Get more done, and do better work, by working less hard

No, really.

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Long email alert: read this one when you have fifteen minutes to spare. It’s longer than future emails will be, but I’ll be referring back to it. And it changed my life.

Now available as a podcast! (Or, at least, me reading it to you.) Click here.

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Things that sound too good to be true usually are. But it’s beyond doubt that most of us can get more done, do it better, and be happier, by working less hard—if we go about it the right way. And it’s life-changing (and potentially life-prolonging, too: see this, this, and this).

Skeptical? Let’s start with the evidence. The standard Western working week, five working days and a weekend, evolved, in the UK and the USA, from six working days in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Saturday’s Jewish sabbath, Shabbat, was glued to the front of Christians’ day of rest on Sunday.

What if our days off were to multiply again? What if people worked four days a week instead of five? They’d get 20% less done; businesses would be less profitable; organizations less effective. Or people would cram the same number of working hours into four longer days. Except: there’s abundant evidence that none of those things happens. Instead, something magical occurs. The organization 4 Day Week Global and others have carried out trials of four-day working weeks, involving thousands of workers in organizations of various sizes, commercial and non-profit, around the world.¹ To be clear: full-time workers in these trials switch from five working days a week to four eight-hour days of work a week but their pay isn’t reduced. Why on earth would an employer sign up for that?

Here’s what happens. Business revenues increase substantially. Staff hiring increases, and staff turnover decreases. Workers love it—and see improvements ranging from mental health to sleep to the culture and sense of purpose at work. People use their extra day off not to take on other work but for “hobbies and leisure, housework and caring, and personal maintenance.” Everyone’s lives improve (women’s even more than men’s). Childcare is dramatically easier. And the vast majority of the participating employers like it so much that they decide to continue with a four-day working week after the trials end. In a number of other trials, the results have been similar.² One, run by the Icelandic national government and Reykjavík’s City Council, was so successful that it resulted in major changes to work contracts in Iceland. There’s also good evidence that shorter working weeks are better for the climate: less commuting, for a start.

Here’s a participant in one of the four-day week trials: “When you realize that day has allowed you to be relaxed and rested, and ready to absolutely go for it on those other four days, you start to realise that to go back to working on a Friday would feel really wrong—stupid actually.” Over and over again, experiments like these have been successful. Consider this for a moment. In trials such as these, people did one day less of work every week but were paid the same. Their days off increased by 50%, employers and workers were happier, and productivity increased. Not productivity per day worked. Productivity overall. The question we should be asking isn’t why employers would sign up to this. It’s why on earth the five-day working week is still the norm.

(I have a painful yearning that I could have learnt this, and had the chutzpah to put it into practice, when I was working full-time as a lawyer. With hindsight, it’s easy to see how much happier and more productive I would have been.)

There’s nothing new about this finding, that a significant shift in the balance from work to rest would make us more productive. In the 1950s Raymond van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues at the Illinois Institute of Technology about work habits and discovered that those who spent more hours in the office were less productive.³ They were responsible for fewer publications and inventions than their colleagues. The optimum was around ten to twenty hours each week in their campus workplace. Were these people working at home? They were, and van Zelst and Kerr investigated this too: they found a bell-curve: working at home for up to about 3.5 hours a day increased people’s output, but beyond that it reduced their productivity. We’re going to come back to this bell-curve.

Let’s appreciate the significance of what van Zelst and Kerr found. It’s not that, if you do another hour of work each day you won’t be as productive during that hour (though that’s true). The startling conclusion is that those who do an extra hour of work each day accomplish less overall than those who don’t.

Management consultancy: a notoriously ‘always-on’ service. Like others who provide skilled professional services commercially, many management consultants cling to the belief that their clients expect their late-night emails to be answered straight away. An experiment at Boston Consulting Group, one of the ‘big three’ US management consulting firms, required people to take regular, scheduled time off. You may share my concern about how well-suited these people are to be telling anyone how to run an organization when you learn that part of the experiment was to require consultants to take just one scheduled night off a week, “not even check or respond to emails or other messages” after 6 pm on that single night. The partner in charge of the team involved in the first trial worried about having to tell her client the mutinous news that each member of her team would be unavailable one night a week. But, you may now not be surprised to learn, their work improved, communication was better, and the team functioned more efficiently and effectively.

