contribute to them realizing their online dreams through their websites.

These are the goals for the new year. Perhaps they aren’t as well defined as “work 4 hours per week” but as I’ve discovered it’s not just about the hours but more about how I feel.

This week went a lot better than the last.

I was back into the 4 hours a day. In fact there were quite a few days were I worked less than 4 hours per day – 2 days of 3 hours and one day of 2 hours.

I’ve developed a bit of a system that really works for me.

Basically before I sit a my desk each day, I have a think about what I can do today that will really impact the business, what will move the business forward the most, then I write down those things on my white board, a bit like a ‘to-do’ list.

The biggest difference from a regular ‘to-do’ list, is that I am not focusing on what tasks in general need to be done. I can always think of lots of things to do. The problem is that many of them are either insignificant when it comes to actually moving the business forward OR affecting the bottom line.

So what I’m actually doing is filtering those insignificant tasks by asking myself the question “What can I do today that will really impact my business” and then making sure that I only write down the things I believe I can do within my 4 hours.

I notice that when I do this, I FEEL as though my time has been effective, I FEEL as though I’ve achieved a lot in my allocated time, and I’ve observed that the business continues to grow.

Strangely though, even though I KNOW this works for me I don’t always do it, and when I don’t I can almost guarantee that I end up feeling frustrated, and unfulfilled with my days achievements.

Being aware of this is a start, the next step is to make sure I stick to this little strategy each and every day.

Well this week was a complete shambles.

I worked a total of 15 hours today, 12 hours yesterday and 9 1/2 hours the day before. That’s a total of 36 hours in just 3 days, not to mention the days before.

For some reason this week I just can’t seem to keep the hours down. Looking back at the week I recognise a couple of reasons for the extra hours.

I was working on an important customer project that needed my personal attention. The project is for a good friend of mine and I really needed to make sure all the i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed. That’s pretty much done now.

I also noticed that I wasn’t feeling that ’secure’ – it seems each time I get concerned about money my immediate response is to simply throw myself into work, work as many hours as I can, becuase somewhere deep inside I have this belief that if I work hard then everything will be OK. It’s something I want to work on within myself.

And lastly I’ve observed that I often work simply becuase I’m bored. I don’t really have anything else I want to do so I work.

Let’s see if I can pull myself out of this rut next week and get back on track.