History & Science Of The 5-Hour Workday

If you have never started a company, I think this activity is the most important you will do. My aim is to change the traditional mentality of working long hours at the cost of balance, family and church to the pre-industrial one when work and a balanced life were common. It is when we strike balance that we create the opportunity to live a spectacular life. No life is stress free, and I have my fair share of worries, but if I keeled over today I would hand on heart shout from the cliff top like Robin Williams. Make your life spectacular, I know I did… and the reason is the magic of balance.

If you search online, you’ll find many articles about the entrepreneur 80-hour work week. Others suggest working hard the first year and then backing off. The scientific evidence contradicts both. Before you purchased this course you probably downloaded and read the free gift ‘The practical magic of the 5-hour workday.’ Here, you’ll find extra scientific data and new suggestions not found in that pamphlet.

When I worked in the Navy I worked 4 hours on, 4-hours off, 2-hours on, 14 hours off. Even the regimented mentality of the military knew humans cannot maintain peak brain power for more than a few hours at a time. When I was ‘On Watch,’ it was intense and required full concentration. When I was ‘Off Watch,’ I took a stroll on deck for some rejuvenating sea air, went to my cabin for a nap or read a biography of an adventurer or historical leader (a passion of mine).

My next job was in a hospital radiotherapy department. I worked either a 4-hour morning shift or a 4-hour afternoon shift on linear accelerators, alternating the shift daily. During the alternative shift my role was to accompany patients for tests or clinic visits. If they were in a wheelchair I’d take them the long way around to their appointment and make sure we both got some fresh air in the hospital grounds. The shifts were determined that way because humans cannot concentrate on a highly technical task like running a linear accelerator for more than a few hours.

During the six years I worked there, however, doctors were required to work sometimes more than 24 hours without a break doing the same demanding medical work. I lost count of the number of errors I witnessed. In fact, in many cases during my down-times, I was able to prevent doctors from making them. Their brains were fried and mine was alert simply because I had taken a break.

When I eventually joined the world of commerce I was careful to accept jobs that let me work from home. When I was a sales representative I never worked more than 3 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon. Of, course I never told my boss that. I would have been fired for laziness. After a dedicated work period in the morning, I would get some lunch and take it to a nature area or else take a walk around a castle or cathedral grounds.

As I moved up the career totem pole, I kept to that schedule of dedicated work periods and dedicated distraction periods, but I never shared the fact. If I went to work in a corporate office I could never had got away with it, but by working from a home base nobody but me knew. Yet, I was one the most successful sales representatives, winning every prize on offer and getting promoted to district manager within 18 months. Then I was manager of the year for my fortune 100 company 3 years in a row before winning European marketing manager the year before I moved to America. Everyone else I worked with then and since was stressed and burned out. I was VP commercial development in my early thirties.

None of that fast-track career was due to talent. It was because I had already studied the art and science of the five-hour day and proved its success for myself.

So, when I started my first company I kept to the same scientific schedule of dedicated work periods and dedicated distraction periods. In Secrets of a Successful Startup it is essential to structure you workday and indeed your ‘life-day’ in this manner. Otherwise stress and burnout are inevitable, and with that comes performance decline. Here is a great example of what happens if you don’t do it:

Erin Bagwell, producer of ‘Dream Girl’ a documentary about inspiring female entrepreneurs available for free on YouTube, had this to say about her experience starting her own venture.

Here’s how it goes when you start a project and let it control you without a balanced schedule… One of the most important things I’ve learned through this journey is that as founders we need to surrender to self care. I use the word surrender intentionally because building your own business is exhausting and taking time for yourself can often feel like an anxiety-inducing luxury. As my business partner Komal Minhas says in Dream, Girl, “There is so much guilt for every hour you are not working on building your business.”

This reality of working nights and weekends isn’t a new one for many of us, but the stress and pressure of being an entrepreneur is a unique blend that pushes the envelope on what one can take and without the balance of self-care, you are destined to burn out. Or at least, I was.

