A guest blog post by Florian Hoornaar, Entrepreneur and “Man-friend”. Florian recently went from running a company where his employees worked in the office together, to a company where everyone works remotely.
Today is not a good day. Today I can’t get anything done. I’m looking at my computer and all I see is a blur of characters, lines and rectangles. Apart from efficiency, I know the quality of my work will suck. Today, I give up.
Some days are more productive than others. In the past, when I worked 9 to 5, I pushed through. Those were my productive hours. Dictated and enforced by the organization that I was part of. Today, I accept that not all days are good days. Productivity can only be summoned to a certain degree.
There are 168 hours in a week, and I choose to work 45 of them. I could work 9 to 6, and hope that these will be my most productive moments. I think this approach is dogmatic and just not good enough. My drive and passion forbids me to work when I cannot be efficient and effective.
As a business owner, nobody cares when I work. I am paid for the value I produce, not the hours I put in. I know I am most productive in the morning and the evening, on Mondays and on Sundays. These are the hours I should work, and maximize flexibility during the remainder of the week.
I realize that I am in a fortunate position. I have the opportunity to design my work around my lifestyle and peak productive moments. I like it. It’s liberating and recommended.
Epilog: after writing this, I went for a reinvigorating bike ride. A change of scenery worked wonders. Today became a good day.
To learn more about Florian, visit FlorianHoornaar.com
Reading your article Florian is like talking to myself 🙂
Yes, there would be days that we are hyped and there are those “lazy” days. Sometimes it’s not because you are bored of what you are doing, sometimes it’s how your mind and body telling you to rest or perhaps you need to take a walk for maybe 15 minutes instead of sitting on your chair for 8 or 9 hours straight.
An interesting about you though is you are productive on Mondays – quite unusual 😉
Good to hear from Sydney! I lived there for two years, and enjoyed it very much. I watched your 5 minute presentation video. It’s interesting to see how your monitoring platform facilitates trust. I like the 3 minute Skype rule in particular. I wonder how this platform could be used to let your people work when they feel most productive.
That’s nice to know Florian!
Where do you live now?
About our platform, I’m glad that you were able to learn its ultimate purpose – to facilitate trust. Yes, it’s a monitoring platform and it’s designed to provide our remote workers and clients the progress of their project through statistics such as timesheet, screenshots, bandwidth usage and so on…
The 3 minute skype rule aims to ensure that communication between our remote workers and clients is always open.