At the end of a hard day, you sit down on the couch (or at the bar) with some self-satisfaction: you «plowed» so many hours, put in so much effort … Only this does not bother anyone, says writer Oliver Burkeman.
Forgive me if I ruin your mood from a glass of martini, but the truth is that we all confuse the effort invested with the results actually achieved — for people in creative professions, this threatens to waste time and energy on meaningless activities instead of really important work.
Psychologists have long noted the existence of some kind of “labor illusion”: when we evaluate the work of other people, in words we usually only care about the speed of work and the final result, but subconsciously it is also important for us to see that they put a lot of effort into the work.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely told a story about a locksmith who got fewer tips and more complaints as his skills improved. As he got the job done faster and faster, it seemed to customers that he was hacking, although, objectively speaking, for a locksmith, high speed of work is a useful quality.
Productive work doesn’t have to be exhausting. On the contrary, several hours of immersion in it often only add strength.
In 2011, Harvard Business School researchers Ryan Buell and Michael Norton conducted a study and found that users of a flight search website actually preferred to wait longer for search results, provided they were visually shown the progress of the search process and could see that the search engine «works hard» through the databases of each airline.
These are not just interesting features of consumer behavior — we apply similar standards to ourselves. You could call this the “illusion of effort”—it’s very easy to believe that a 10-hour day spent sorting through accumulated mail is more valuable than two hours of intense mental work with full concentration.
Meanwhile, any writer, designer or web developer will tell you that it is these two hours of hard work that give the maximum results — both financially and creatively.
In Mason Carrey’s book Daily Rituals, the author collected information about the mode in which people in creative professions are used to working. It turns out that almost none of them are directly involved in creative activities for more than 4-5 hours a day.
Productive work doesn’t have to be exhausting. On the contrary, several hours of immersion in it often only add strength and energy. If you measure the effectiveness of your work by the degree of fatigue, you risk making a big mistake.
In many companies, there is a strong feeling among employees that the best way to get a promotion is to put in more effort, measured in hours of work.
In fact, if you can do your job brilliantly and still leave work at three in the afternoon, a good boss should be pleased with you. For the same reason, when asking for a raise, it makes no sense to remind you of your diligence if the boss only values results.
When time is limited, the most important tasks tend to come to the fore.
It is often advised to deal with the most important things first at the beginning of the day. This is reasonable, because even if you then plunge into the routine, you will not spend those hours when you are full of energy on it.
If your job allows, do an experiment: try to drastically reduce your working hours. In the conditions of limited time, usually the most important tasks by themselves come to the fore. You can use special programs that will remind you throughout the day that it’s time to switch.
But most importantly, remember: scheduling the whole day to the minute and working to exhaustion, you will not necessarily spend your time productively. This idea can be expressed even more optimistically: perhaps for the creative implementation you will need much less effort than you think.
About the author: Oliver Burkeman is a journalist, writer, and author of The Antidote. An antidote for an unhappy life” (Eksmo, 2012).