I’ve been working on a theory that there are only so many productive hours every day. I mean the easy hours, periods of time when getting things done is, for lack of a better word, easy.
My theory is that for many if you work a full-time job, the easy-hours are all used up before you even clock out for the day. Those hours of easy-productivity are given to someone else, donated to another’s business in exchange for a paycheck.
It is no surprise, therefore, that upon returning home from work, tired with no easy hours of productivity left, all anyone wants to do is nothing.
Once home, the price of productivity goes up. These are hard hours. The time when it’s difficult to be productive and takes much in mental clarity and strength of will to be so.
By no means am I trying to make excuses or suggest that one shouldn’t have a full-time job. I only intend to understand my own state of mind, to deconstruct this phenomenon and through rational thought make better “productive” decisions.
Are there easy-hours and hard-hours of productivity? Well, yes and no.
There are if you believe there are. There are if you think there are.
In reality, all hours are created equally, but our perception and judgment of the time we have isn’t.
Most value their jobs and work diligently to excel. There may be many reasons for this like the desire for others to see you as successful or maybe to make money to pay for your non-productive time at home ;).
Whatever the reason may be I propose that hours at work are productive not only because we have a reason, but also because we have given our control over to our employer.
We don’t begrudge what is out of our control (or shouldn’t) and when expected to work, we work.
At home, we do have control, whether said control is exercised or not. But, it can be difficult. No one’s watching or judging. No one is paying you to be productive. And you are tired after all, from working so hard all day.
The key takeaway here is our perception of time spent working is directly related to how we judge the situation. How we feel about anything is directly related to our own judgments.
It’s an interesting line of thought that I’ll leave you with and that I will continue to ponder. The implications on the relationship between our emotional state and our analytical judgments alone are wide-ranging and threaten to lead me down other paths and theories.
So are there a limited number of easy hours of productivity everyday? I say yes. Additionally, I think there are strategies to help make hours spent after work more productive.
In the end, this topic has been something interesting to think about. Hopefully the next time there is a decision between crashing on the couch in front of the TV and getting out into the shop to work on a project, I’ll head out to the shop.
Thanks for reading!
