So, You Want To Quit Your Job? (Fantasy Versus Reality)

This is part two in a series about quitting your job.  Check out the first post here.

Imagine you are going for a run in your neighborhood; just a casual jog. You are running along comfortably, not really straining that much or breathing heavy, but making good progress. Now imagine that all of the sudden a tiger jumps out of the bushes and starts chasing you.

What do you do?

You probably run quite a bit faster with much more purpose, because you are scared for your life. This is kind what is it like when you quit your job to work for yourself.

For the longest time I had this fantasy of quitting my job and working for myself. Well, actually my real fantasy was playing video games all day and not having to work at all, but even fantasies need to have some basis in reality, so I modified it to be a little more reasonable.

Anyway, I always wanted to be my own boss; to work for myself. I thought that life would be so much better if I had more control over my life; if I could come and go as I pleased and set my own work hours.

Now that I’ve actually done it, I’ve found that working for yourself is not exactly as I had imagined it… let me explain.

The 8 hour fantasy

One of the main things I thought about when I had dreams of working for myself was just how much I could accomplish if I had 8 full hours in a day to work on goals and projects that I set for myself.

For a couple of years my life was pretty miserable. I would work 8 hours during the day for my employer and then when I was done doing my first job I would take a little break to eat dinner and spend some time with my daughter and then back to work for another 4 hours doing Pluralsight courses at night. Weekends usually involved at least another 4 or so hours of doing Pluralsight courses and perhaps another 3-4 to create a blog post each week.

I kept thinking to myself that if I could work full time on the Pluralsight courses I would get an additional 4 hours a day and not even have to work nights. I should be able to get twice as much done and work far fewer hours during the week.

I ran some calculations to see if the payment for creating Pluralsight courses would cover the income I made from my regular job if I produced twice as much content. The numbers seemed to say I would come out pretty far ahead, so as far as I was concerned “quitting my day job” was a no brainer.

The 8 hour reality

My first week of working for myself turned out to not be the fun lighthearted adventure I had set out on.

When the end of the first week had come, instead of completing 4 to 5 modules of a Pluralsight course, like I had anticipated, I had actually only barely completed 3, and that was with me putting in the same 12 hour days that I had put in before quitting my job.

Something was wrong; something was seriously wrong. Working a full time job I was completing 2 modules a week, so if I had 40 extra hours in the week, shouldn’t I have been able to easily get done another 2 more, perhaps even 3 more?

I shook it off as just a fluke. The particular course I was working on required a large amount of research and prep-work as well as scripting out paragraphs of text for each slide—it must have just been bad timing.

The next week I fared a little better, but still not anywhere close to what I had anticipated. I got 4 modules done but it still required around 12 hours of work each day during the week and some on the weekend; the math just didn’t add up.

Here I was busting my butt for only slightly improved results over what I was getting before.

There is work and then there is work

I bet you are probably wondering what exactly happened at this point. What can explain the results I was seeing?

Well, it turns out there is a difference between a job and “work.”

You see, at a job you get paid just for showing up. Now I don’t mean to say that you can just sit at your desk and do nothing all day, but in reality you can just sit at your desk and practically do nothing most days at most jobs.

Again, I don’t want to make it seem like I wasn’t working hard for my employers. As an employee, I have always worked hard and done a good job, usually performing well beyond the level that I was expected to perform at. But regardless for how hard I ever worked at any job, I never worked so hard as when I started working for myself.

The reality of the situation is that even the hardest desk worker I know who is working for someone else usually only actually works less than 4 real hours in an 8 hour day. I would actually venture to guess that actual hard nose-to-the-grindstone hours would probably average about 2 per day.

Now, before you get all upset about what I am saying, let’s take a moment to thing about why this is.

There are a number of reasons why employees work much fewer hours than the hours they are on the clock. The first, most obvious reason is because they are getting paid by the hour and not the job. When you are getting paid by the hour you have no real motivation to be fast or efficient or to make sure you are working every minute of every hour.

This means that a task that would perhaps take you an hour to do if you were working as diligently and as hard as possible, might take you 2 to 3 hours if you are working, but just not working hard at the task.

Think about the difference between jogging down the street and running for your life because a man-eating lion is chasing you. It isn’t like you are being lazy when you are jogging down the street, it is just that you aren’t in any real rush.

Another major source of distraction is office conversations. In most work environments, people socialize. It is not unreasonable to assume that 2 hours of each day, on average, is eaten up by socializing about non-work related topics or remotely work related topics.

Let’s take another slice out of that 8 hour pie and account for general job overhead. This would be things like checking your work email, reading bulletins and memos, attending pointless meetings, etc. I’ll be absolutely ridiculous and assume this kind of thing only takes up an hour of time a day on average, (although we really know that it probably takes up much more.)

