If you’re running an organisation or project, your job is not to work your hours. Your job is to see that things get done (not to do them yourself) so that the organisation or project achieves its goals.
This principle seems obvious, but we rarely live by it.
It means that if there was a way that instead of you working 40 hours, you could work 10 hours and have the organisation achieve double its current impact, then that is better.
Working hard has some merits. Working long hours has few or none. No-one else really cares about either.
Working hard, long hours seems to assume a kind of linear correlation between your work and the organisation’s output… which means that it would be impossible for you achieve more than five times your 40-hours-per-week impact even if you never stopped working, and never slept.
Your job is not to work your hours. Your job is to find the multipliers (usually people, processes and technologies) that will allow your organisation to reach 10X, 100X, 1000X of its current impact – and allow you to go out for lunch.