How Many Hours Do We Need to Work to Be “Productive?”

“Work is no longer a place; it’s a state of mind. It’s become less about when I turn off the office lights and more about when I turn off (at least mentally) the inbox.” Christa Carone

Is the private life dead?
When you hired me, did  you buy my evenings, weekends and holidays?

Now that you can reach me anytime on any of my devices– should I respond when the “boss” is calling or texting and I am in the bathroom? How about when I am out for a walk with my child or on my way into a movie on a Friday night?

Maybe it’s important – I’ll just respond to this text.

What about that email from the boss that arrived at 5 am?   OMG – its 7 am already, he’ll think I’m a slacker because I didn’t respond earlier. I should start getting up at 5 because more people seem to be getting started earlier than me?

My boss begins work at 6am – she says she likes to get an early start. She’s still texting me at 6 PM. Does she expect me to put in a 12 hour day?

Unfortunately, all the above are real scenarios. My informal poll tells me the average salaried worker is putting in about 10 – 12 hours per day/night/weekend.

Is this productive?
And by the way, when was the last time we/you defined productivity? And whose productivity are we defining – the organizations’ or our own personal standards? Or is that distinction an amorphous blur in today’s work world?

What’s Productivity? 

Author Tim Jackson defines productivity, “as the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy.”  Even though the word, “productivity” has crept into the lexicon of the average person, it is, in fact, an economic term.

When your teenage sister says, “I wasn’t very productive today, I just sat around reading and watching movies,” she’s unconsciously defining her time spent through the lens of economic measurement.

Most of us are now culturally conditioned by the collective meme – Time is money. As author Tim Jackson writes, “Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O’s and finance ministers. We’ve become conditioned by the language of efficiency.”

Using the simple language of efficiency metric, each person should ask – how many hours of my life do I have to trade for enough money to buy particular items?  When I count my hours, do I include the amount of time it takes to commute to work?

How about the time spent grooming and preparing a wardrobe to wear for work? Should I factor in the costs for those items as well? If it’s a matter of economics, everything’s on the table, right?

In more deeply defining productivity, Workplace Culture Speaker, Jamie Notter suggests that each person should define the term to personally determine the value/s that matters most to them.  His three domains of value include:

• Impact – Who receives the value of your productivity? Yourself, loved ones, your company, customers, community, the planet?
• Endurance – How long does the value you create endure? An hour, a day, a lifetime? Is it quickly consumed and forgotten? Does the value you create have a ripple through time?
• Essence – What is the essence of the value you produce? Do you help people? Entertain or enlighten them? How much do others value what you produce?

According to Notter, the only truly productive task you can perform before you know your purpose is to work to discover what that purpose is. The pursuit of essence, Jamie says, is essential if you want to have a nonzero productivity.

The Facts on Long Hours – Old and New News

 Once upon a time there was actually talk about the concept of a 4-day work week. Having more of a life is not a very popular conversation of late..

But the facts remain the same. There is little evidence to support that longer hours alone boost productivity over time.   In an article, Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week, author Sara Robinson, wrote, “Most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.”

Now,  Robinson continues, “It’s a heresy  (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul.”

Turns out that in the post WWII shift from industrial work to white-collar professional jobs, driven by the expansive GI Bill, leading employers assumed that if you weren’t lifting heavy objects and working up a sweat, you should be able to work longer hours.

But extensive research into sleep deprivation, psychological factors such as depression and stress disorders and optimal brain functioning measurements have shown that, in fact, the “knowledge worker”  has less good working hours than manual laborers do.  We now understand that the brain’s neural energy uses 20-25% of overall available energy for the average person.

As Sara Robinson points out, an entire generation of workers – shaped by uninformed post WWII models of the ideal worker – morphed into Silicon Valley workaholic cultures that management gurus like Tom Peters and others inadvertently anointed as “excellent” and “passionate”  brought us to this point in time where 60 hour work weeks are not uncommon.

What’s Next?

Which will win out –  the  human spirit or the drive for greater profitability via human “productivity?”

How long and how far will workers continue to drive themselves? We all must survive economically – but we all must live in the process. Unless we are willing to continue to sacrifice our precious free time to accommodate corporate balance sheets – it’s inevitable that new technologies will either enable people to work longer or eliminate the need for our services completely.

We may not have as much choice in the matter as we want, but we have some. Any changes, however, small, must include the decisions we make as to how much and how hard we are willing to work.

Thanks for reading. It’s appreciated.
Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication Consultants
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