Motivation

Know When To Call It Quits For The Day

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If you’re doing it for yourself, by yourself, you’re not going to get any stickers or gold stars for working longer hours than everybody else. Nobody really cares if you burn the midnight oil and neither should you. The only thing that matters is productivity and the quality of your work.

And ironically overworking, putting in too many hours, tends to make both your productivity and the quality of work go down not up, if not in the short-term then definitely over the long haul because you’ll probably end up burning out.

The key is increasing mindfulness to become aware of when you reach your exhaustion threshold where energy, concentration, and creativity start to go out the window. When you hit that wall where you’re putting in lots of hours but doing very little that matters during those hours give yourself permission to break free of those self-imposed chains and do something, anything else, instead.

Know when to call it quits for the day so that you can come back ready to give it your all tomorrow. Any endeavor worthwhile is a marathon not a sprint, and this means you’ve got to let go of the cultural norm that working is in and of itself a valuable activity. Is it valuable to dig a hole fill it back up over and over again? Of course not. Your work is only valuable if something of value comes out of it, if something that positively serves you and others is produced from the time you put in. If you find that you can produce more and especially that the quality of your work improves when you work less you shouldn’t feel ashamed of this fact you should embrace it. All that matters is quality and productivity all else is propaganda.

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