Introduction-5-Hour Workday

Imagine getting a winning idea and turning it into a $100 million company not once but many times. Imagine doing that without ever hiring an employee or calling a meeting. Now imagine doing all that without ever working more than five hours a day, five days a week, enjoying long lunches with the family, evenings undisturbed by work, and relaxing time in nature at weekends. Impossible? A pipe-dream? New-age gimmick?

The 5-hour workday is the secret to long-term success and a balanced life. When interviewed, I  explain it like this: ‘It is about maintaining peak brain performance in dedicated working periods and setting oneself up for the moments of magical insight that come when we deliberately switch off. A moment of insight is worth a lifetime of work, and I want that as much as I want to be productive when I have to be working. The typical workplace or school is not unlike the typical prison. The long hours and conditions in all three models are not just inhumane but senseless and counter-productive. Recent science offers a common-sense alternative way to structure the workday, and history surprisingly backs up the evidence. So many of my fellow entrepreneurs get burned out quickly. They are on their third marriages. Their dogs don’t even recognize them as they are never home. Some are even taking anti-depressants to cope. It doesn’t have to be that way.’

When Covid-19 hit in 2020, many people were made to work from home for the first time, but no one explained the difficulty of the transition from a social-based workplace where only 25% of the day is used for productivity to what can feel like solitary confinement for long hours in a home-based office. I wrote this short course for all home-based entrepreneurs and employees. ‘Success with balance is a beautiful thing and your birthright.’

‍I consider myself not just a sceptic, but a cynic. I am a scientist and I like to know how and why things work. I demand proof, evidence, and theory before I adopt any concept or technique in my work and life… and, yes, those are separate things. Work is work. Life is different entirely. In my world they never get mixed. Work is part of life and only a part of it. I work to live well. I don’t live to work well. Success with balance is essential to me. I can’t live any other way. Sure, I enjoy my work, but I enjoy sitting in my garden watching the sailboats drift between Laguna and Newport Beaches even more. I don’t believe these are mutually exclusive pastimes.

Writing this short course counts as work to me, and I am typing it on a Friday afternoon between 2pm and 4 pm while the sailboats pass below. If that sounds like something you would like in your life then read on.

I’m not a management consultant or academic—I’m a creator and builder of successful multi-million dollar companies that I run from home. I have always worked from home. I have never hired an employee. I have never worked more than five hours a day…  not because it is a quirky thing to do, but deliberately because it is necessary for peak brain performance. Peak brain performance is one of my secrets to success and I will explain it to you.

‍Everything you’ll learn here works in the real world. ‘Prove it,’ I hear you say.

‍In 2010, I ran 3 companies simultaneously from a casita at home. Although I built a network of part-time contractors to run various functions of the companies, I never hired a single employee for any company. The combined value of the companies was around $300 million when I sold them. I’d never been happier or more content in my life. My office assistants were furry, 4-legged friends and, when I looked up from my desk, the Pacific Ocean sparkled. The only human visitor to my casita during the 5 hours was my wife, who popped in around noon for us all to go have lunch together… two-hour lunches at our favorite restaurant. After lunch we would take a nap together, and then I’d go for a walk in nature by myself for at least an hour. I never worked after 5 pm and not once did I work at weekends.

When I tell people this, their first response is often envy. Their second response is usually disbelief. It just seems too good to be true. I still work this way, however. Unfortunately, my wife passed-over in the interim, but I still take those lunches at the same table… her favorite spot. Today, I have four companies in unrelated industries and I am having fun building them out, but I have to confess now that I rarely work more than two to three hours a day.

Now, I also teach dozens of other single-person business builders to structure their lives this way. A structured daily-schedule designed to maintain peak brain performance is a key to entrepreneurial success.

We’re conditioned to think that the harder we work, the more we achieve…

In this e-book, however, I’ll show you that the opposite is scientifically and psychologically true. I’ll show you the evidence for working less than 5 hours a day, and I’ll show you the tools and techniques to ensure you can do exactly the same as I do.

‍A LITTLE PERSONAL HISTORY TO GET IT ALL IN CONTEXT

‍What gives me the right to teach this and why should you trust me?When I was young and contemplating a career, there was no shortage of advisors on what it took to succeed. Whether career counselors or my own parents, I was told—as if it were a law of life—that the higher up the career ladder one wants to go… the harder one has to work. I was also told that to be an executive meant being cold and calculating, even heartless, and to have your own company meant having a ‘pedal-to-the-metal’ life… 24/7… and no privacy. It was only later in life when I was contemplating this advice that I realized my career counselor was straight out of college in her first job, and my father was unemployed my whole life. They were in no position to opine on this, but were simply repeating long and wrongly held beliefs.

The career counselor gave me an application for the position of apprentice manager in a chicken-packing factory. We can assume from this that she did not have high hopes for me. Instead, responding to the inspiration of an incredible mother who thought very differently, I qualified for the elite officer-training naval academy. (see Three Simple Steps. A Map to Success in Business and Life for the full story). In the first lecture at the college, the Commander announced that we no longer had lives of our own. The Navy was our family, our spouse, our mistress… and our lives were to be dedicated 24/7 to it. It was the same indoctrinated advice.

