Here’s a question for you: are you working hard or working long? If you think the two are the same, go read this post by Seth Godin in full (not a bad idea anyway). Here’s the gist of it:
Sure, you’re working long, but “long” and “hard” are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn’t lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that’s really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It’s about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.
Here’s a few ways to tell the difference when it comes to your own self-funded software company:
Working Long:
- There’s no on or off anymore – you’re working any and all the time you’re awake.
- Your family has stopped complaining about you missing family things.
- You can’t remember the last full day – let alone two or ten – you didn’t work at your microISV.
- You never seem to get through everything you need to in a day.
- The harder (actually longer) you work, the more you feel like you are slipping behind.
Working Hard:
- You take the time to fix and/or document once and for all the top ten issues with your microISV product.
- You research, start, work through and complete a 12 to 18 month marketing plan for your software.
- You do a blogging plan in the same way.
- You make that difficult emotional decision about your microISV you’ve been putting off. Examples: admitting your company needs a whole new web site. To start charging 30% more than you did when you launched 3 years ago. To hire your first employee. To develop the app you really want to develop, even though it has nothing to do with the app you are selling.
- To fire your spouse – because as hard as they try, they don’t get tech stuff and they’re slowing you down.
- To go to work for your spouse – because they’re better at keeping to a budget, focusing singlemindedly on what needs to be done and care a lot less about your software baby so they can see it’s faults.
We are so over the era – the industrial era – where working long meant you pulling double shifts on the assembly line and therefore your take home pay went up. We are so done bragging about how many hours we work hard at work – when all we are doing is working long. And we are so done trying to fit what we do and the online world we do it in into the old industrial cookie cutter mode of time and business management – it does not work.
So here’s my question for you again: are you working merely long or are you ready to start working hard?
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Seth has very good points, but this also extends the insights nicely not only for microISV’s, but for knowledge workers as well.
It is hard to get away from enough day-to-day stuff, get recovered enough, and then be ready enough to look at the hard examples you provided. I think it is one of the reasons we don’t make the hard decisions: we prefer long hours so we don’t have to deal with hard decisions!
Good insights.
I like this post. It dovetails with a series of books I have been reading from Michael Gerber. Ie the e-myth. I am planning to blog on it. I think you without stating it you hit upon that same germ of an Idea of the difference of working *in* the business vs working *on* the business.
Joe Mele
http://www.youseful.com
Instead of saying “working hard” and “working long”, I think a better way of wording this would have been “working smart” and “working hard”. Working long is hard—but it’s not always smart.
I’m an active track athlete, and this is what we call “Training hard” vs “Training smart”.
Training hard is doing 3x the training volume necessary. The athlete ends up burning out and rarely improves.
Training smart on the other hand, is about not killing yourself every workout, and making sure you’re leaving enough in the tank for the next one. It’s about knowing when to stop, when to keep going, and having a sound plan of action for how you’re going to improve.
I think that’s the point you were trying to drive home here.
Reminds me of the metric re: one’s role in an organization. Poor managers look at “seat time” – how many hours you clock. More modern ones look at value/contributions. Thanks for getting me thinking.
Excellent post. I think sometimes fixing problems in your software will sell more copies then adding features. Tackling my top 10 ‘TODO’ items was the best thing I ever did for my product.
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