The Five-Hour Experiment
- 6 days ago
- 1 min read
If you’re working 50+ hours a week, here’s the only assignment I’ll give you:
Cut five hours over the next two weeks.
Not by working faster.
Not by skipping sleep.
By eliminating or delegating five hours of work that either doesn’t need to be done
or doesn’t need to be done by you.
This is harder than it sounds.
The moment you try it, you’ll generate a list of reasons why every hour is essential.
Challenge those reasons.
Most of them are habits masquerading as necessities.
I had a client working 61-hour weeks.
I asked him to try 50 for one month. He was terrified. Certain things would slip.
At the end of the month:
— Team output: unchanged
— Boss feedback: none
— What changed: an extra hour of sleep every night
and dinner with his family four times a week instead of once
“Where were those ten hours going?”
“Mostly email,” he said. “And meetings I didn’t need to be in.”
The five-hour experiment isn’t about working less.
It’s about finding out which hours were actually doing something.
Three places to look first:
1. Meetings you attend but don’t contribute to
2. Work you do because you always have — not because it requires you
3. Response times you’ve trained people to expect
One more thing: pair this with a non-negotiable.
Pick one thing that recharges you — exercise, sleep, family time, a hobby.
Make it non-negotiable. Not ‘I’ll try.’ Non-negotiable.
The things that recharge you will always lose to the things that deplete you if they’re optional.
They have to be protected.
Where are the first five hours you could cut?
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