Focused Hours Beat Long Hours

Camille Fournier doesn't believe in working long hours. This might sound lazy, but her logic is sharp: overwork lets you avoid doing the hard work of figuring out what actually matters.

If you work 80 hours, you don't have to prioritize. You just do everything. But that means you never learn what's truly important.

Her approach: force yourself to log off. Then audit what actually got done. You'll discover that focused work for fewer hours produces more value than scattered work for many hours.

'If you're not regularly doing an audit of your time and trying to knock things off that list that don't matter, you're probably wasting a lot of time on things that don't matter.'

This is the quality time argument, but with teeth.

Being home all day but distracted isn't parenting - it's just being in the same building. An hour of truly focused attention beats eight hours of half-present multitasking.

But here's the hard part: focused time is harder than long time. It requires you to actually show up. Put down the phone. Stop thinking about work. Be genuinely present.

Fournier says working hard in a focused way for fewer hours is more productive. The same is true for parenting. Stop counting hours. Start counting moments of actual presence.