You're Not Getting More Done

You know roughly how many hours you put in last week.

And some part of you is a little proud of that number.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast.

This whole show runs on one idea: to expose the lies you believe and the truths you don't. Most of us have believed things for a long time that just weren't true, and when you finally see the truth, it changes things.

The most dangerous lies don't look like lies. They look like success. They look like golden cages, where the bars are covered in gold so you can't see them, and as a result people like you and me get deceived, because the lies that trap us look like good things, they look like truth, they look like wisdom.

Maybe there's something you used to believe that kept you trapped and you are so glad you don't believe it anymore. Maybe there's something you still believe, and you don't realize that it's keeping you trapped. This show is about helping you break free from that cage.

I expose these lies twice a week.

Every Monday, I interview someone who believed one of those lies. We talk about what they used to believe, why they don't believe it anymore, and what it costs people to stay stuck inside that lie for another five years.

On Wednesdays, just like today, I bring you a special edition, where I read you a version of the article I write for my newsletter every Wednesday called What's Real?

You can subscribe free at therealjasonduncan.com/articles, and it hits your inbox every Wednesday morning before this episode drops.

This week's post is called "You're Not Getting More Done. You're Just Getting More Tired."

BODY

In April of two thousand seven, Arianna Huffington woke up on the floor of her office in a pool of blood.

Nobody had attacked her.

She had collapsed. She hit her face on her desk on the way down, broke her cheekbone, and came to on the carpet in a pool of her own blood. She was two years into building The Huffington Post and working eighteen-hour days to do it.

Her doctors ran her through everything looking for a cause. Echocardiograms. MRIs. Tests to rule out a brain tumor. Tests to rule out her heart.

And the diagnosis came back, not as a bad heart, not as a stroke, not as anything you'd expect.

It came back as burnout.

She has said since that if you had asked her that morning how she was doing, she'd have told you she was fine.

What that tells me is that she had stopped knowing what the word fine even meant.

Now, the story of her collapse gets told all the time. What almost never gets repeated is what she said she'd have done differently.

She wishes she hadn't believed the lie that there was a trade between doing good work and living a balanced life. And she's said she wishes she could go back and tell herself that her performance would actually improve if she committed to unplugging and recovering.

Think about what she's actually claiming there.

She isn't saying she should have worked less and settled for a smaller company.

She's saying she would have built the same company better.

Now let me give you the other side of this.

In August of twenty eighteen, in the middle of Tesla's Model 3 production crisis, Elon Musk told the New York Times he'd been working up to a hundred and twenty hours a week. He called it the most difficult and painful year of his career. He said it cost him time with his kids and his friends. He admitted he was sometimes taking Ambien just to sleep.

Everybody quotes that part of Elon's story. It's what the entrepreneur accounts on Instagram and TikTok point at when they want to prove that hard work pays off.

The issue isn't that it's untrue. The issue is that it's not the whole story.

Because a few months later, he told Axios that nobody should put that many hours into their work, and that it isn't recommended for anyone.

And then in February of twenty twenty-five, he was doing it all over again with DOGE, saying publicly that his people worked a hundred and twenty hour weeks while their opponents worked forty, and that this was why the other side was losing so fast.

He had the data. He lived it. He said it out loud to reporters. And seven years later, he was bragging about the exact same schedule.

The belief is tougher than the evidence against it.

Now I need to be careful here, because there's a version of this episode that turns into permission to be lazy, and that is not at all what I'm saying.

King Solomon is relentless in Proverbs about the person he calls a sluggard. The man who won't plow in season and then begs at harvest. Scripture does not go easy on that guy, and neither do I.

Hard work is required. Nobody has ever built anything worth having without putting the time in. And if you want somebody to tell you otherwise, you've got the wrong show.

But a lie got inserted into the truth somewhere along the way, which is how most lies get in.

We started believing that the hours themselves are the thing producing the result. That being wrecked on Friday is evidence you're winning.

So let me give you some actual numbers.

John Pencavel, an economist at Stanford, went looking for hard data on this, and he found it in an unusual place. British munitions factories during World War One, where you could count exactly how many shells a worker turned out in a shift.

Now think about that setting for a second. A country at war takes every shell it can get. So nobody was working slowly because there wasn't enough to do. Everybody was working hard and producing as much as they possibly could. Which means if output fell, the worker was the reason.

What he found is that output per hour drops sharply once the work week passes about fifty hours. And past roughly fifty-five hours, it falls off a cliff.

His data suggests that a person working seventy hours a week produces roughly the same amount as a person working fifty-five hours.

Those last fifteen hours just evaporate into the ether. They do not matter.

Then in twenty twenty-two, the UK ran the largest coordinated four-day-week trial that's ever been done. Sixty-one companies. Roughly twenty-nine hundred workers. Six months.

Everybody kept a hundred percent of their pay for about eighty percent of their previous hours, with a commitment to hold output steady.

Here's what came back. Revenue stayed broadly stable, and actually rose about one point four percent on average. Sick days dropped sixty-five percent. Seventy-one percent of employees reported lower burnout. And ninety-two percent of the companies kept the four-day week after the trial ended.

Those companies removed an entire day. Not a meeting. A whole day. And the work still got done.

I work four days a week myself. Monday through Thursday in my core business, and Friday belongs to me.

Some Fridays I'm building something. A new company, or a joint venture I've been circling for a few months. And some Fridays I'm on the motorcycle from morning until dark.

It took me seven or eight months to get comfortable with it. Before I did, I'd catch myself opening the laptop at ten in the morning on a Friday to check on something that did not need checking on.

Nothing broke. The revenue held. And at this point you could not pay me to go back to grinding out five days.

SPONSOR BRIDGE AND READ

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WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

So here's what I want you to actually do this week.

Run an experiment. Subtract one thing. And not a small thing, because small things don't test anything.

Pick a standing meeting you attend out of habit. A report you generate that nobody acts on. A Saturday.

Then measure the output instead of the feeling.

At the end of the week, look at what actually got produced and shipped compared to a normal week. My claim is that it holds or it improves. You'll know inside seven days whether I'm right.

And if it drops, I want to hear about it. Reply to the newsletter and tell me, because I'd rather hear that than have you nod along to a podcast and change nothing.

Now here's what I'd watch for while you're doing it.

If you cut one real thing and the whole operation starts to wobble, that is not a discipline problem on your end.

That's a business that can't function without you standing in the middle of it. And that is exactly what a buyer sees when they look at your company.

If you run a company or belong to an association that puts on events, and you'd want this kind of talk on the stage, I'm booking keynotes for twenty twenty-seven. Go to therealjasonduncan.com/speaking. That's therealjasonduncan.com, slash, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G. The link is in the show notes.

There's a verse that lands right on this one. Psalm one hundred twenty-seven, verse two.

In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves.

That verse isn't about laziness.

It's about vanity, in the old sense of the word, meaning empty. It's the rising early and the staying up late in vain that it's after. Doing the thing that looks like devotion, and getting nothing back for it.

Solomon wrote that observation down three thousand years ago. And a Stanford economist found the same thing in a munitions factory ledger.

Go read the full post at therealjasonduncan.com/articles.

And if you already work fewer days than everybody around you, and it took you a while to stop feeling guilty about it, I want to know how long that took. Hit reply on the newsletter. I'm collecting these.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.