How to Reduce your Working Hours and yet, Increase Your Impact and Prosperity?

Here’s my definition of intellectual laziness: Working long hours and not having the time to have it all - deeply fulfilling successful profitable business, joyful loving relationships, happy responsible confident kids with their genius joyfully expressed, lots of nourishing nurturing me-time; while making a huge difference to the world.
 
If you are upto some intellectual gymming, let's get started to understand how to reduce your working hours and yet increase your impact and prosperity as a by-product of that.

A. Commitment: The first step is to make a commitment to make it happen. Commit to reducing your working hours and yet increasing your impact and prosperity as an outcome of that. 
 
B. Choice: The next step is to make the choice to believe that you can reduce your working hours and yet increase your impact and prosperity. If your whole Being is rebelling at the preposterous idea, then pretty much you are blocked from exploring, experimenting and creating your way forward. We need Agility of Mind to turn our mind 360 degree around any reality. 

You ask how? Let's do an experiment together. Place a box with different colours on each side in the centre of a circle. Walk around the box, on the perimeter of the circle always looking at the box. Can you see that at each point on the perimeter, you have a different view? Infact; at two points 180 degree apart, you see completely different colours. Imagine 2 people standing at 180 degree looking at this box called Reality; refusing to acknowledge there are 360 different views of the same Reality and shouting – You are wrong, I am right – on the top of their voices. Who is right, who is wrong? Till each of them don’t focus their energies to increase their Leadership Depth by strengthening their Agility of Mind to recognize, acknowledge and accept with reverence every view of the Reality, however contradictory; is there any progress available to either of them?
 
Therefore, I am asking you – Do you make the Choice to Believe that you can reduce your working hours, and yet increase your impact and prosperity?
 
There is a very real reason why you may not be able to make the choice to believe, inspite of intellectually appreciating the view from my point. And, that is – Maybe, you don’t want to reduce your working hours. It could be you want to work long hours:

1. to escape the complexity of your emotional life.
2. to avoid taking responsibility in others areas of your wheel of life (relationships, home management, kids, your own self).
3. because working long hours gives you a sense of importance and self-worth.
4. because of the acknowledgement that you get at work, which you may not be experiencing at home.
5. because the work keeps you busy being busy that you get to escape the endless gibbering of the monkey called ‘mind’.
6. because you believe that one needs to work hard by putting in long hours to create success and wealth.
7. because you really enjoy working and it is more stressful to not be working.

 
Self-awareness is the foundation for fulfilling your intentions and realizing your dreams. It is important to be aware, very aware of your choices and the reasons behind your choices; really be authentic about your own inauthenticities – that is when you progress with velocity.
 
If you made the choice to believe, move forward to explore and experiment. If you are in the space of – Prove it to me, then I’ll decide; then you don’t as yet have the mindset of exploring and experimenting; and the outcome will prove to you the belief that you originally started with.
  
C. Create: 
If you are an entrepreneur (start-up or seasoned), here are five broad ways you can create to increase your impact and prosperity as an outcome of that, while reducing your working hours:
 
If you are a corporate professional, view yourself as a solopreneur with your organization as your customer and the work you do as the service offered by you in return of which your customer gives you a fixed retainer month on month. Go ahead and read all the below five ways you can increase your impact and monthly income (you can call it salary, if you like) as an outcome of that.
 
C1. Process Innovation: Reducing the number of hours taken for a particular process through Business Excellence, by making each of your process repeatable and scalable. 
Questions to ask yourself for a breakthrough in this area:
 
a. Which mistakes keep happening again and again? Can I put a checklist at those points with measurable input and output performance indicators to reduce the mistakes to zero? (Repeatable)
b. How do I re-design this process that it can function effectively and efficiently without my continuous supervision or me? (Repeatable and Scalable)
c. How do I simplify this process that with a single day’s training, a new employee will be able to deliver results as per the defined performance indicators? (Repeatable and Scalable)
d. Which things the team members or I keep doing multiple times during the week or during the month? Can I batch them together? (Scalable)
e. Are there too many people on this process? What if I had to manage this process with half the number of resources? (Scalable)
f. How do I de-expertise this process – meaning how to re-design the process to reduce the dependency on experts? (Scalable) 
 
C2. Value Innovation: Increasing the value of your product or service for your customer that they are willing to pay you more by you playing the game to be the world’s best in what you do, through deepening your Craft Mastery, 

The value of your product or service to your customer increases by your customer being able to achieve more in less time.
 
Questions to ask yourself for a breakthrough in this area:
a. How can I give 10 times the return on customer’s investment on our product or service?
b. What is the real problem the customer is trying to solve through our product or service?
c. How can I deliver 10 times more value while reducing customer’s time 10 times in consuming our product or service? 
 
