In a day, your best work is done in the hours when you are most productive. This is when your performance is best; you get tasks done at the maximum quality. If you are a typical employee who works 40+ hours a week, should you give your best hours to your company? Why or why not?
The answer depends on whether the work you do during your most productive hours will directly impact your personal results and income.
The truth about giving your best to a company
First and foremost, you should not equate hours with productivity. Break this mental association.
Your CEO does not care about how many hours he works, as long as his business is doing well. Putting in 80 hour work weeks does not guarantee good performance.
Besides, it is hard to quantify your hours if you are in a knowledge-based field. Certain types of mental work can happen in the shower or during a commute. Writers, analysts, programmers, and salespeople are often processing tasks in their brain. It is hard to “count” those sorts of minutes towards productive work.
Instead, giving your best just means performing well at key tasks.
If you work in a performance-based career, you would want to give your best (most productive) hours to close important deals, make sales, and improve your company’s bottom line.
Basically, if you are paid by your performance, you would earn money without a salary cap. The more clients and sales you bring, the higher your commissions. Giving your best hours to the company will directly grow your personal productivity and earnings.
But if you work a standard job, giving your best hours to your company is not quite as pivotal since your income has a definite cap. Of course, you should put in enough work to avoid losing your job or getting yelled at.
Yet, your best hours should instead be channeled into projects that will grow your income, such as side hustles, and you should take advantage of remote work to do so.
Should you go the extra mile?
Companies would love that you go the extra mile, since that will reflect positively on their bottom line. Since a typical office job has a monthly salary cap, your income cannot increase no matter how many hours you work. Your income can only increase if you are in a performance-based position – the more sales you bring in, the higher your total commission. Thus, give the bare minimum to stay in your job.
Put in the minimum amount of hours to perform tasks at a “good enough” standard. Just get tasks done according to what you are being paid for. Giving your best does not mean overworking. In fact, you can give your best without putting in more hours than you should and inadvertently reducing your own hourly rate.
There is no company loyalty
If you feel guilty for not giving your absolute best, understand that companies are inherently profit maximizing and will undercut its employees. Yes, they will, as long as they can get away with it.
If employees tolerate low pay, low headcount, overtime or increased workload, these standards will be the norm. There is no problem if many employees do not resign at once and the company is able to hire fresh blood for cheap.
Going the extra mile for your company presumes that your company would do the same for you. Yet, this is clearly not the case most of the time.
The most obvious example is that companies do not reward more work with more pay, as a typical everyday salary is fixed no matter your performance or extra labor in the evenings.
A second example is how companies reward employee loyalty. Job hopping, which is the phenomenon of switching jobs within a short span of time (typically 2 years or less), is beneficial for employees. Those who job hop make around 50% more income over the course of their lifetimes.
The average salary increase when one switches jobs is around 10-20% — much more than annual pay raises an employee gets by staying in one company (typically only 2-3% of one’s salary).
This means that a loyal employee, whether aware of his/her losses or not, will lose more money staying with one company. At the same time, the company benefits because it does not have to spend extra resources (time and money) hiring and training new staff when the employee leaves.
How do companies reward their employees’ many years of service, which saved them extra resources (time and money spent)?
Generally, the rewards are cheap, superficial items that have little to no positive impact on the employee. If one is lucky, he/she might get time off or increased pay. But more often than not, companies issue a written letter, a free meal, or a plaque or trophy to reward 10-20 years of service.
Yes, there are brands and companies promoting the idea that awards and plaques are motivational for employees, and even better than money.
If you browse the LinkedIn platform, you would see many common examples of appreciating long-term employees using awards, trophies, and plaques. These glorified posts draw many “likes” and congratulatory comments from people on LinkedIn, giving these companies positive exposure and publicity. If you are smart, you would realize that these posts benefit companies more than the loyal, burnt out, and fatigued employees who gave 20 years’ of service.
As an employee, you will benefit by “playing the game”.
Since the nature of companies is to squeeze more work out of their employees at the lowest cost (in order to maximize their bottom line), there is only one way to game the system. It is wise to turn the tables.
Perform your job at a reasonable standard but reduce your hours at your job – free up time so that you can channel it into other projects (maximize your own bottom line).
The truth is, you can afford to decrease your productivity at your job, as long as you get the job done to a reasonable standard – not an exemplary standard.
You should not feel guilty about this, since most people are never productive for a full 40 hours anyway – even though they might sit in an office for 40 hours.
What should you spend your best hours doing
As a general rule of thumb, it is beneficial to spend your best hours on maximizing your income. As much as possible, you want to dedicate your best hours to your side hustles such as building a side business and other streams of income (e.g. blogs, podcasts, freelance work).
This is because your brain has a capacity for how much work it can perform in a single day.
Once you get past the point of diminishing returns, you will be less productive for every additional hour of effort you put in. Thus, you will need to take a break.
Most people spend the bulk of their day working at their jobs, and they have nothing left when it comes to working on their side hustles in the evenings.
If you are a remote worker, you can build more flexibility into your workday.
It does not matter whether you are most productive in the morning or evening. You can take advantage of the timings in which you are most productive, and use these hours to do your best work for yourself – such as growing your income outside of your job.
Usually, your peak productivity is limited to a few hours per day, so capitalize on them. When you are done working for yourself, you can return to your job.
If you are not a remote worker, there are limits to how you can design your workday. Nonetheless, you can still block out a few hours after your office job to work on side hustles. If you give the minimum amount of effort at your job while getting things done to a reasonable standard, you will have more energy leftover at the end of the day. Determine what this minimum amount of effort entails, get familiar with how it feels, and execute.
Ultimately, it is best to switch to a remote position and gain more control over your time.