…But after a couple of weeks of working my 24/7 schedule, I started running out of steam. I didn’t have the space or the energy to be excited about all the exciting things that were happening to us. I felt too tired to be happy. Too tired to make plans. And on my days off, my husband would watch me curl up into a ball and sleep or binge watch The Good Wife. A week before our White House screening, my body finally gave out and I got both the flu and a sinus infection that forced me off my computer and into bed… It wasn’t until three weeks after our premiere that I was able to take my first work-free weekend in five months. I had a full-blown panic attack before we left the city for the Berkshires for three days and packed my laptop — just in case an emergency were to pop up. It didn’t, of course, and I was able to unplug for a little while. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but it felt like the start of something better. Every weekend since, I have tried to be really intentional with the time I need away from work to regenerate. I am spending more time with my husband, more time with friends and I’m saying yes to plans and events (non-work related ones, I should note) that I would never have gone to six months ago (dinner parties, hang-outs in the park, weekends out of the city). I don’t feel like I have totally mastered unplugging. This is definitely a work in progress, but stepping away has kept me excited by our work, and it gives me the space to play and build on our next phase of the film — sales and distribution.

It’s really easy as an entrepreneur to get lost in the climb — to work so hard for something you have built. And oftentimes we trick ourselves into thinking goal-setting will work for us. “If I just get that next level of investment,” or “If I just hire that one person,” our life and our company will shift and settle down. I don’t think that’s true. I think as we grow, so do our expectations, and it’s up to us to carve out the time now to make it worth our while. Surrendering to self-care is the first step.

That is the experience so many first-time entrepreneurs suffer. It does not have to be that way, and I want you to change mentality now before you start your company. If you are already an entrepreneur it is time to consider changing your lifestyle. Give yourself a two-week trial of what I suggest below. You will never regret it.

When I was growing up, all my relatives and teachers insisted that to get to the top required hard work and more hard work. I have found the opposite to be true. I have met many entrepreneurs who are successful in business who work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Most are on their third or fourth marriage, estranged from their family and friends, and can’t remember the last time they lay on the grass staring at a starry sky.

I know, however, that by breaking up the workday into dedicated productive periods and dedicated relaxing times you can be more successful and still have a fun, balanced life. The dedicated relaxing periods are vital for maximum brain productivity and also for creating the ideal set of circumstances for creative work like finding solution to issues. The dedicated working periods are productive, but also because of the outsource model we use in Secrets of a Successful Startup are more than enough time for work.

I can get lucky once, but not three or more times in a row and not for a gross enterprise value of at least $300 million. Let me remind you that I have never hired an employee, never worked more than 5 hours a day when in my home-based office since I started my first company in 2003. I am currently building my fourth company. At one time I was running three companies together and I still kept my workday to five hours. It works. The business model makes it possible. History already shows it was the better way to live and science now backs me up.

In his book Brain Rules John Medina lays out how hard it is for the brain to stay on task for more than 10 minutes at a time. Here are some snippets:

We are not used to sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while we walked or ran as many as 12 miles a day. The brain still craves this experience. Exercise boosts brain power in sedentary populations like our own. exercisers outperform couch potatoes (sic or a guy stuck at a computer all day) in long-term memory testing, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving tasks…

People don’t pay attention to boring things. You have to grab someone’s attention and you have only 10 minutes to keep it…

Your brain wants a nap. In one study a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performances 34%…

We have created high stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive than a non-stressed brain…

Schools are designed so that most learning has to occur at home. If you tried to create an educational environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle set up.

OK 10 minutes is up… your attention is starting to waver. Trust me; stand up, stretch, go take in the view from the window and come back. Notice how different you feel.

If you want to be successful in something other than a $50K a year business, it is essential to change your mentality from working all the time to balancing your life between work and distraction. In my experience, it is when we are relaxed and balancing life that the great ideas come, the ones that propel you to multi-million-dollar opportunities. They do not come when you are exhausted and burned out from a day of seemingly endless meetings and teleconferences. Science also backs me up on that as you’ll see below.