Finally, we get to just plain laziness and doing personal stuff on company time. Life is life and things happen. Your kid gets called into the principal’s office and you get a call at work about it that you have to deal with. You are buying and house and need to fax those loan documents to your mortgage broker. Sometimes you get to work and you just feel burnt out and tired and can’t really manage to do much other than pretend to code while you scroll repeatedly through lines of code waiting for the clock to tick 5:00.

I’ll be nice again and attribute this to only taking up an average an hour a day, but based on my Facebook and Twitter streams, I am pretty sure we all know that number is greater than even the most candid of us will be willing to admit.

So let’s go ahead and do the math. Take your 8 hours and subtract away 2 hours for socialization. That leaves you with 6 hours. Take away 1 for work related overhead and another 1 for life related overhead and laziness and you are already at 4 hours right there. Now take the 4 hours of work that could be done at a running pace and reduce it to a jogging pace, and you are effectively cutting it in half to about 2 hours of actual real work. If you come in late or leave early or you are more social or more lazy or you have more meetings than average, the number could even be further reduced. Some of you might be coming up with negative numbers. It is a wonder anyone gets any work done at all!

So, where did my hours go?

Just because you switch from working for someone else to working for yourself doesn’t mean that you immediately go from getting 2 hours of work done a day to a full 8. Some of the office distractions are eliminated by working for yourself, but others are not.

Most importantly though, there is a big difference and adjustment from being used to working 2 actual hours of real hard work to working 6 to 8 hours of real hard work.

It is sort of like going for a 3 mile jog every day for a couple of years than suddenly one day deciding to start running 12 miles instead. You might be able to do it, but you are going to feel like total crap until you adjust.

It turns out for me that my old routine, before I quit, was working my regular job during the day, which wasn’t all that taxing on me, then working 4 hours each night, at which time I would accomplish perhaps 3 hours of real hard work.

Each day I was perhaps doing 5 hours of real hard work.

When I started working for myself, I found that I was actually doing about 5 hours of real hard work during the day and by the time the night came, I would work perhaps 4 hours, but was so exhausted that I was only getting about 1 hour of real hard work done.

So overall, I was only adding about an hour or two of actual real work worth of progress each day. This lines up about perfectly with the results I was seeing. I was still having to work the same number of hours and I was just getting marginal improvements in my results.

Tracking my time

I’ll put things as civilly as possible here, but to say the least, this was royally pissing me off.

I mean, I was not happy at all with this revelation I was discovering.

I thought long and hard about different jobs I had and what I did during the day at work. I tried to count up the hours and determine if it was really true that I was only spending a couple of hours of real hard work, on average, a day at any given job. Then, I thought about how at most jobs I was getting a lot more work done than most developers were and it made me even more sad.

I decided to start tracking every minute of every day I spent doing work on my Pluralsight courses and whatever else I was working on during the day in order to see where my time went.

My results after several weeks confirmed what I had already known. In any given day, I was lucky to get 5 hours of solid work done during the daytime and 6-7 hours overall in the entire day was about the average.

I was also busting my butt harder than I had ever before.

Summing it up

So, what am I trying to say here? What can you learn from my experience?

Well, first of all, working for yourself is much harder than you might imagine. When you are working for yourself, you are only getting paid if you are working. You don’t just show up and get paid.

You may think you are busting your butt at your job now, and you may very well be, but I can almost guarantee you that you are not working nearly as hard as you would if you were working for yourself. There is a huge difference between doing 2 hours of hard work per day and 6 hours or more of real hard work per day. If you aren’t ready for this change of pace, you can easily be crushed and discouraged by it.

You might just think that this doesn’t apply to you; that you can just sit down at 9:00 AM, plug in your headphones and work hard until 5:00 PM when you disconnect and smile happily at your 8 hours of good old hard work you put in that day.

But, if you are of this mindset, I’d encourage you to do two things before quitting your day job. First, take a week off and try it out. During that week track your time and see how much work you actually get done. Only count work that results in you creating something you get paid for. Don’t count all the overhead and checking emails, etc.

Second, after you see how dismal your results are, get a copy of “The War of Art” and learn that you are not alone. We all struggle with the same problem of being lazy creatures who want to do what is pleasurable instead of being productive and habitually rationalize all our actions until we are reduced into believing that the course of action we are taking is the only possible and reasonable choice.

I’m not saying don’t quit your job. In fact, I encourage you to find a way to build your own business and work for yourself. But, just realize that if you don’t like the idea of working hard every single day you probably won’t like working for yourself very much.
 

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