Working hard

Some people work over a hundred hours a week.  Like our national budget, that's a number so large that it's hard to grasp.

These days, I have 11 hours left every weekday after preparing for, commuting to, and being at work.

On an average day, I give myself
* 7 hours for sleep (assuming I sleep the minute I hit the pillow)
* 1 hour for exercise
* 1 hour for the kids and putting them to bed.
* 2 hours for everything else: mostly talking with the wife and doing household chores, but also tv, paying bills, reading, internet, etc.

Not a huge amount of free time; as you might expect, I watch very little TV.  Still, at this rate, I work 10.5 hours a day, or 52.5 hours a week. 

I could decide to skip exercise and sleep only 6 hours, then use those 2 hours for working.  I would operate a lot less effectively, but that would get me to 62.5 hours a week.

I could decide to destroy my weekends, and pull the same schedule on both Saturdays and Sundays.  My wife would be unbelievably upset, and I wouldn't get to see my sons' baseball games or eat any meals with them or take them to the zoo.  And that would still only get me to 89.5 hours a week.

To get to 100 or 110 hours, I'd have to decide to never see my kids or wife, and let my recreation and contributions to the home disappear.


I don't do those things, so I'm not as strong in my job as I could be (though I do sometimes work longer than 10.5 hours, and sometimes a bit on the weekend).  Or, I could take those extra 50+ hours and do a whole new job, start a new company, 50 hours being the equivalent of another full-time job.  (So, don't let anyone ever tell you that they can't do what they truly want to because they have to work.  The job isn't the prob.)

But that's the choice I make.  Working hard explains 80% of the variation in results.  It's a simple rule to keep in mind when you're thinking about what you want to do and how you're going to get there.