Let me tell you at the outset that switching from working long hours, often in an ill-disciplined manner, to the stiff self-discipline of structured work periods at home is not an easy thing to achieve. I have convinced many people to do it, and the transition can take several months. They could never go back to the old schedule, but they had difficulties adjusting to the new one for a while. It goes against all we have been taught. It contradicts how we were raised with early starts to school and nights filled with homework. It certainly goes against the typical workday of a traditionally-structured company.

This requires a complete shift in mentality and with it an even stronger sense of self-discipline. When did you last switch your mobile phone off, lock it behind a door and walk away knowing that you will not touch it again for at least 17 hours? Dare you try it? When did you last take a whole weekend off-grid? When did you last deliberately avoid catching up with messages before starting work at 9 am and actually enjoy meditating, walking in nature and then eating a hearty breakfast before checking that first email? When did you ever stop a task before it was completed simply because the work period has ended?

A title like ‘The 5-Hour Workday sounds a bit kitschy. It is not a gimmick; it is one of the most essential disciplines to learn to build a multi-million-dollar venture while also living a fun, balanced life in Secrets of a Successful Startup. I have said that about five times in this activity already. Why? Because John Medina in Brain Rules also suggests repetition is the best method for learning.

THE SCIENCE TO SUPPORT 5-HOUR WORKDAYS

K. Anders Ericsson, an expert on the psychology of work, says performance flat lines after 3 hours of continual work and all you are doing after that is working for the sake of it. Ericsson has made a career out of studying the most successful people on Earth and figuring out what exactly helps them rise so high.

Work does not mean productivity or performance. Additionally, toward the end of the day, performance begins to flat-line or even worsen, “If you’re pushing people well beyond that time they can’t really concentrate maximally,” Ericsson told Business Insider in 2016.

Studies also show that over the course of an eight-hour workday, the average employee works for only two hours and 53 minutes. The rest of the time, according to a 2016 survey of 2000 business offices, people spend on a combination of reading the news, browsing social media, eating food, socializing about non-work topics, taking smoke breaks, and searching for new jobs.

The actual amount of productive time is less than 3 hours in the workday. In most traditionally-structured companies, however, that 3 hours could all be spent in meetings. It is, however, well known and reported that most meetings are unnecessary and unproductive. Additionally, because the employee is trapped into the regimental 8-hour workday, he or she does not dedicate time to relaxation periods. Although the employee is working less than 3 hours he or she is unable to be creative in between while stuck in an office environment.

Meetings also do not equate to productivity or performance. When you were an employee you probably agreed totally, but you were usually forced to attend meetings for political reasons. Rare is the company whose leader allows people to decide to attend or not attend.

Eliminate Meetings

When I compare before and after being my own boss, the biggest difference is productivity. Reflecting on my regular career in traditionally-structured organizations, I spent 75% of my time sitting in meetings. Rarely was the topic of the meeting to do with profitability, cost efficiency, or customer satisfaction. Most meetings were about internal matters like employee morale, human resource systems, and company regulations.

It is estimated that there are more than eleven million formal business meetings per day in the United States alone, each lasting on average 3 hours. Assuming on average that there are 4 meeting participants, which is generously small in my experience, this means 44 million employees are begrudgingly participating in what most consider a waste of time.

On average, each United States employee spends over 40 hours per month attending unnecessary meetings. That does not take into account the even longer time most employees spend to prepare for the meeting or to travel to it. Also, it does not take into account the amount of time people spend in unscheduled meetings in the corridors, by the water cooler or coffee pot or even in the parking lot. When all that is included a typical employee spends over 80 hours a month attending some form of meeting, equivalent to two full weeks of labor per month.

With the elimination of all this wasted time, entrepreneurs gain two extra weeks work time a month. But you won’t need it because the business model I recommend pretty much runs itself. You’ll find even 5 hours is too much work time.

When I started my first company, I found I could achieve in five hours what used to take two or more days. With my three companies, the first six months were the busiest, but even then I didn’t work more than five hours a day. That five hours was intense at times, but there really was no need to spend any more time in the office.

If you must have a meeting follow the rules of productivity. Famed businessman Peter Drucker once said, “Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.” I couldn’t agree more. The key is: meetings must be efficient.

