Cheating the Clock

Seth Godin
June 14, 2010 | COMMENTS

One way to do indispensable work is to show up more hours than everyone else. Excessive face time and candle-burning effort is sort of rare, and it's possible to leverage it into a kind of success.

But if you're winning by cheating the clock, you're still cheating.

The problem with using time as your lever for success is that it doesn't scale very well. Twenty hours a day at work is not twice as good as 18, and you certainly can't go much beyond 24 . . .

What would happen if you were prohibited from working more than five hours a day? What would you do? How would you use those five hours to become indispensable in a different way?

Go ahead, try it. Just for a week. See what happens. Even if you go back to ten, you'll discover you've changed the way you compete.

Seth Godin is a marketing expert, blogger, and bestselling author. Reprinted with permission.