The 35-Hour Challenge: Can You Run Your Business in 35 Hours?

When a man tells me he never works more than 45 hours a week, I give him a challenge.

For two weeks, produce the same output in 35.

What happens when you cut your week to 35 hours?

If you can produce the same output in 35 hours, the extra ten were noise. They weren't value. They were meetings you didn't need, email you didn't need to answer that day, and work you were doing because it was in front of you.

The constraint forces a discipline that's hard to adopt any other way. With ten fewer hours, you can't do everything, so you have to decide what actually matters. That decision is the whole point.

I call those the MITs, your Most Important Things. Spend your time and energy on the 20% that moves the needle. Name your three Most Important Things for the day, the week, and the quarter, and protect them. Get the rest off your plate: out of your brain, out of your workflow, out of your inbox, handed to someone less expensive and less critical, or to an agent.

The 35-hour challenge is the implementation side of MITs. The MITs tell you what to do. The challenge tells you when to stop. If your three most important things are done, you're done for the day, fully done, and coasting doesn't count.

Why is this a self-care question as much as a business one?

Because the time you get back has to go somewhere, and I want it to go to the things that fill you up. Training. Sleep. Dinner with your family. A weekend away.

Self-care is the result of applying the MITs discipline. Most executives treat self-care as something they'll get to when the work is done. The work is never done. So the self-care never happens, and the energy that the work depends on slowly drains out.

I've written about how work addiction wears a suit. The 35-hour challenge is the practical test for it. A man who struggles to stop at 35 hours, even when the output holds, learns something about why he was working the extra ten.

How do you run the challenge?

Pick two normal weeks, ones without a board meeting or a product launch.

Before you start, write down the output you'd normally produce in a week. Be specific: deals advanced, decisions made, projects moved.

Each morning, name your three Most Important Things. Do those first.

Stop at seven hours a day. If you finish early, stop early.

At the end of two weeks, compare the output to your list. If it held, you just found ten hours a week. Decide now where they're going, before the noise moves back in.

If you can't take Friday off, there's something wrong with your organization. This is how you find out what.

What would you do with ten hours a week back?

~b