Stop Working 8h a Day, Work Good

Having 2 businesses I have completely rejected the organizational model with an 8-hours workday to boost productivity instead

Kseniya Kovaleva
3 min readAug 12, 2022

Back in time when I was passing a course in Business Education from London Business School, I discovered a new motivation system for employees and companies of different sizes. Its core idea of it is to give more freedom to people to bring better results to the business. Allowing people choose a work schedule, time for work, tasks and projects themselves boosts productivity and allows being more responsible and even more creative. However, many stakeholders are afraid to lose control over the situation that way. Moreover, they are afraid of the loss of the project. Are they right to think this way?

Unsplash image by Djim Loic

Working Better Means Less

All modern management tools promote one big idea of time-saving technologies. Coming from that, working faster means working better. The faster you get your work done without a loss of quality, the better specialist you are in the modern world. Since in that way you will have enough time for the personal development, development of personal relations and even enough time for sport and health activities, that apparently is one of the most important things for the employee’s motivation.

However, when you work fast people may think you are not doing enough tasks. To deal with it:

  • set up a clear system of task tracking like ClickUp;
  • have an agenda others may watch;
  • make weekly reports with an overview and analyses of work over the week;
  • implement new ideas and make some innovations in the company;
  • don’t forget your daily stuff;
  • stay online.

For example, I work on several projects at a time, have 2 businesses, 3 podcasts, 4 blogs, a dog, family, write a book, paint with oil and run an NFT collection, making articles for a fashion magazine at the same time. Every morning I also run, do some sports and every evening I spare new books and my beloved person. How do I deal with all of that?

  1. I have a to-do list, so chaos never takes me;
  2. I know my productivity slots — for example, I know that 5 am is the best time for me to wake up for sports, by 7 I’m already doing some home stuff, and at 8 I start working on a book, NFT, podcasts and blog, by 10 I only have business work reaming. From 10 to 3 pm I work on one business, then from 3 to 5 pm on the next one and then get back to the main one and work till 7–8 pm. At 8 pm despite anything, I close my laptop and go to the date or read a book since my family and education are also important.
  3. Never work on the weekend — this is a perfect time for creativity, family and lazy chill with wine to get yourself together;
  4. Work fast — get focused. Never let food or anything distract your attention. Complete tasks one by one, staying focused.

You don’t need to work 8h per day. You don’t need to prove to others you work a lot. Seeing my social network you may think I don’t have work at all. However, I work a lot. It’s just a French-style of work without anyone seeing it. And that’s cool. Make work your private life and live it to the fullest!

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Kseniya Kovaleva

✏️Journalist with 7 years of work experience.🌍CEO and author of UI/UX design boutique-TheRoom.📌VOGUE ex-intern. Writing for Marie Claire💥