C3. Impact Innovation: Increasing the impact your product or service has on your customer’s life through increasing your Leadership Depth by you willing to take responsibility of all that is not working and willing to give away credit for all that is working. When you shift your Being to that depth, you will suddenly get access to increase your impact in the world by transforming your customer’s life in ways beyond the direct scope of your product or service. 
Questions to ask yourself for a breakthrough in this area:
a. What is not working for which I am not taking responsibility?
b. What is working for which I am taking all the credit and not giving it away?
c. How does our product or service fit into the life of the customer?
d. What is the customer’s purpose of life? What can I do to support him / her to live that?
e. What are the customer’s intentions and dreams? What can I do to support him / her to fulfill them?
          
C4. Increasing Personal Productivity: Here are few ways you can increase your personal productivity –

a. Applying the Ultradian Rhythm – Pioneering researcher Nathan Kleitman discovered that our bodies operate in 90 minutes rhythm not only during the night but also during the day when we move from higher alertness to lower alertness.

In his renowned 1993 study of young violinists, performance researcher Anders Ericsson found that the best ones all practiced the same way: in the morning, in three increments of no more than 90 minutes each, with a break between each one. Ericcson discovered the same pattern among other musicians, athletes, chess players and writers.

Experiment with scheduling your day in slots of 90 minutes interspersed with 15 minutes of break.

Reference: HBR Article - For Real Productivity, Less is Truly More by Tony Schwartz 
b. Define one big win to focus on, the day before.
 
c. Applying Pareto’s Principle – Pareto’s Law: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
Alternately,
80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes.
80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time.
80% of the company profits come from 20% of the products and customers.
 
Identify your 20% that will give you 80% results, the day before, and focus on completing that 20% before 11 am.
 
d. Applying Parkinson’s Law - Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will expand in perceived importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
 
Therefore, identify few critical tasks that contribute most to your income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
 
e. Do not multi-task – Experiments have proven that multi-tasking actually reduces productivity and efficiency. Have one task at hand and focus all your energies on completing it; then move on to the next.
 
f. Schedule email, whatsapp, social media time once during afternoon and if needed, once in the evening. Restrict your usage strictly as per this schedule 
 

C5. Increasing Personal Creativity and Innovation Index: You can increase your personal creativity and innovation by nourishing, growing and evolving all the five bodies of your Being – Physical, Energy, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual by dropping Limiting Habits and adopting Growth Habits in each one of these bodies.
 
The questions to ask yourself to get an access for growth in each of your five bodies are: 

a. Physical – How healthy am I?
b, Energy - How joyously energised do I feel to do all that I want to do?
b. Emotional – How happy am I?
c. Mental – How well can I focus on something?
d. Spiritual – Why am I doing all of this? What is my purpose?
 
Measuring Impact and Prosperity
 
Money is a measure of the difference we are making. More we serve, make a difference and contribute to our customers (external and internal), more we earn. Money is a perfect expression of our creativity and the positive impact we are creating through our work.

This write-up is about reducing your working hours and yet increasing your impact and prosperity.  How will you know if you have achieved your objective year on year; if we don’t have a way to measure?
 
Lets call this measure the Impact Index and define it as the amount you earn per hour spent in working.
 
In Year 1, you worked 12 hours a day, six days a week and earned USD 1,000,000 in the year.
 
In Year 2, you worked 8 hours a day, five days a week and still earned USD 1,000,000 in the year.
 
In which year, did you create more impact?

You created the same impact in both the years but you did DLCM in Year 2, which is Do Less to Create More Value.
 
It is in the domain of possibility that in Year 3, you work 8 hours a day, five days a week and increase your earning to USD 2,000,000 through Process, Value and Impact Innovation; and by increasing your Personal Productivity and Creativity & Innovation Index.

Therefore, in Year 3, your Impact Index was the highest.
 
 
In Conclusion
 
Here is an over-view of the three steps to increase your impact and therefore, your prosperity, year on year, while reducing your working hours:
 
1. Make the Choice to Believe that it is possible.
2. Commit yourself to it.
3. Create through
a. Process Innovation
b. Value Innovation
c. Impact Innovation
d. Increasing Personal Productivity
e. Increasing Personal Creativity and Innovation Index

Looking forward to applauding you as you fly high in the vast sky of your limitless possibilities; creating massive positive impact, contribution and prosperity, as an outcome of that; while Having It All:
i. Deeply fulfilling successful, profitable business
and
ii. Loving, harmonious, positive, uplifting relationships at work and at home
and
iii. Happy, healthy, responsible, confident kids with their genius joyfully expressed
and
iv. Nourishing and nurturing yourself to the highest level of health, fitness and joyous well-being;
and
v. Making a massive difference by living your Purpose through your work, leaving footprints in the sand of time, creating a Brave New World of Love, Peace and Joy.

Loving you,
j.