0:00

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37Signals about the

0:02

better way to work and run your business. I'm

0:05

your host, Kimberly Rhodes. In their

0:07

book, It Doesn't Have to be Crazy

0:09

at Work, authors Jason Fried and David

0:11

Heinemeier-Hansen write that you can't just outwork

0:13

the whole world and that work ethic

0:15

isn't just about putting in more hours.

0:19

Here to join me are the co-authors of

0:21

It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

0:23

and the co-founders of 37Signals, Jason Fried and

0:25

David Heinemeier-Hansen. Guys, let's talk about this because

0:27

I think for most people, they think work ethic

0:29

is putting in more hours, being more

0:31

available, always being on, but that's

0:33

not what you guys think. So

0:36

tell me about that. Jason, do you want to jump in?

0:38

Yeah, sure. I mean, the work ethic thing

0:40

is interesting because it does, for most people, it equates

0:42

to just putting in the hours. That this

0:44

person's got a good work ethic because they put in 12-hour days

0:46

or they work on the weekends or they're there at night or

0:48

they're there all the time. That just means

0:50

they're there all the time and they're working on the weekends and

0:52

they're putting in hours at night. It has nothing to do with

0:54

work ethic. Work

0:56

ethic is about showing up and helping out

0:59

and being on time and all the things

1:01

that it really is about. Putting

1:04

in your best work. Actually, I

1:07

think a big part of work ethic is not

1:09

wasting time and figuring out how

1:11

to make sure you don't waste the company's time or

1:13

your time or other people's time by creating more work

1:15

for other people. Sometimes

1:17

people delegate work that doesn't need to be done at all.

1:20

All that stuff to me is really what work ethic is

1:22

really about. It's not about the hours. As

1:24

far as outworking people, there's

1:27

another myth that goes around which is basically like

1:30

and you'll hear it all the time from big

1:32

time entrepreneurs like you just got to work your

1:34

ass off. You got to outwork everyone. If you're

1:36

not working, someone else is. That's

1:38

true. Someone else is. You

1:41

cannot outwork the world. You cannot work

1:43

somebody or three people perhaps in a

1:45

sense, but you can't say I'm going

1:47

to work harder than everybody else. If

1:49

I do that, therefore I will win

1:52

or whatever you want to say at the

1:54

end of the rainbow. It's not that at

1:56

all. That is not what separates

1:59

people. Now, there might be a few people where

2:01

that really works well for them because they're exceptionally

2:04

good in their working hours and if they put

2:06

in some extra hours, that really

2:08

does equate to actually literally being way more

2:10

productive because they're so productive to begin with

2:13

but most people are not that way. I would say if you're

2:15

lucky to get a few good hours of work in

2:17

a day for most people in this

2:20

kind of work which let's call it, I don't

2:22

know, information work or whatever professional work or whatever

2:24

you want to call it, that's

2:26

a pretty good day. Four hours is actually a pretty

2:29

good day. You might do other things for the remaining

2:31

four but if you really get four good strong hours

2:33

in, that's a pretty good day in itself. I don't

2:35

think like you're actually going to be able to sustain

2:37

that for eight hours, let's say, or 10 hours or

2:39

whatever most people are trying to work. I

2:41

think part of the problem with this work ethic

2:44

equation to a lot of hours is that it's

2:46

a way to justify the

2:48

busyness, justify the fact

2:50

that you feel like this

2:52

is the main input you have control over. So

2:55

if you're desperate for something to succeed, what

2:57

can you turn on? What levers do you

2:59

have? The most obvious one

3:02

that just seems like something you should

3:04

do is to put in more hours.

3:06

It is far harder to actually diagnose how

3:09

am I spending my time? Am I spending

3:11

my time well? This notion

3:13

of busyness that I'm walking around

3:15

with, is that actually helping anyone

3:17

do anything? I think the

3:19

great tragedy is that a lot of

3:21

entrepreneurs are indeed very busy and they're

3:23

very busy being a nuisance to

3:25

the rest of the company. They're very

3:28

busy being in everyone else's business all

3:30

the time. When actually the

3:32

best thing they could do for the business

3:34

is to just leave people to hell alone

3:36

for a week, two weeks, or six weeks

3:38

at a time and go off pursuing

3:41

something else, go off thinking deeper

3:44

about the problems that you're facing, go on, do

3:46

your own work. But this

3:48

notion that busyness is good is

3:51

really flawed when it's paired with the

3:53

idea that it's a manager who's busy.

3:55

And what's a manager busy doing? Telling

3:58

a bunch of other people what to do. Again,

4:00

at scale, perhaps, we've

4:03

talked about Elon about a million times, but

4:06

it's still fresh in my mind, this biography.

4:08

He's like five companies and he could be

4:10

very busy running five companies. You know what?

4:13

That's perhaps like the maximum amount

4:15

of business that's good, that having like

4:17

a fifth of Elon associated

4:19

with your business on a weekly or on a

4:21

monthly basis, but having all of it all the

4:23

time at 100 hours or 120 hours, you know

4:25

what? I don't think

4:28

that's a long-term sustainable thing. And

4:30

the thing with the long-term sustainable stuff too

4:32

is when it comes to creative work, there's

4:35

so much empirical studies on,

4:37

for example, the advantages

4:40

of sleep that if

4:43

you're maxing out, if you're putting

4:45

in the 78 of your 100

4:47

hours and some pathological cases, even

4:49

120 hours, usually you're trading

4:51

something else off. Usually you're

4:53

trading off at the very least sleep. And if

4:55

you're not trading off sleep, you're trading off

4:58

exercise. And if you're not trading off exercise, you're

5:00

trading off social relations

5:02

outside of work. And all of

5:04

those things diminish you as a

5:06

human. They make you more

5:08

tired. They make you more fatigued. They make

5:10

you more isolated. None of

5:12

those are good qualities for entrepreneurs

5:14

or anyone. So I think

5:16

the reason we always come

5:18

back to how are you spending

5:20

your time is the quality of

5:23

the hours. But that really matters.

5:25

As Jason says, if you get

5:27

four really high-quality hours that are

5:29

in line, they're together, it's four hours in a

5:31

row, it's not 45 minutes here and an hour

5:33

and a half there, and those

5:35

hours are kind of born

5:37

out of being well rested, well

5:40

exercised, socially stimulated outside of work,

5:42

they're going to be awesome. They're

5:44

going to be great. And

5:47

then you can give up on this whole

5:49

busyness notion. And you can give up on

5:51

perhaps the fear that

5:54

you're not trying hard enough. I feel like

5:56

this is often what comes off or

5:58

what I see when entrepreneurs are not trying. are so

6:00

eager to talk about their personal

6:02

inputs, is it like there's

6:05

some insecurity here. There's like, I got

6:07

to prove to maybe my investors that I'm

6:10

really working hard for their return. I got

6:12

to prove to whatever everyone else that I'm

6:14

working really hard when actually, a

6:16

lot of the times, you don't have to work that hard.

6:18

I think, I mean, Jason and

6:20

I often talk about the fact that being a

6:22

manager at 30 Semisignals for us is a part-time

6:25

job. We're spending the majority

6:27

of the time in product development, in

6:29

marketing, in these other domains that actually,

6:32

if we were to spend literally 60,

6:34

70, 80 hours