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For the last few months both Steve and I have been working long hours seven days a week. Even when we've been sitting in front of the television after dinner we've both been working on our laptops.

But this weekend we actually took more than an hour or two off. Instead of working in front of the television after dinner we played games. Instead of working through the daylight hours over the weekend we actually took some time off and we even ... almost ... slept in on both days.

Today, instead of feeling grumpy and tired we're feeling pretty good. We're not feeling great but we're feeling a whole lot better than we would normally feel on a Monday morning. Not only are we keen to get some work done but we've already achieved that goal and today could be one of our most productive days in a long time.

It's marvelous what a little time off can do.

But that's not what adult webmasters do is it? In this industry you're not a real webmaster unless you pull all-nighters ... heck if you can't work more than 24 hours straight you're an absolute wimp and if you want to achieve legendary status then you've got to work for an entire week without sleep.

Of course what you might actually achieve after working all those hours without taking a break for sleep is something most people don't want to discuss. They know that there will be errors and the task could probably have been done in half the time if they had stopped for sleep ... but hey, in this industry it's better to be a legend than to be really productive isn't it?

Sadly it seems that it is often more important to be a legend than to be productive ... if it wasn't why would we all try and work such long hours?

Well perhaps we work those long hours because we don't understand that we can be more productive if we work less. But can that really be true?

Actually it is true and there have been numerous studies over the years to support the idea that the more we work the less productive we become. Ernst & Young ... a major accounting firm ... conducted a study that showed that the longer the vacation their employees took the better those employees performed when they got back from holidays

Other studies have shown that the less sleep you get the less productive your work time is and the longer you work the more your productivity drops. I doubt that they've ever found anyone who was prepared to work for days without sleep as adult webmasters often do but if they did it wouldn't surprise me if those people's productivity reached a point where it moved into negative territory.

So what do you really gain by working all those long hours? What do you gain by trying to turn every hour of every day into an income producing time? Well Toyota is a prime example of what happens if you're a big business and you do that. You might do quite well for a while but then the crash comes and you could be struggling for survival.

With a big business like Toyota the business can almost always recover but when it's just you working 24 hours a day and trying to cram more into every single hour of the day the damage that you're doing to yourself may well be something that you can't recover from.

So what's the point of damaging yourself and destroying your productivity when you don't have to?

Sure we have to work hard to make a buck ... and we might even have to work longer hours if we're just breaking into this industry ... but all those studies that have been done all go to prove one simple fact ... and it's a fact that we really can't escape from.

If we're serious about making money as adult webmasters and making every post a winner then we have to stop working those long hours. The so-called ‘legends' who do put in days of work with no sleep are more fools than legends.

Instead of being like them we have to work reasonable hours ... we have to take time off ... we have to be prepared to walk away from our computers on a regular basis and just get out and smell the roses.

We have to get serious about taking weekends off ... we even have to start thinking about vacation time too ... because when we take time off we come back to what we're doing refreshed and able to work more efficiently.

The myth that adult webmasters have to work 24 hours a day to succeed is dangerous and the sooner we stop thinking that making money here requires that sort of effort the sooner we start to work smarter and that's when we'll start making serious money.