What I got wrong about working hard

The story I was telling myself

Hard work is the one virtue nobody argues with. Everyone agrees it is good. So for a long time I used it as the measure of whether I was doing well.
Long day, good day. Weekend spent working, good week. It was a comfortable system because it never required me to ask whether the work was worth doing.

The month I actually counted

I wrote down where my hours went for four weeks. Not what I did, but how long each thing took and what came out of it.
The result was uncomfortable. Roughly a fifth of the time produced almost everything that mattered. Another fifth produced something. More than half produced nothing I could point at, and a good part of that was work I had chosen precisely because it was easy to start and hard to finish.
I was not lazy. I was busy in a way that felt like progress and was not.

What effort hides

Effort is a good feeling and it is available on demand. You can always work more. You cannot always decide well, or choose the right customer, or say no to the wrong project.
So when the hard decisions are uncomfortable, effort is where people go instead. I went there for years.

What I do differently

I still work long hours. The difference is that I decide what the hours are for before I spend them, and I check afterwards whether they produced what I expected.
Some weeks the honest answer is that I worked sixty hours and moved nothing forward. That used to be invisible. Now I notice, and the next week is different.
Hard work is necessary. It is not sufficient, and treating it as a measure of success is a way of avoiding harder questions.