Meetings must have an agenda distributed well ahead of time so attendees can prepare. Meetings without agendas are just coffee breaks, but coffee breaks don’t allow you to build the next billion-dollar company.

In most cases meetings can be done over the computer or even over email over time and especially if they are just the dreaded update style of meeting. Who needs to listen to an update when they can read an email? Invite only those who absolutely have to attend. No bystanders, no looky-loos. A common mistake many make is to try and invite everyone on their team to a meeting, thinking that a larger “meeting of the minds” will produce better results. To transform a meeting from “time killer” to “business grower,” a meeting must result in clearly defined action. If anyone in a meeting leaves without a clear next actionable step, they didn’t need to be there in the first place. They can read the meeting minutes by themselves.

Unfortunately, when many employees become owners they often fall into the same habit. Holding meetings fuels the ego. A meeting feels like progress. When we sit at the head of the table a meeting makes us feel powerful and as if we are achieving something. Oftentimes, when things are quiet, as they are in a fully outsourced business model, we feel guilty to have so much free time, so we call a meeting. In the traditional workplace all those distractions that mean we are only really working less than 3 hours are what save us from burnout. At home as owner of my company we don’t have those distractions so we have to create them. Otherwise burnout is a very real threat.

Burnout

German-American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger first recognized the problem of burnout in New York City in 1974, at a clinic for addicts and homeless people, Freudenberger wasn’t thinking of drug users.

The clinic’s volunteers were actually struggling, too: their work was intense, and many were beginning to feel demotivated and emotionally drained. Though they had once found their jobs rewarding, they had become cynical and depressed; they weren’t giving their patients the attention they deserved. Freudenberger defined this alarming new condition as a state of exhaustion caused by prolonged overwork – and borrowed the term ‘burnout’ to describe it.

Burnout has three elements: feelings of exhaustion, mental detachment from one’s job and poorer performance at work

Sportspeople get it. Social media stars get it. Entrepreneurs get it. Freudenberger himself eventually got it. Late last month, the World health Organization announced that the trendy problem will be recognized in the latest International Classification of Diseases manual, where it is described as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”.

“A lot of the signs and symptoms of pre-burnout would be very similar to depression,” says Siobhán Murray, a psychotherapist based in County Dublin, Ireland. Murray suggests looking out for creeping bad habits, such as increased alcohol consumption and relying on sugar to get you through the day. Also watch out for feelings of tiredness that won’t go away. “So that even if you do sleep well, by 10 in the morning you’re already counting down the hours to bed. Or not having the energy to exercise or go for a walk.”

“It’s when we’re continually exposed to stress and anxiety, that we’re not letting go, that it starts to turn into burnout. It’s when you’re bringing that big project with you into the next stage of your day, and adding to it continually,” she says. When we’re continually exposed to stress and anxiety, that we’re not letting go, that it starts to turn into burnout.

However, sometimes the work environment is the problem. According to a 2018 Gallup poll of 7,500 US workers, burnout stems from unfair treatment at work. “Another issue can be that the values of the company are seriously at odds with the person’s own values, which creates a sense of strain and dissonance, because they’re doing something that they don’t believe in,” says Walker.

In some cases, her clients can solve the problem by taking up something fulfilling outside work.

A study of office workers in the UK also suggests a three-hour workday might be more sensible, because people can only concentrate for about 20 minutes at a time. One study even found people struggled to stay on task for more than 10 seconds. Recent research supports the shorter worker attention span being caused by gaming and addiction to devices. That is easy to believe.

It turns out the mantra “practice makes perfect” is true, but only if people engage in a certain kind of practice known as “deliberate practice.” Experts don’t spend hours upon hours honing their craft, Ericsson has found. They spend a few hours at a time purposefully trying to improve, and then they stop and recuperate.

This is how it is for Secrets of a Successful Startup. We must use focused self-discipline for short periods of time and then have the courage to lock the office door and walk away for a break. The break is the key. I am not suggesting you switch on the TV and watch a soap opera for an hour. I suggest instead you go for a walk outside in nature, or workout, or do some meditative practice. Why not even take a nap? Take your partner for lunch. Play with the dogs. Surprise the kids with a treat. Any such balanced activity switches the way the brain works.