The author of a wonderful book called Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang—to whom I owe much of my thinking on this topic—looks at the optimal amount of work for getting great work done.⁴ One potent observation of Pang’s is that many creative types who achieve greatness do so by working for around four hours a day. It’s a peculiarly consistent figure. Pang considers Charles Dickens (fifteen novels, five novellas), Alice Munro (Nobel prizewinning writer), Ingmar Bergman (more than sixty films), Gabriel García Marquez (another Nobel prize for literature), Ernest Hemingway (and another Nobel Prize), Charles Darwin (an astonishing intellectual legacy and nineteen books), the influential doctor and medical educator William Osler, and Anthony Trollope (47 novels—“All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers,—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write”⁵). In two fascinating books by Mason Currey (who has his own Substack newsletter—recommended) sketching the working habits of several hundred great writers, musicians, artists, architects and philosophers, the same picture emerges again and again (with plenty of exceptions).⁶ When Elon Musk wrote “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” he didn’t have the slightest clue what he was talking about.

Now, for some, it’s clearly possible to do great things while working ludicrously longer hours. And, with the exception of Alice Munro, I’ve just given you a list of men. A lot of these four-hour days have a hard-working woman (or several) behind them. But to Pang’s list we might add Alice Walker (of The Color Purple), Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, author Isabel Allende and, famously, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, who describes her schedule—including three or four hours of writing in the morning—in her diaries and letters, and writes brilliantly of the importance of space, not just a room, but in your head, in her essay A Room of One’s Own.⁷ So we have to ask: are four-hour days the cause of productive brilliance or were these short days and success the consequences of these people’s privilege? Did these luminaries work four-hour days because they could, or did they do great work in part because they worked four-hour days? It would be hard to set up randomized controlled trials to answer that question. But the message of research such as the Illinois Institute of Technology study, the belief of many who have experimented and done great work, and the experience of more ordinary folk (including me) who work on their creative or intellectual projects for a focused four hours a day is that they couldn’t have achieved what they achieved any other way.

But what about you?

Novel-writing may be far from the everyday grindstones at which most of us work but, if you’ve done hard mental work—studying something complicated, say, or research, or writing—I’d be willing to bet that you weren’t able to sustain it for more than four hours a day for long. Perhaps you felt guilty that you weren’t doing the eight or so hours a day that we typically consider to be a full working day. But you’d probably have got more done had you been more generous with yourself, focused for four hours, and then allowed yourself the rest of the day for guilt-free relaxation.

This is all well and good for those with the luxury of spending four hours a day writing their novels before going for a restorative promenade around their landscaped country estates. But its relevance to the prosaic work that most of us spend our time doing, where the job has to get done and we’re required to be on duty for long periods of time? Let’s go back to the Illinois Institute of Technology study, and the bell-curve that van Zelst and Kerr discovered, showing the relationship between how many hours their colleagues worked and how productive they were. Recognizing that this is not just about time but effort, we might generalize van Zelst’s and Kerr’s bell-curve to something like this:

To turn that into words: there is an optimum amount of effort. Work harder and you’ll achieve more only when you’re to the left of that optimum, the peak of the curve (C). That’s often where we assume we are—at B. I have so much to do I won’t have time for a break today; I’ll stay a bit late at work to try to clear my list; I’m going to have to take this piece of work home with me; I don’t have time for a short walk to clear my head; I guess I’ll have to come in for a bit at the weekend—because (we think) working harder will get more done. But, as we’ve seen, that assumption’s usually wrong. Many of us spend most of our time to the right of the peak, at D. This is beyond the land of diminishing returns: we’re in the quicksands of negative returns. If we’re at D and we double down we’ll make things worse. The implication of the four-day week studies is that, across a range of settings and in a number of countries—most of the time, most of us are to the right of the peak. We will get more done only if we take it easier.

(To complete the picture: A is so lazy that they’re just getting in the way, making things worse than if they weren’t there at all. As much use is E, who is working so hard that their stress and the poor quality of their work cause more problems that they solve. If you’ve been working for a while you may have met A or E, but they’re fairly uncommon: A can survive only in a seriously dysfunctional team, and E usually burns out quickly. Note, too, that, even at B, you’re in the land of diminishing returns: more effort gets you less than it would if you were starting further to the left—the gradient at B is getting shallower.)

Why is there this right side of the curve, where working less hard results in more work, done better? The short answer is obvious: that, to do your best work and your most work, there’s an optimum balance of work, rest, sleep, and all the other things we have to do in life. There’s no bread without the rise. Work harder and you might get more done today but it won’t be great work and, in the longer run, you’ll function less well, so the amount you get done each day, and the quality of what you do, will decline. (In future emails we’ll look at the science explaining why rest and sleep, and also exercise, when done right, bring such astonishing benefits to our work and our lives.)

What does all this mean for you? I’m not suggesting you must, nor assuming that you could, work only four hours a day (unless you’re doing tough intellectual work, in which case you really shouldn’t spend much more than four hours a day on those bits of your job). Nor, necessarily, four days a week. This isn’t for only the Virginia Woolves and the Charles Darwinses. Nor is it solely about how many hours or days you work: remember, we’re looking at effort more broadly.

When working as a barrister (trial lawyer), I’d often anxiously over-prepare for court hearings—and, as a result, perform less effectively than I’d have done had I taken it easier.

