I do work a lot. I try to work every hour of the day that I’m awake. I love the struggle. I’m working at Intuit, I’m working at home, I’m working where ever I am…work and play are the same to me. It’s not like I’m some softy who got lucky. I have had to work to like working. I used to be incredibly lazy and irresponsible doing only what I deemed necessary to prevent some huge failure. It wasn’t until I worked a lot at my work that I really started to enjoy it. That may sound odd, but that’s how it was for me.
I used to think I needed to find my calling and then I would love to work. Well, I have found that I love to work by doing it a lot and that work has become my calling. I love to solve problems. The experiments of problem solving are very exciting to me. It allows me to get ideas out of my head and find out how far off-base they are.
Also, I have realized that my time with my family at home was work also. The same kind of deductive reasoning and experiments are the same as when I am at home or when I am at work. How do I want my children to behave? How can I get them to want to behave that way? How should I set up my finances to reach my goals? Which bank is best for this? Where to take my wife to dinner? How should I commute to work today? Where shall we take a vacation? What kind of experience will we want for our children? It’s all action around relationships and outcomes. That’s what work is to me. I just try to make sure that what I am working at is going to get more of what I want: health, happy family, wealth, etc. That’s what productivity is to me.
Anyway, I completely 100% disagree and agree with the article. I think employees should make sure they are rested and advocate for time in their lives away from work to get rest; however, I also think that every employee should consider themselves their own “small business”. If you ran your own business, would you limit yourself to 40 hours a week just on principle? You just might go out of business doing that. It’s not about time, it’s about productivity. I completely 100% agree with that.