Productive people don't measure the hours worked on something. They don't measure the input. They measure the results. It's the output that matters. There's a very famous scene in the Stephen King novel that became a great movie starring jack nicholson. He's feverish Lee working on his great novel for months and months in this isolated mansion in the middle of the winter, but then his wife comes in, takes a peek and what she has papers everywhere all this writing stacks of paper things have been rejected.
It looks like he's about finished the great novel. She then looks at it, every single page says exactly the same thing. All work and no play. Makes jack a dull boy. One sentence over and over and over at that moment she realizes her husband is insane. But it's also insane for you or me or others to measure ourselves based on how many hours we put in how many hours we clocked.
Yes, I understand get certain professions, the legal profession, certain consulting professions where you work an hour, you get paid regardless. But for most people in most fields, it's not that way. It's what is the final output? What did you create a lasting value? You read a great book that people read throughout the ages, no one cares if you spent 10,000 hours or five hours on it. It's about what the lasting quality is.
So never confuse those two productive people focus on did I create something of value and to quote Seth Godin, did I ship it doesn't matter how many hours you put in, if you didn't ship the product, and that's a metaphor, obviously if you're creating some new content salting service or you're just getting better at teaching kindergarteners. And you've perfected a system that's shipping in a sort. Did you take something from a concept to something finished, that gives value to people that is shipping. And that's what you need to focus on not working, more hours highly productive. People do not sit around talking about, oh, I work 70 hours a week and 80 hours a week. They focus on what they've actually accomplished.
Some of them do work long hours. But it's incorporate with everything do in their life, but they're counting things like going to cocktail parties in their industry and flying to all sorts of interesting, fascinating locales. So be a little skeptical. When you hear certain CEOs talk about 90 Hour Workweek. What that means is just they're doing interesting things all the time and they have other people handling every other aspect of their life. They don't want to do