Why your best work is not achieved with non-stop work

Do you know how you do your best work? If you want to be productive and effective, you need to know how you do your best work and make sure that you deisgn your working life to reflect it. If you don’t, you end up with an approach where the greatest motivator is pressure e.g. impending deadlines. A little pressure can be great to give you the push you need to take the actions and decsions required. Unfortunately, some people think that they can work under endless pressure. They end up working non-stop; long hours, day after day.

The misleading badge of honour

In the modern working world, being the first to the office and the last to leave it has become a badge of honour. Busyness is equated with importance and we are encouraged to believe that the person to admire and imitate is the one who sacrifices everything for the company. Whether you are employed or self-employed; you should not equate busyness as a sign of importance. You should view busyness as a sign of someone with poor organisation and focus.

You don’t do your best work when you are busy and rushing around like a headless chicken. You do your best work when you have a crystal-clear focus. You know exactly what you are trying to achieve and you are organised in a manner which allows you to achieve it with the least effort possible.

The folly of constantly working hard

People who pride themselves on working hard have the wrong end of the stick. Sure, there will be times when we need to work hard but we shouldn’t be required to work hard every day. I recently heard Ryan Deiss, of Digital Marketer, say that a working life is a series of sprints; not a marathon. This is a truer reflection of working life than the old myth that hard work will always get you the results you want.

To do your best work, there must be times when you are not working hard. Instead, you are taking time to plan, organise focus and; following periods of intense work; you should be taking time to rest, recover and evaluate your progress.

Even during the sprint periods, where you work intensely on one goal; you shouldn’t have to be working ridiculously long hours. If you have managed the planning period properly, you should be able to work 5-8 focused hours per day to achieve what you need to achieve and; 5-8 focused hours per day is hard work. Barring an emergency, you don’t have to sacrifice your personal life by working longer hours than that.

The damage of working non-stop

Trying to work non-stop, with a high intensity, is only going to cause damage in the long-term. Nobody can sustain that level of effort without harming themselves; their work and their personal life.

The following are some of the key ways in which trying to work non-stop will cause damage:

1. The quality of your work suffers

If you are not taking regular breaks during the day, you are going to experience mental and physical fatigue. If you don’t give yourself enough time away from the workplace, your body and mind will not have sufficient time to recover from the exertions of the day. You then begin the next day with depleted energy. With each day that you go without getting sufficient rest and recovery, your energy levels drop sharply.

If you want to do your best work and be productive, you need to manage your energy levels effectively. Your work doesn’t have to be physical to require a lot of energy. The mere act of concentrating requires a great deal of energy, especially when the task is particularly complex. Your energy levels are not infinite so you must manage your work and your work day in a manner which allows you to rebuild your energy levels between difficult tasks.

The first cost of not allowing your energy levels to recover is poor concentration. Poor concentration leads to more mistakes and if you keep making more mistakes, it will damage your profitability, credibility and reputation.

2. You have an unhealthy life-balance

When you go with a “work at all costs” mentality to get your tasks and projects done, you suffer physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially. If all you’re doing is working non-stop, you are taking time away from eating healthy, working out, spending time with family and friends, doing leisurely activities, and getting enough sleep.

These missing factors will likely lead to a reduction in your work quality because you need to have a well-balanced life to continue producing work at a high level.

However, it is not just your work quality which will suffer. Think of your happiness as a bank balance. Every time you do something which you really enjoy, you make a deposit in your account. Every time you do something which you don’t enjoy, you make a withdrawal from your account. So, if you want to be happy, and who doesn’t, you need to make more deposits than withdrawals.

Let me tell you some things which rob you of happiness by making withdrawals from your account:

If you stop spending time with family and friends, you’re likely to become bored with your work and lose focus because work is all that you’re doing. If you stop doing leisurely activities, you’ll become even more bored with your work, lose focus, and even become resentful of your work because it is all that you are doing.

To do your best work, you need to be happy and to do that, you need to have time for all the important things in your life. You need to live a more balanced life. You don’t have to give the same amount of time to everything but you do need to make time for everything that is important in your life.

Working non-stop also impacts your health in many ways. Both your mental and physical health can be seriously affected when you are pushing yourself too far and getting insufficient rest.

If you stop eating meals, you don’t get the proper nutrition you need to stay healthy and focused on your work. If you don’t exercise regularly, your health will suffer, both physically and mentally, leading to a decline in your work quality.

If you don’t get enough sleep, you won’t be able to focus enough on your work to make it of high-enough quality to where it stands out and gets you noticed by your employers, your peers, your customers, and/or your target markets. As pointed out earlier, the opposite is more likely to happen i.e. your work will be of such a poor quality that it will damage your profitability, credibility and reputation. This leads to worry and anxiety as the pressure increases on you. Your physical health will also suffer as you no longer feel you can cope with the pressure and the symptoms of stress start to kick in.

There are too many negative consequences of stress to write about in one article but you can check out the following articles for more detail:

One critical way to reduce/avoid stress is making time for everything which is important in your life. When you stop thinking about work, your mind gets some precious recovery while you are using other parts of your brain for other activities.

In case you have any doubt, it is not possible to do your best work, on a sustained basis, while your health is suffering or, while you are experiencing stress​

Conclusion

Living a balanced life where work is part of it, not all of it, is key to producing your best-quality work. Being dedicated to your work and your business is a good thing; being obsessive about it to where you exclude and neglect everything is not. You will suffer damage physically, mentally, emotionally, and/or socially from neglecting other areas of your life to focus more on your work, and your work quality will suffer over time. In addition, you won’t be happy with working all the time and doing nothing else, so much so that you may even resent your work. Therefore, having a healthy balance of work and other aspects of life is key to producing your best work on a consistent basis. Your best work is done as part of a well-balanced life, where you make time for everything that is important to you.