How do you square this sort of mindset with the well-known demands of entrepreneurship? In other words, if it's possible to do great work in short amounts of time, why do most successful entrepreneurs end up working very long hours to make their companies succeed? If it's possible to check out at 5pm M-F and still excel, why do investors look for the highest possible levels of commitment from the founders in whom they invest?
Personally I think stories like this arise from the fallacy that jobs have a set amount of work. Entrepreneurs know that is not true--there is not some predetermined, set amount that an Apple laptop needs to better than an HP laptop. The truth is that any and all competitive advantage should be seized--it might be needed to survive.
Of course not everyone is a founder; most people are employees. But employees have an interest in their company's success too--it keeps them employed. In addition, high performance offers them opportunity for promotions, raises, advancement, publicity, etc.
I think that if you are a talented enough employee to get the "expected" work done in less than the expected time, the thing to do is to fill the remaining hours by doing work that beats expectations. Increase quality even more; put that gold leaf on since you have time. Or, spend that time thinking and inventing an unexpected addition or improvement--or even a new product.
Nowhere in the article does it suggest that you should do anything like let employees go home at lunchtime if they've finished their work - in fact, the author says that under this system, he usually gets home around 7PM. It's more that rewards like bonuses and salary increases should be tied to the results that matter, and not to overtime that could just as easily indicate an ineffective worker as dedication.
And while start-ups often require extreme hours due to the fact that building a successful business is hard, an established business should not demand extreme hours as part of normal business. If you do, you're risking employee burn-out, and probably not taking into account the costs that can lead to. If you need 60-80 hour work weeks to keep your business competitive, then you need to realize that your business is as close to the brink as any start-up, and is probably not sustainable in that state.
> why do most successful entrepreneurs end up working very long hours to make their companies succeed?
There's a mistake in your reasoning in this sentence. An entrepreneur who has to work long hours for years on end is by definition not successful. At least using my definition of success.
I consider myself a very successful entrepreneur, even though my 'preneuring only brings in the equivalent of a modest developer salary. The important part is that it only takes up a few hours of my time each month, leaving the rest open to do what I want.
And, of course, being able to do whatever you want is the core reason to become an entrepreneur.
With that in mind, if you've set off to be your own boss, and you somehow find that you're working longer hours than ever, regardless of the payback, you've failed.
How do you square this sort of mindset with the well-known demands of entrepreneurship?
Because the 'well-known demands' are mostly socially constructed myths rather than reality. Because people are really bad at tracking stuff-done and find tracking hours-worked and looking at stuff-to-do much easier to think about. Because people a really fucking awful at figuring out how productive they are.
I have been a team coach multiple times where I have demonstrated by, weirdly, actually tracking the amount of work done that teams working fewer hours were producing more work. The amount of push back from these sorts of results from management and the team is incredible.
People know that if they only stayed a bit later they would get more done despite lots of evidence, by our tracking stories completed, bug reports, user satisfaction, etc. all went down the more hours people worked.
Tired people make mistakes. Tired people work slowly. You can be tired without 'feeling' tired. In anything but the very short term (and I'm talking days, maybe a week or two tops) trying to do hard intellectual, creative work for more than 30-40 hours a week will make you slower overall - not faster.
Hell - Ford promoted the 40 hour week as the maximum productivity point for physical labour on a production line... and we somehow imagine that working 60 hour weeks is going to make us do more.
People still seem to conceptualise 60 hour weeks as 40 normal hours + 20 extra. In fact it's 60 hours of being knackered where you're probably being half as productive as you would be if you were fully rested - but you're too damn tired to realise it.
> In other words, if it's possible to do great work in short amounts of time, why do most successful entrepreneurs end up working very long hours to make their companies succeed?
Because there's a lot to do and very few people around to do it. One of the distinguishing aspects of a startup is that the initial team is very nearly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of things that need doing, but don't yet have the revenue to hire people and distribute that load properly. No founder is sitting around at 3pm going, "Well, now what do I do for the next two hours?" They're going to sneak in ten minutes of product development, answer a dozen emails, wash dishes in the office kitchen, whatever.
Once a company stabilizes (meaning that its revenue stream is mostly predictable and dependable), it can ramp up employee count to the point where the load is more sanely distributed and there's no longer a reason to work very long hours because everything is properly parallelized.
Personally I think stories like this arise from the fallacy that jobs have a set amount of work. Entrepreneurs know that is not true--there is not some predetermined, set amount that an Apple laptop needs to better than an HP laptop. The truth is that any and all competitive advantage should be seized--it might be needed to survive.
Of course not everyone is a founder; most people are employees. But employees have an interest in their company's success too--it keeps them employed. In addition, high performance offers them opportunity for promotions, raises, advancement, publicity, etc.
I think that if you are a talented enough employee to get the "expected" work done in less than the expected time, the thing to do is to fill the remaining hours by doing work that beats expectations. Increase quality even more; put that gold leaf on since you have time. Or, spend that time thinking and inventing an unexpected addition or improvement--or even a new product.