Satire | Working 70 hours a week is nothing, it’s all about the mindset

Infosys founder Narayana Murthy suggests working 70 hours a week. In this satire column, the author gives some strategies to expand a work week to 70 hours and more. He suggests getting a job, tracking distractions, making a to-do list, and working on two devices simultaneously. Working more than 70 hours per week is possible with the right mindset, he says.

I was going to say it first, but no one asked me, and Mr. Murthy beat me to it. Of course, we should work 70 hours a week. That’s the bare minimum. I don’t know about Mr. Murthy but I used to work 70 hours when I was a baby. As a working adult, my average is 120-140 hours. My personal best is 170 hours a week. That’s a full two hours more than the official number of hours in a week which is 168 (24 multiplied by 7).

You may ask: how did I manage to work 170 hours when a week only has 168 hours? But that’s missing the point. It doesn’t matter how many hours a week has. What matters is your mindset, and I think that’s what Mr. Murthy was getting at. Do you have a 170-hours-per-week mindset or are you a clock-watcher? By mindset, I mean something that’s unaffected by petty things like salary and promotion. With the right mindset, you would work 170 hours a week even if your salary is worth only 17 hours a week. Are you that person? That’s the question you should ask yourself.

Fortunately for you, and for this country, I am an expert at squeezing the most out of every working day. If you give me 24 hours, I’ll take 34 hours out of it, work conscientiously for 26 hours, and use the remaining eight hours for high quality REM sleep. But if you want to be like my friend Chakrapani, a serial entrepreneur who eats an apple a day and co-finds (or is it co-founds?) a new start-up every two days, then you’ll take the pill that induces somnambulism and continue working in sleep-walk mode. That’s not for everyone, though.

There are, however, strategies anyone can use to expand their work week. You may never get to 170 hours like I did, but 70 hours a week should be a cakewalk.

The biggest challenge facing any Indian who wants to work 70 hours a week is finding that much volume of work to do. This is going to be tough unless you have a regular job. So, if you don’t have a job, I suggest you get one immediately. I know it won’t be easy. In India, unemployment is more common than the common cold. But you can always start by getting a pumpkin. You may have heard of the saying, ‘Pumpkin hai toh mumkin hai’.

Typically, the reason why even employed people don’t work 12 hours a day every day — the minimum needed to clock 70 hours a week — is that if they did so, they would finish all their work by Wednesday and have nothing to do on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, making their bosses look stupid. This is why time management is critical. Learn to manage your time well so that your working day achieves the elasticity needed to expand from 8 hours to 12 hours.

The key to effective time management is tracking your distractions. Turn on all notifications, have a few hundred tabs open, and keep in your line of vision a dedicated entertainment device such as an iPad streaming a web series that you can dip into for a short break of 40 minutes for every 40 seconds of work.