Since my recent move to San Francisco from my home state of Nevada (fun fact, most of the Klout clan are also Vegas raised) I’ve noticed a lot of trends that I wasn’t aware of before.
Some, like skinny pants on guys (bad call gentlemen) and fixed gear bikes (no brakes, really?) make me shudder, while others like the work hard, play hard concept I notice among the most successful people I know, is ingenious yet relatively unpracticed elsewhere.
The gist of the trend is pretty self explanatory, these people work hard during the weekdays and play hard at night and on the weekend. Sometimes they even combine work and play, like mixing booze and coworking at S.F. night owls.
Maybe it’s the fact that there is just so much to do around the bay area, at night – in the day – on the weekend. But I think you can easily take this mentality and apply it wherever you live. It also invigorates you to work harder and feel better about the work you do when you know you’ll be rewarded by playing hard at the end of the day.
This flies in the face of the traditional idea of spending long hours at work in order to be more productive, but it also goes against the idea of the four hour workweek. If you enjoy what you do, why not work hard at it for 6-8 hours during the day and then play hard afterwards. You’ll get tons more done without feeling overworked or pathetically lazy (which is the feeling I suffer from whenever I try to work a “four hour week”).
In Vegas there was a mentality of “work until happy hour, then get wasted and go to work again in the morning with a hangover” – I never particularly understood this line of thinking or adhered to it. The San Fran model is much more my speed.
So why not try it out today? Work really hard until dinner, then stop and enjoy the rest of your evening. This weekend take yourself on a mini vacation and see if you’re not 150% more effective in the coming week.
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