Early in my career as a GP, when patients would show up with eight things they wanted my help with, seven of which they mentioned only in the twenty-third minute of their ten-minute appointment, I’d try to deal with them all—and so do so badly, leaving my patients feeling rushed and dissatisfied. GPs-in-training are taught to deal with this common situation by making a list and prioritizing, booking a further appointment to deal with those problems for which there’s insufficient time. I do a bit of that, now, but have learnt that what usually matters most is simply to listen. Rarely is there a need to rush. Sometimes, a list of problems is a sign of someone feeling out of control, unheard. When there is more to do, the listening earns enough trust to agree some measured, unstressed, next steps.

Do less, better.

Journalists, lawyers and some social workers may be able to compress what they currently do into fewer hours or days and, with clearer, more rested heads, do it quicker and better. But what about teachers, nurses, librarians, and others whose jobs involve being on duty, doing the job, between certain hours? It’s subtler. But the seven practical steps I’m about to offer you all apply. If part-time working is an option for you, we’re going to consider new perspectives on that in a future email. And most important of all is to ensure your time away from work—enough of it—is truly restful and restorative (another thing we’re going to consider in more detail in a future email).

Here’s where you start. It sets up a positive feedback loop, a virtuous cycle: you get better at playing this game, your perspective shifts, you prioritize better, you get more rest, you become more efficient.

a)    Pay attention to where you are on your efforts/results curve.

It’s probably to the right of where you think you are. Most of us move to the right as the working day goes on. An awareness of where you are allows you to make better decisions about how to use your time.

The best place to be is B, not C. At B you have some unused capacity; at C you have none. And serenity and success don’t require you to maximize results.

b)    Take breaks whenever you can, especially when you feel tired or aren’t performing optimally.

Several times a day. There’s nothing work-shy about this: it’s a skilled strategy for getting more done and doing better work.

c)    Break well.

The effects of a walk, ideally in fresh air, even for just a couple of minutes, can be astonishing.

d)    Allow yourself, when appropriate, to do a quick-and-dirty job of things.

Distinguish between those things that need to be done perfectly and those that don’t. You may, as a result, do things better than you would have done had you been meticulous.

e)    Stop working when your working day should end.

I used to follow a different rule: do today’s work today. I’d leave work only once I’d finished everything that could be finished that day. (This is easier done with work like much of mine, when each quantum of work is short: rarely is a GP working on a project for weeks or months.) I believed in that because I’d leave without work hanging over me, without the temptation to do more when I got home. When I can, I’ll still do that. But often, now, after I’ve seen my last patient of the day, I find myself battling clinical admin and taking an age to get through it. If I leave it, rest, sleep, and return to it the next working morning, it takes my clearer head moments to bash through it.

Tired? Stop working, if possible, or at least switch to something different, and come back to it when you’re going to do it more efficiently.

f)      Structure your day wisely, if you can.

When days are unavoidably long, include, at the times when you’ll most need them, activities that are more restful, that are lower-paced, or that stretch you in different directions. We’ll return to this, too.

g) Build time off into your weekly schedule.

Not just time to do other things that need to be done: time for rest and leisure (to which we’ll return).

h)    Consider working fewer hours, if you can.

If you’re working a lot of hours—and we know from the four-day week and Illinois Institute of Technology studies that ‘a lot’ of hours a week probably includes anything north of the low-thirties per week—then you are likely to get more done, and to do it better, if you cut down your hours. If you can make that decision, try it.

If you need to persuade the boss, suggest a trial. You could lend them a copy of Pang’s book, Rest (see immediately below), or point them to 4 Day Week’s website. Organizations that try shorter working weeks rarely revert to the bad old days.

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Further reading:

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (London: Penguin Life, 2017).

Newport, Cal. Slow Productivity: the Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2024).

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Next week: overcoming the imposter phenomenon.

1. See here, here, Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (New York: Crown, 2022), 187 – 190, and here.

2. See here, and Anna Coote, Aidan Harper, and Alfie Stirling, The Case for a Four-Day Week, The Case For (Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021).

3. Raymond H. Van Zelst and Willard A. Kerr, “Some Correlates of Technical and Scientific Productivity,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 46 (1951): 470–75, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0063045; Raymond H. Van Zelst and Willard A. Kerr, “A Further Note on Some Correlates of Scientific and Technical Productivity,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 47 (1952): 129–129, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0058912; see also Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less(London: Penguin Life, 2017), 62 – 64.

4. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less(London: Penguin Life, 2017).

5. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company (reprinted 1922), 1883).

6. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work (Picador, 2013); Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: Women at Work (London: Picador, 2019).

7. Currey, Daily Rituals Women at Work; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas: Virginia Woolf, 1st edition (London: Penguin Classics, 2019).