If you’re a morning person, you’ll want to favor those morning hours when you’re feeling fresher to get your most demanding, analytic work done. Using your brain to solve problems, answer questions and make decisions is best done when you’re at your peak. For night owls, this is obviously a much later period in the day. I actually work most productively and creatively in the late afternoon for some reason. The key is to structure your 5 hours of office time around your peak times.

Says Murray, On the other hand, if you’re trying to do creative work, you’ll actually have more luck when you’re more tired and your brain isn’t functioning as efficiently. This sounds crazy, but it actually makes sense when you look at the reasoning behind it. It’s one of the reasons why great ideas often happen when we take a walk or a shower or a nap.

If you’re tired, your brain is not as good at filtering out distractions and focusing on a particular task. It’s also a lot less efficient at remembering connections between ideas or concepts. These are both good things when it comes to creative work, since this kind of work requires us to make new connections, be open to new ideas and think in new ways. So, a tired, fuzzy brain is much more use to us when working on creative projects.

In 2018, a Scientific American article described how distractions can actually be a good thing for creative thinking: Insight problems involve thinking outside the box. This is where susceptibility to “distraction” can be of benefit. At off-peak times we are less focused, and may consider a broader range of information. This wider scope gives us access to more alternatives and diverse interpretations, thus fostering innovation and insight. For me this has always meant ‘lock the office door and go for a stroll or take a nap.’

Napping

In one study, participants memorized illustrated cards to test their memory strength. After memorizing a set of cards, they had a 40-minute break wherein one group napped, and the other stayed awake. After the break both groups were tested on their memory of the cards, and the group who had napped performed better: Much to the surprise of the researchers, the sleep group performed significantly better, retaining on average 85 percent of the patterns, compared to 60 percent for those who had remained awake.

Research indicates that when a memory is first recorded in the brain—in the hippocampus, to be specific—it’s still “fragile” and easily forgotten, especially if the brain is asked to memorize more things. Napping, it seems, pushes memories to the neo-cortex, the brain’s “more permanent storage,” preventing them from being “overwritten.”

A study from the University of California asked participants to complete a challenging task around midday, which required them to take in a lot of new information. At around 2p.m., half of the volunteers took a nap while the rest stayed awake. The really interesting part of this study is not only that at 6p.m. that night the napping group performed better than those who didn’t take a nap. In fact, the napping group actually performed better than they had earlier in the morning.

Some recent research has found that the right side of the brain is far more active during a nap than the left side, which stays fairly quiet while we’re asleep. Despite the fact that 95% of the population is right-handed, with the left side of their brains being the most dominant, the right side is consistently the more active hemisphere during sleep. The study’s author, Andrei Medvedev, speculated that the right side of the brain handles housekeeping duties while we are asleep. So, while the left side of your brain takes some time off to relax, the right side is clearing out your temporary storage areas, pushing information into long-term storage and solidifying your memories from the day.

For about 300 years humans have been mentally conditioned to think of work as what you do between the time you get up and the time you go to bed, 5 or 6 days a week. What would have been considered inhumane 400 years ago is now accepted as normal. Blame the machines and those who owned them.

Today, even when relaxing in front of the TV, most people are bombarded with TV news, soap operas or other TV shows which reinforce this unnecessary work ethic. They are texting, emailing, even taking calls when they should be allowing their brains to be creative, In some workplaces we are also conditioned by shifts. Get up, work an 8-12 hour shift, eat, go to bed. Do it again. Then get a couple of days off. Repeat. If it sounds robotic that is because it is.

Imperatives for Structuring the 5-hour workday for a Successful Startup:

1. Separate, lockable office space in the home.

Without doubt the most important ‘must-have’ is a separate office space at home. It is no good just setting up your laptop at the kitchen countertop. There are too many distractions and the temptation to grab something from the fridge is all too real. It is imperative to separate the work time from the home time and that means using a spare bedroom or cordoning off a space in a lounge or garden.

You need to create the mental triggers of work and downtime and that is only effectively done when you can enter and leave the workspace. That means the workspace must also have a door and preferably one that can be locked.

