Generation Y Entrepreneur Adam McFarland blogs about his plan to work "only" 20 hours per week, and it is a refreshing attitude to see. He, like many young people these days, is highly-influenced by Tim Ferris's book, The 4-hour Work Week. It sounds crazy, but consider the following:

He explicitly excludes learning time, blogging time, commuting, and reading. For him, it is all about focus--a focus that comes not from a desire to be lazy, but from a time crunch imperative. It's amazing how much work you can get done when you don't have a lot of time to do it. And you cannot apply that intensity evenly across 40 hours, so if people say, "you should be working this hard all the time!" a reasonable response is "why?" You just cannot assume linear productivity.

I come at this from the opposite age perspective--as someone who has worked for half a dozen startups and has done the 60+ hour work week, I can tell you the end result is often not that much more than if people had spent 20 hours of focused time. There can be months of time spent on projects that ultimately go nowhere. Yes, there are some situations where you have a huge volume of work to do and you just have to crank through it...but most of the time in an office today is spent talking to people, sitting in meetings, and redoing things to make them a little better.

There are plenty of resources on productivity online and virtual cult of people interested in "GTD" (Getting Things Done). But those are only tools that usually presume you have 100 hours of work you need to get done in 60 and wish you could do in 40. What if you only had 20? You find ways to make it work out of necessity.

The same principle applies for VC funding. It is hard, extremely hard, to manage costs when you have 10 or 20 million dollars in the bank. But when you have $100K in the bank and 6 employees with payroll to make in 3 weeks...it is amazing how you learn to manage costs. Personally, that's how I've managed my finances for years--whenever I have "too much" money in my checking account I transfer it to savings so that I live roughly paycheck to paycheck. When the "buffer" builds up, I find myself buying coffee again instead of choking down the free swill available in the office.

But I don't know if the 20-hour work week can really work outside a very entrepreneurial context. The reality is that when you own the business, limiting your work hours is a discipline, but if you are not an owner...it is very hard to maintain that kind of discipline. I think the dirty secret of most companies is that they know most workers are only working 10-15% of the time anyway. People cannot easily coordinate their "productive time" with other employees. I suppose you could declare the work day was 9-1pm, but people need scheduling flexibility and unexpected problems cannot be scheduled to occur when people are best positioned to solve them.

A better model is to recognize that goals and deliverables are necessary and time is not important. It's OK to read a blog at work while you are waiting for something to load or when you have 15 minutes before a meeting. And there are times when you are at home on the weekend when you will need to do some work because it needs to be done and if you wait until Monday, it won't happen. There is also value in the "non-work" activities that go on at work...getting to know the people you work with, having lunch with them, taking time to enjoy the day...these are not "wastes" of time, they are part of working life.