Why I Stopped Trying to Work Harder

I work about 12 hours a week.

Some weeks less. Some weeks twenty. Twelve is the honest average, and I only know that because I sat down and worked it out rather than guessing.

I still feel guilty about it. Not because the business is struggling, but because a voice in my head insists that gaps in a diary are a sign of something going wrong.

That voice was handed to me. I suspect it was handed to you as well.

The advice never changes

Whenever the conversation turns to growth, the answer is the same. Double the output. Double the hours. Work harder.

I have tried it more than once, and every time the result was the same: burnout, and no additional progress. So at some point it seemed worth asking where the belief actually came from.

Mine came from watching my father work until he nearly collapsed and be admired for it. The wider version came from somewhere much less personal. The forty hour week was designed for factory work, in a different century, for a kind of labour almost none of us do now. Nobody revisited it. We simply inherited it.

That is worth sitting with, particularly if you are building something of your own. When you own the business, the hours are a design decision. Nobody is imposing them on you. You are choosing them, often without noticing that you are choosing.

What 12 hours actually contains

People assume this means absent, or that the business must be very small. Neither is the case, so here is the breakdown.

I support between 45 and 55 people at any one time across a programme and a membership, many with daily access to me. That averages five hours a week. Clients are busy. It is rare that anyone needs more than I can give, and when they do it is short lived.

Two and a half hours on the group calls I run personally.

Two hours on sales, which I have largely delegated. I keep my hand in on the strategic side and take the occasional call.

Two hours managing a team of specialists who deliver across time zones while I am asleep. They are experts already, so this is coordination rather than training.

The remainder is finance, admin and content, which I batch heavily. I will write several pieces in one sitting and record them in one run.

Twelve hours. I am present in the business. It simply does not require permanent occupation to function.

The evidence is not on the side of the grind

The Stanford economist John Pencavel studied output in munitions factories where productivity per worker could be measured precisely. Output per hour fell sharply once workers passed around fifty hours a week. Beyond roughly fifty five, the additional hours produced essentially nothing.

The extra time was not neutral. It was wasted, because tired people slow down and make mistakes that then need correcting.

And that measures paid work only. It excludes the running of a household, the caring responsibilities and the invisible load that in most families falls disproportionately on one person. Include that and the calculation shifts again.

The test I did not plan

We spent three months in Australia during a period when my children needed considerably more from me than usual. I managed about ten hours a week throughout.

When I returned and looked at the numbers, the business had grown.

That was the point I stopped negotiating with myself about it. Not because ten hours is optimal, but because it demonstrated that the relationship between hours worked and results achieved was nothing like as direct as I had been told.

Why this matters particularly for Occupational Therapists

We are the profession built around the balance of activity, rest and meaningful occupation. We assess it in other people. We prescribe it. We understand, better than almost any other profession, that hours of output without meaning is not health.

And then a great many of us leave clinical practice, build something of our own, and construct a second job with worse pay and no annual leave.

That is not commitment. It is a design flaw. Design flaws can be corrected.

Working out your own number

I am not proposing twelve hours as a standard. It is not right for everyone or for every season.

There are periods where working hard is exactly correct. Setting up systems, building momentum, getting something off the ground. I have worked forty hour weeks doing precisely that. The argument is against doing it permanently and by default, without ever asking whether you chose it.

So work out your own number. Count everything, including the load outside paid work. Measure it across a month rather than a week, because a single week will always misrepresent you.

If I were redefining the terms, I would call twelve hours part time and twenty hours full time. You can earn a full time income on either.

If your business is turning into a second job

Most of the Occupational Therapists I work with do not have a motivation problem. They have a structure problem. They are working hard on the wrong things, in a business that was never designed around the life they wanted.

That is fixable, and it is considerably faster with an outside perspective.

If you would like to talk it through, book a call with our team. We will look at how your business is currently built, where your hours are actually going, and what would need to change for it to run on fewer of them.

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