2. Separate phone and devices for business and home life.

Most people think it an unnecessary expense to have separate devices for the separate parts of their life. I can tell you this is one of the best things I ever learned to do. When your phone shares business and life contacts it is almost impossible to leave it behind during the downtimes. It is also just as hard to ignore the life calls during business hours. What you end up being is muddled and inefficient.

I am not talking about a separate line on the same phone system. That doesn’t help. I really do mean separate phones, separate tablets, and separate computers. Only that way can you successfully leave the work phone in the office, lock the door, and walk away.

3. The third imperative is a bit old fashioned, but sometimes I feel the more things change the more they stay the same.

Carry a notepad and pen wherever you go. During your down-times great ideas will pop into your mind. We all kid ourselves how good we are at remembering things. We are not. Jot down ideas and notes. Doing so relieves your brain of the stress of remembering. I am sure you didn’t think when you bought this book that you would be reminded to keep a pen and paper handy, but these days hardly anyone does it. Do you have pen and paper now while you are reading this? You have to get into the habit of leaving the phone behind so you won’t just be able to add notes electronically. Besides, writing is also shown scientifically to be better for memory retention than typing.

Self-discipline

The 5-hour workday is not very negotiable. If you try to cram in more work hours you’ll just be wasting time… literally. 5 hours means 5 hours. If you work 5 hours, then go for a walk but take your business phone with you, you are fooling yourself and performance will diminish over time. You simply can’t have creative ideas and solutions at the same time you are working.

The good news is that with my recommended business model, 5 hours is more than enough to get everything done. All you need is to show some self-discipline. We’ll discuss that in detail later, but for mnow consider two essential disciplines.

Schedule Discipline.

Working out of a home office can be a challenge to keeping a regular schedule. There are so many tempting distractions around, and family and friends love to pop in for a chat. There is the temptation to catch the last innings of an afternoon baseball game, check the stock market, play a video game, or get the news headlines. You can do that after you sell your company for $100 million, but not when it is a start-up.

The secret to staying disciplined is to schedule absolutely everything. That means not just the work tasks but the home-life tasks as well. Both are equally important so both deserve the same sophisticated approach. So, schedule your day out to include both, your meditation time, your start time, your stop time, your break time, lunch with partner, and so on.

Never deviate from the schedule. There are plenty of online scheduling and calendar tools that allow you to block out your regular home life times and share available work times with your clients and vendors. That way they can schedule teleconferences with you without it ever encroaching on your downtime. All they see is ‘available to meet’ times.

The most productive parts of the schedules are the down-times. These are the periods when distractions allow us to go into a sort of mental diffusive mode. It is in that state when all the solutions to all the problems pop into our heads. That is why it is so important to take the breaks. Soemtimes when I get a great idea while, say, walking the dogs in the afternoon, I am eager to get back to the office to start working on it. I have to be verfy self-disciplined not to fall into that trap. I’ll make a note on a piece of paper and that reduces the eagerness enough.

For most people this structuring of the workday is a tougher task than it should be especially when it comes to switching off the electronic devices. The Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University performed studies about how the brain processes information, which were reported in the Denver Post in 2011. Their research has found that as the flow of information increases, activity increases in the region of the brain responsible for decisions, solutions and control of emotions, but only up to a point. When the brain is flooded with too much information, activity in the same region suddenly drops off. The center for smart thinking shuts down at a time when you probably need it the most.

This has implications for the way we live our lives today. People admit to an almost compulsive need to answer emails, texts, twitters, and voice messages, and get nervous when their own do not receive immediate responses. The study showed that people find it impossible to take time off in our culture anymore without being anxious the whole time and with minds racing.

They concluded that “only when people take the time to quiet down the left brain, to forget about to-do-lists and to unplug from all input, solutions often percolate up from the subconscious. History is filled with stories like this. A period of not thinking about the problem, then the answer simply appears.”

That is why I recommend structuring the workday with total discipline.

Task discipline.

When you think of something that needs doing, and your immediate reaction is to write it on a list, you have task-discipline. If your immediate reaction is to tell yourself you’ll remember it later, you do not have task-discipline, and your business success will suffer.