But here’s the funny part…

We actually didn’t work 24/7, but ‘watches’ of 4 hours on and 4 hours off. Even the traditional military knew that humans cannot concentrate well for more than a few hours. Any longer than that becomes, not just unnecessary, but downright dangerous. Sleeping at the wheel on the bridge of a battleship is not something anyone wants… although it does happen from time to time. The inquests into collisions at sea almost always conclude that someone was overworked and lost concentration at a crucial moment.

The same book, Three Simple Steps, describes how I met my future wife and the transition from navy to work in a hospital as a radiation technologist. The hospital was permanently under-staffed and over budget. Shifts were long and tiring. Even today, I cringe in horror at the medical mistakes made through tiredness and lack of concentration. People were blamed, some disciplined, some let go, but it wasn’t their fault. Brains simply can’t cope with long shifts whether at the wheel of a ship or in the operating room.

After that, I worked in a traditional commercial environment for both large and small companies. They were all structured in a hierarchical fashion and all had this culture of belief in long hours relating to top performances.

I had a good regular career in sales, sales management, marketing, and eventually business development. When I reflect on it, however, I realize that at least 75% of my time was spent attending meetings. Hardly any of those meetings were about productivity, profit, or improving customer experience. They were mostly about internal concerns like human resource systems or whether to upgrade the sales reps’ cars. Most meetings were poorly led without proper agendas, time wasted on irrelevant matters, ego boosting for show, and they dragged on for what seemed like hours, sometimes days and often melded into social gatherings. I am sure many of you are familiar with the feeling of drooping eyelids and rubber necks as someone droned on in front of a group. Equally, I am sure many of you have experienced the meetings fusing into long nighttime hours of socializing.

I started my first company at age 43, which coincidentally is the average age of a first-time entrepreneur. I didn’t have the money to hire employees, so I went with a hub model, which means hiring vendors instead. The thing about vendors is they need direction but not training. They have their own internal meetings and human resource systems. They only needed me to tell them what I wanted from them and then to pay the invoice when it was done.

It was a new way of working for me.

At first, it was a strange experience. I remember pacing the floor of the spare bedroom that I had converted into an office, sure that I had done something wrong or that I was missing something very important because I seemed to have a lot of spare time on my hands. I’d made all the necessary calls, checked the emails, and processed the sales. But it was only 11 a.m. and I had run out of things to do. I sat by the computer waiting for an email. I kept checking the silent desk phone to make sure it was plugged in as it had not rung all day. I called vendors up to ask for unnecessary updates. After a while, it dawned on me that without all the dumb meetings I had become immune to in the corporate world, I had plenty of time to actually do stuff. I realized that I got more done in the first few hours of a morning than I had previously done in a whole day in the corporate world.

No one knocked on my office door to distract me from my tasks. No one stopped in to waste my time on gossip.  No one had booked me into a series of pointless meetings. The phone didn’t ring because the vendors knew what they were doing and didn’t need to check in with me.

Feeling a little lost, I started a new kind of meeting, one I have continued at 11 am ever since… I went for a walk and met with some nature.

Around the same time I started my first company, a close friend started her first company. Like me she was fresh out of the corporate world. Unlike me she had capital to hire people. So, she hired a bunch of full-time people, a head of sales, a software-manager etc. She worked from sunrise to sunset attending all kinds of meetings…  on Mondays to discuss their goals for the week and a meeting on Friday night to discuss what they managed to achieve in the week. Meetings about human resource systems, medical benefits, project management, employee training, health and safety, sexual harassment training. In a way she simply repeated what she had learned in the corporate world. Hiring employees is mistakenly considered a sign of growth and progress, and the CEO is there to keep employees working hard.

Turnover at her company was high. The capital soon ran out. She got so burned out mentally that her husband asked for a divorce and her doctor prescribed anti-depressants. Within two years her company folded.

My experience was altogether different. The vendors had their own internal systems and I didn’t need to be included in any of that. Being skilled workers they worked without supervision. My role was primarily to set strategy and direction and then keep out of their way so they could do what they were getting paid to do. There was no need for weekly updates, although it took me a while to learn to stop asking for them.

With no employee hand-holding to do, I was able to focus on customer acquisition, marketing, and growth. Within two years the company was bringing in $12 million in annual revenue, but the biggest and most pleasing statistic was 76% NET profits from that. I stopped pacing the spare bedroom and took longer walks in nature.

Because of my experience, I recommend to everyone that they start their own company and that it is such a blast. Because of my friend’s first experience, she recommends everyone keep their day job and she has returned to the corporate world.

Today, seven companies later, I still work this way. Until her death I was happily married to Lyn for thirty-six years. I have enjoyed the lives of family and dogs to the fullest. With taking so much time for relaxation and walks in nature I am still relatively fit for my age. So what? So, I hope I have explained what gives me the right to present this alternative work style to you. Success with balance is the payoff.