What Successful People Do To Work Less And Do More

The key to the answer is in the question itself: successful people achieve more because, in general, they work less. In return, the hours they dedicate to their work are more intense. But how is it possible to achieve this? As simple as it may seem, one of the keys to the productivity of successful people is in the time they dedicate to their rest.

But it is not about applying the typical “less is more” cliché or reducing work time to a few hours a day or a few hours a week. If you want to be successful in life, you have to work – hard and hard – but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything else. In fact, you have many other things to do.

Many people believe that the more hours they work, the sooner they will succeed. That is why they dedicate endless days to their work, days that continue when they get home and that do not stop even on the weekend. But that is not the way.

Work hard to succeed, but not so much

A Stanford University study published in April 2014 found that hourly productivity drops dramatically when the work week exceeds 50 hours and that productivity drops so much after 55 hours that there is no reason to work more. In fact , people who work up to 70 hours (or more) per week actually get the same amount of work done as people who work 55 hours.

If you do the math, you will see that working 50/55 hours a week is equivalent to doing it 10 hours a day from Monday to Friday. Sound like a lot to you? We can turn it around. Working 10 hours a day means leaving 14 hours free. If we take 8 hours of sleep, there are still 6 hours left to spend on anything other than work.

Do you sleep 8 hours a day and have 6 hours a day free? For many this is a utopia. What would you do if your job left you 6 hours a day for other things? Many would give anything just to be able to have breakfast and eat with ease, because they feel that they don’t even have time for that.

Change rhythm to charge the batteries

Successful people know the importance of disconnecting from work at the end of the day and the importance of shifting gears during the weekend for relaxation and leisure activities. They also know the good of spending time with their family and friends and themselves.

But let’s be honest, this is easier said than done. Here are a few things successful people do to find balance at the end of their workday and on the weekend to get to work at 110 percent each morning.

Disconnect during rest periods

Disconnection is the most important strategy of all, but also one of the most difficult. To what extent are you able to forget about e-mail, or the phone or pending tasks in your non-working hours? If you keep checking e-mail, answering phone calls or “doing paperwork” at work outside of your working hours, you are really still hooked on work, even if it is at half throttle.

Being available to work 24/7 exposes you to a constant barrage of stressors that prevent you from refocusing and recharging your batteries. If you really need to attend to a work matter, reserve a specific time of the night or the weekend to do it, in small and regulated blocks of work. This will relieve stress without sacrificing availability.

Although it seems obvious, each highlight at this point that it is essential to have a well-defined work schedule that you must respect yourself and make others respect. It’s one thing for the schedule to be flexible and another for it to be manipulated, stretched, and twisted in any way.

Minimize tasks during rest periods

Although rest is important, from time to time we find that we have to do some pending or urgent tasks. But there are also other tasks that have nothing to do with work that we also have to do and we have to leave them, precisely, for non-work periods.

But, why is it that the tasks of weekends or rest afternoons take as long as the time we have available? The key is in organizing and minimizing those tasks.

The fact that you have a lot of time to do something does not mean that you have to spend everything on that pending task, whatever it may be. To avoid this task devouring our rest time, it is necessary to organize it like any other task, assign a time and a moment and respect the deadlines.

Reflection and evaluation

Daily reflection and especially weekly review are powerful tools for improvement.  Analyzing the achievements at the end of the day and using the weekend to contemplate everything that has been achieved and what can be improved offer a new vision of work.

Rest allows you to analyze things from a new perspective and propose different or alternative solutions to the problems that arise. Problems that, on the other hand, are not always easy to determine if we do not stop to observe what is happening.

Spending quality time with family

Working tirelessly is a bad habit that we learn from our elders and that we can pass on to our children. The quality time of a father or mother means being able to enjoy free time with their children, allowing them to forget tasks and obligations with studies for a few hours or days.

But the week is loaded with things to do, even when there is no talk of work. That is why it is so important to find a moment in the day when everything is set aside to be able to talk and to be able to enjoy what really matters in life with those we love the most.

Always get up at the same time

Surely for many this is the worst part. In fact, it’s tempting to be able to get more sleep over the weekend to catch up on missed sleep. But sleeping more, even if it makes us feel good temporarily, what it does is disturb the circadian rhythm, so that the body’s cycles to elaborate the phases of sleep that make us feel awake, rested and fresh are altered.

One of these phases involves preparing the mind to be awake and alert. For this reason, people who always wake up at the same time usually do it just before their alarm clock goes off, since their brain is trained to be ready at that time.

When you sleep longer than usual on the weekend, you end up feeling groggy and tired. This is not only detrimental to the rest day, but it also makes us less productive on Monday, because the brain is not prepared to wake up at the usual time.