Hey everyone, Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this video, we need to talk about a big myth or lie when it comes to what it takes
to be successful as an entrepreneur.
And of course, I'm talking about ideal work hours and ideal week hours.
So day and week, we're going to go through both of them here.
There'll be links in the description to several science and real world case studies of where
these numbers came from and how a lot of what you've been told is probably complete bogus,
whether or not the person who told you knew or not.
So before we go through all the science and the numbers and get into the ideal workweek
hours, and then of course how you should split up those hours across your day.
Let's go ahead and go through a quick example that's going to frame us in the right mind
as we go through all these numbers.
So let's take the example of working hours.
So we have work, which is what we're talking about.
And then we have working hours, well, with working hours, it's common knowledge that
you can't work out six hours a day.
Your body needs recovery.
When you hit the gym, you go for a run, you go for a bike ride, you do it for a certain
period of time, and then your body needs to rest.
It needs to recover before you go and exercise and the harder your workout, the longer your
body needs to recover.
So it's common knowledge over here with working out that that's how our body works.
And yet, as soon as we go to our work hours, we seem to just throw that logic out the window.
When in fact it works the exact same over here, they're both work.
So keep that in mind as we go through all these numbers.
Now, before we dive into the exact number of hours we should be working and the hours
per day, we need to smash through that baseline, that we've all been taught, that there are
all these other entrepreneurs and hard workers out there that are working 75, 70 plus hours
a week.
Because according to the Bureau of labor statistics, that is simply not true.
When they went through a survey, asking knowledge workers, how many hours they were working.
And then they looked at their actual time cards or sheets.
They found that people who estimated that they worked 75 plus hours a week, were actually
overestimating mating their time by 25 hours.
Just let that sink in, 25 hours.
And then those people who were working anywhere from 65 to 74 hours a week, we're overestimating
their time anywhere from 18 to 20 hours.
Now quickly doing the math, that puts their actual work time for both groups closer to
the 50-hour week mark, which is going to make a whole lot of sense, when we start going
through the science.
So if you're thinking of a friend or coworker, or even some gurus out there who are claiming
that they're working these long hours, one of two things is happening.
Number one, they're just not tracking their time.
And it's not actually the reality of what's going on or number two, they're part of that
0.001% of the population who seems to have the magical ability to work those long hours.
I'm not saying either one is lying, but just when it comes to estimating our work hours
as humans, we are very biased and tend to overestimate.
So unless you can see the actual time sheet, take it with a grain of salt.
Now, with that knowledge in mind, it's time to come up with a new baseline of how many
hours we should be working a week and then look at, well, you know, we're entrepreneurs.
We want to work more.
How much can we push the limit?
How much can we push the [unintelligible 03:20] before we start doing long-term damage to
ourselves, our businesses.
And most importantly, our bodies, because we only get one.
There's no replacements here.
So after looking at multiple studies, I'll link one of them below, the ideal work hours
for optimal health and optimal productivity is 39.
Now, if you're anything like me, you're still watching this video.
Then you know, that 39 sounds really small, really 39, we're entrepreneurs.
We want to work more than 39 hours, right?
We want to push the envelope.
Well, the good news is there are some other science backed studies that show that we can
actually go up to 48, where you can round a 50, because it sounds better, 48 hours a
week and not cause too much long-term biological damage, keyword, not too much.
So it's still going to cause damage after that 39 or 40 hour a week mark, but it can
still work without getting super bad.
Now, when it comes to how much the CDC looked at 22 different studies and 16 of them found
concrete evidence that working past 40 hours a week was strongly associated with poor general
health, increased injury rates, more illness, and the big one, mortality.
Now, before we dive into this 39 and 48 hours a week and how we can actually optimize ourselves
to reach that 48 point, I do want to note that I've removed all of the gender and age
factors in these studies.
And I'm just looking at the absolute max.
So they did find that it's different depending upon your age and gender and some other factors
in terms of how well your health is currently right now, but I'm just giving you the absolute
max in the ideal situation.
Now for that 48 hours, let's go ahead and go back to our example, the beginning with
the working out, because when you surpass that 40 hour a week mark, and you start getting
to that 48 and 50-hour mark, your recovery time becomes just as important as your actual
work time, because you are essentially pushing your body, your biological limit to the max.
We are not designed to work that much.
Our Hunter gatherer ancestors, they worked five to six hours a day, and then they just
got to chill.
We are working way more than they were, which means we're working way more than we were
initially designed for.
And so when you're pushing a machine to its limit, you need to make sure that you are
taking care of that machine as much as possible.
So what does that mean?
That means you're eating right.
You're exercising and you're getting plenty of sleep, not squeezing one more episode in
before you go to bed.
So essentially, when you want to work the max hours 48 to 50, your free time becomes
your health time.
It becomes your recovery time.
You essentially have to become a part time biohacking health nut in order to make sure
that the machine you have, the one and only body that you'll ever get, can actually continue
to rest, recover and grow as you push it to the limit during those 48 hours of work during
the week.
So now that you know, the reality of what you can actually do as a human being and that
most of those people who are saying, they're working 78 hours a week are actually closer
to the 50-hour mark, which is pretty much our biological max without causing serious
long-term damage.
How do we split up those 48 hours?
Well, we have one more study to go through to help us figure out how we should split
our 48 hours or 50 hours over the entire week.
And the CDC found in those same 22 studies that the longer you worked, the lower your
cognitive function would become.
So essentially what this means is the later in the week and the later in the day, the
less cognitive function you have, which means you want to front load your week and you want
to front load your day.
What this means is you want to put more hours at the beginning of the week, when you have
more energy and you want to do those harder tasks at the beginning of the week in the
morning, the ones that require you to really use your brain, like creating something versus
just checking emails or having meetings.
Those can be done in the afternoon.
So here's a breakdown of what I would recommend taking all of this data and just distilling
it down to exactly what we should do on a day to day basis.
Monday 10 hours, Tuesday, 10 hours, Wednesday, 10 hours, Thursday, 6 hours, Friday, 6 hours
and Saturday 6 hours.
And remember with your time off, you're making sure you're getting plenty of sleep, 8 hours
plus, you are eating right.
You're exercising.
And most importantly, your meal prepping for at least those first three, 10 hour days.
Because when you're going through a day where you're actually putting in 10 hours of work,
you need to make sure that you have the right type of food pre-prepared so you can continue
to eat right through that process.
One of the biggest factors I believe in these CDC studies is the fact that when you work
more hours, you tend to let your health go.
And so you really have to be on top of eating right, sleeping right.
And of course, working out on that off time to offset the excess damage you're doing by
working more than 40 hours a week.
So I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video and you feel a lot more comfortable
and confident with trying to hit that 48 or 50-hour week Mark versus trying to do 60 or
a hundred or whatever crazy thing you may have heard from someone else.
So thank you so much for watching.
Go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe for more entrepreneur videos, just like this
one.
And until the next, keep building the business you love.