Author Chetan Bhagat has a new productivity proposal for India’s workforce: avoid looking at the clock and the number of hours you are expected to put in at your desk, and instead focus on how much work you can actually get done.
He argued that even four hours of dedicated work can be enough for a day, reigniting an old debate over whether longer hours mean greater productivity.
Bhagat made these remarks at the 18th edition of the Project Management South Asia Conference (PMSAC) in Bengaluru on 3 October and said, “I work 4 hours a day, and that is enough if you do it with full dedication.”
“If you genuinely do work for 4 hours in a day, that is enough, good enough. It doesn’t mean you have to include meetings, breaks, Wi-Fi issues, and other hunky-dory stuff that the offices often witness. In those 4 hours, you have to prioritise everything you put on the table,” he added, according to media reports.
However, he also stressed the importance of prioritising everything that an employee puts on the table. According to Bhagat, people should not simply start focusing on putting only four hours a day into their work and consider the rest of their day to be free. Instead, his idea is to encourage people to figure out what deserves their attention the most and complete that task with utmost dedication and discipline.
His remarks come at a time when workplaces in India and around the world are grappling with questions over how long employees should work and how their working hours can be used more effectively, even as the rapid rise of (AI) fuels uncertainty over the future of jobs and how work itself could change.
Bhagat’s remarks stand in sharp contrast to views expressed by some industry leaders, including Infosys co-founder , who has advocated a 70-hour workweek for young Indians, linking longer working hours with the need to improve the country’s productivity and competitiveness. Murthy later said that he had worked more than 70 hours a week for over four decades and, during the period when India followed a six-day workweek, his weekly working hours often reached 85-90.
Commenting on how employees can prioritise work-life balance, Bhagat noted, “No one cares for you unless you are. Do what makes you feel happy; follow 11 rules of life,” a reference to his 2024 book, 11 Rules for Life: Secrets to Level Up.
His argument attempts to shift the productivity debate away from how many hours an employee spends at work to what they accomplish during those hours. But whether four hours of focused work can really be enough for a day may depend on the nature of the job, workload, and responsibilities.