At the end of every day, write out a to-do list for the next day, and set it to priorities. This will do two things. Firstly, it helps take the stress away from the fear of forgetting something, and you’ll be more relaxed in the evening. Your family will stop complaining about you being so distracted all the time. Secondly, by writing the list you make a subtle commitment to perform the tasks. It is your disciplined commitment to ensure a productive day tomorrow.

When you enter your workspace the next day, review the list and start the first task immediately. This is an essential discipline. Do not be tempted to check emails, voicemail, or texts first, as they will scatter your focus in a hundred different directions. Get that first task done before you give in to the temptation to do anything else. This is particularly important when we consider the impact of time zones. Many feel they start their day having to play catch up with other zones where the day has already begun. When they enter the office they can have half a day’s communications to respond to. Avoid the temptation to be distracted by that. Get task-one done first. You will find this advice in many biographies and self-help books. It is good advice. It works.

Depending on your type of business, keep a list of customer or client follow-up tasks. We all have the habit of trying to remember promises we made. Customer satisfaction is your top priority so, whenever you create a need for follow-through, write it on a list and in detail, and then schedule it on a calendar. Every day you should review this “follow-through” list and start checking off the tasks.

Finish What You Start. We have all experienced checking into a hotel or airport when the person supposedly helping us then takes a phone call in the middle of the process. It is as if a wall is instantly erected between us, and although we can still see the receptionist, we have suddenly become invisible to him. He has not finished what he started before moving onto another task, and the impact is to offend us. When something different calls for our attention, we usually stop what we were doing and turn our attention to the intrusion instead. The habit is exacerbated when we work from home because we can find the isolation or loneliness difficult to deal with. If the phone rings or your email alert interrupts while you are working on your project, avoid the temptation to drop what you are doing in order to answer the phone or read the email. The mind says it is just a quick distraction, but if you respond you can very quickly lose focus on the task you started. When you pick an important task from your “to-do” list, start it and finish it. Don’t allow any interruptions or distractions, no matter how lonely you may feel at that time.

My typical schedule

7:00 am Wake (Meditation and waking routine, see later)

7:30 Take dogs for walk. Note I have not touched any electronic device. They remain on their chargers behind a locked door.

8:15 Relax in kitchen with Lyn & dogs while all get breakfast & cup of teas. Catch up with sport feeds and my selected independent news feeds such as BBC science. I never read mainstream news as it is totally unreliable and always sensationalism.

9:00 Shower etc

9:30 Enter Office (At this point I imagine many of you will be so stressed at the pull of your emails and texts still left unanswered, but they will still be there when you get to work) Check my white board for the first task. Do the first task no matter what. Then check emails, texts etc and work until.

11:30: Leave office. Lock work tools behind. I like to take a 30-minute walk. Then off to lunch with Lyn somewhere.

2:00 Nap.

2:30 Exercise/gardening

3:00 Back to work

5:00-7:00 Walk, feed dogs. Prepare dinner with Lyn. If I am on a writing project I like to write while we cook. For some reason I find I am more creative. You’ll see that this is just 4 hours of work, but these days I do a lot of writing between 5 and 7 so that makes up my fifth hour. I used to work between 5 and 6.

7:00-bedtime. Only quality time with Lyn and the dogs is allowed.

That’s it. Most meetings, which are rarely needed, are conducted via telecommuting. Of course, in building a successful business being away from the office to travel to meet vendors and customers is a frequent event, but the majority of time is spent traveling in those cases and when I return home, I will not break this home-office schedule no matter what.

Hopefully, I have convinced you to consider this unique on and off home-office schedule. What makes it possible is the unique business model for Secrets of a Successful Startup. Before we discuss that we have to examine your mentality toward employment. That is the next activity… The Employment Conundrum.
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The world of media would have us believe that mystics and scientists hold opposing Knowing that everything in the universe we see is connected, does it change how you will approach this field? Try picking one person who gets under your skin and mentally send images of the two of you hugging and the other person supporting and respecting you. Let us know what happens in the comments below:

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