How many hours per week do you work? If you run a business, there’s a good chance you’re putting in more than 40 hours. My guess is you’re working 50 or more hours per week — maybe more.
Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. Despite the recent popularity of passive income and business automation, most entrepreneurs still work irregular hours and put in at least 60 hours per week.
For some of you, it may be tough to even answer the question about hours, because your workday blends seamlessly with the rest of the day. You’re at a point where you don’t even know what to call the part of the day you’re not working. (Maybe you just call it the “rest of the day.”)
It’s a sad reality, but somehow we’ve come to believe that it’s not only okay to work all the time, but that successful people actually strive to put in endless work hours. After all, opportunity never sleeps, right?
Opportunity does sleep.
Well, as it turns out, opportunity does sleep. It also takes breaks. It knows when it’s time to turn work off and it prefers that you do too. Researchers have found that putting in all those extra hours of work, specifically more than 50 hours, can end up being a waste of time from a productivity standpoint.
Here’s what research from IGDA says: “Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.”
So, if 60 hours is too much, how many hours per week should we strive for? Well, a Stanford study found that when people worked more than 50 hours, output…