I’m going to encourage you to ask yourself this fundamental question. How can I work less and achieve more? Because it’s not about how long you work, it’s about how brilliant you work. So, The Five Great Hours commitment is simply this. On your workdays, you only work five hours every day. You say, “When I work…” Because most people can put in to get five hours, they need to put in 25 hours. Most people are fooling around. While they’re working, they’re checking their phone. While they’re working, they’re at the water cooler. While they’re working, they’re surfing and buying shoes and watches and groceries online. While they’re working, they’re stopping to chitchat. While they’re working, they’re staring up at the ceiling. While they’re working, they’re daydreaming. Why put in 10 hours? Why not Putin five great hours of sweaty, intense, virtuoso-grade work, and then have the rest of the day off?It’s a revolutionary, radical concept. It’s the concept I use, I work. If I can get five world-class hours in on a new book or a new course or a new keynote, I’m good. I actually feel spent. Physically, I feel tired. My energy goes down. Cognitively, I’m depleted because we wake up in the morning with only a certain amount of attention. If you look at the concept, for example, of cognitive bandwidth, we wake up with a certain amount of cognitive bandwidth, and then every time we distract ourselves, we give attention residue to that distraction, and we have less cognitive bandwidth. But after five hours, I’m good. And then, what will I do? I will sunbathe. I will go for a nature walk. I will go for a mountain bike ride. I will listen to some music. I’m actually giving you a formula to do less work and to do much higher quality work. And I’m actually giving you a formula for a beautiful lifestyle because when you work, you really work. You bring it on. You are like a maestro, like a hero. One of the great keys to exponential productivity is you distill your focus and your mastery into a shorter period of time because work expands to fill the time available. If you give yourself, “Oh, I’m going to work for 10 hours each day,” the work will expand to fit that time. It’s like before you go on a great Caribbean vacation or a great vacation to Bali or to Europe, what happens? The day before you go on the vacation, you are world-class productive. You are the most productive you’ve probably been all year because you have to pack your bags, and you have to close your loops, and you have to get ready for the trip. So, you’re monomaniacally focused on the few things that most are important, and all the trivialities and all the superficialities melt away. This concept will change your productivity and transform your life. This one alone, the five great hours commitment. Because if you only have five hours to work and you restrain yourself and martial yourself and have a commitment just to work five hours, well, you’re going to be so much more focused just likegoing on an occasion the next day. You’re going to be very intentional and very deliberate. And you’regoing to have the ability and the capacity to say, “I don’t have time to get involved in superficiality. Ican’t play Trivial Pursuit today. I only have five hours to get this next chapter of the book done. Or I only have five hours to do this marketing presentation. Or I only have five hours to work on this new sales presentation. Or I only have five hours to work on my quarterly strategic plan that I’m going to share with my team.” So, again, I hope I’m expressing this clearly. If you only work five hours a day, it’s much more intense. But also, then, you have the rest of the day off.
