Working Less, Working More
I remember well the day when one of my bosses politely asked that I start working at least 60 hours a week. It was my second tax season in public accounting, when clients began rolling in with their files (and sometimes boxes) of documents to prepare their tax return. I had registered about 55 hours the prior week, so the request was no surprise.
The nice thing about tax season is that you know it’s going to end. And my employer gave staff the option to earn more vacation and/or more pay to make up for a few months of constant work. (One year out of school, and six weeks of vacation built up? I’ll take it.) As another one of my bosses said: “I work hard for a few months so I can do nothing the rest of the year.” (60 hours, for what it’s worth, is low for tax season; 80-100 hour weeks are common. I was lucky.)
For some, however, long hours might be required year-round, or might be an organizational expectation and norm. But even for those who don’t put in 40 hours plus, work can take up a significant portion of our time, and leave us feeling burned out, anxious, and depressed.
I suspect there are many reasons “The Four-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss became so popular. It has a catchy title that gets the dopamine going. It sells a dream that small inputs of time can lead to large outputs of money and time to do what you want, unencumbered by bosses and demands to be at a specific location at certain times. Plus, many feel stuck in jobs that provide little reward or meaning, so a book like this would be immediately appealing. I’m speculating here, but aside from some good distribution and marketing, I would guess many bought the book because they’re miserable in their jobs (the same reason why “Office Space” has such mass appeal).
Though I’d recommend reading “The Four-Hour Workweek” with a heavy dose of skepticism, a couple of sentences from the book capture an opinion I’ve adopted over the last few years: “How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary.”
I’ve collected a few sources (partially to fuel my confirmation bias) which demonstrate that working fewer hours is more productive, or at least better for one’s overall wellbeing, compared to long hours. At Microsoft Japan, meetings were cut from 60 to 30 minutes, the work week was chopped down to four days, and productivity increased 40%. A number of studies on stress, sleep, and productivity find that working fewer hours (40 per week or less) is healthier compared to the 55+ hours crowd. An editorial in The Guardian cites a study which found that most workers are productive for about four hours per day. Ben Carlson, a favorite finance writer of mine, mentions the wild hours in investment banking, and argues that we should be working less. None of this is particularly surprising, as evidence going back to the 19th century supports the notion that long hours backfire.
Derek Thompson argues that, in addition to long hours being counterproductive, our search to find identity through work has morphed into a religion of “Workism,” one that doesn’t deliver on what it promises and what we’re hoping to find, leaving us feeling lost, disillusioned, and depressed. We’re told - constantly - to follow our passion, but are subsequently disappointed. (Mike Rowe says: stop that.)
The way we work in the U.S. is downright whacky in many cases. We are expected to be at our desks at all hours, ready for someone to show up with a new crisis for us to deal with. Hours, not results, are deemed more important. Physical presence assumes productivity. Arriving at work on time is a virtue that should not be violated, even if it means sacrificing sleep. Paid time off is tracked down to the hour, and many organizations have a culture where not using paid time off is a badge of honor; being on the clock, going “above and beyond” (whatever that means) is a major status symbol. In this metaphorical rat race, the rats who appear to spin the wheel the fastest or for the most hours are promoted and rewarded with a bigger wheel.
What’s more, many organizations have a culture where appearing to be anything but busy is frowned upon; we’re not allowed to move between “work” time and “play” time while we’re on the clock, even though a balance of the two has benefits for us and our employers. Shane Parrish says in an article called “Let Go of the Learning Baggage:”
[W]hat we learn in our “play” time can be valuable to our “work” time, and there’s nothing wrong with moving between the two (or combining them) during our day. ...
Most organizations do not promote a culture that allows these activities to be integrated into the work day. Go to the gym on your lunch. Sleep at home. Meditate on a break. Essentially do these things while we are not paying you.
We ingest this way of thinking, associating the value of getting paid with the value of executing our task list. If something doesn’t directly contribute, it’s not valuable. If it’s not valuable I need to do it in my non-work time or not at all. This is learned behavior from our organizational culture, and it essentially communicates that our leaders would rather see us do less than trust in the potential payoff of pursuits that aren’t as visible or ones that don’t pay off as quickly. … So if we are doing any of these “play” activities at work, which are invisible in terms of their contribution to the learning process, we feel guilty because we don’t believe we are doing what we get paid to do.
But what might it look like if work culture was different? A company called Basecamp takes an alternate approach, and it sounds like a breath of fresh air, a dream type of environment. The book “It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work” talks about the policies at Basecamp. A non-comprehensive list:
40 hours per week, tops
32 hours per week in the summer
No chat tools like Slack
“A culture of eventual response rather than immediate response” regarding email and other requests
“Office hours” during which others can stop in, like in academia. “But what if you have a question on Monday and someone’s office hours aren’t until Thursday? You wait, that’s what you do.”
Your calendar is not visible to anyone else. “You can’t just reach into someone’s calendar, find an open slot, and plant your flag.” (They call this “Calendar Tetris” - a bad practice, but an excellent name.)
A less-than-stringent vacation policy, without the anxiety of unlimited vacation policies (which subtly discourage taking time off). You get three weeks, a few extra personal days, standard holidays. Here’s what I love: “This is a guideline, so if you need a couple extra days, no problem. We don’t track your days off, we use the honor system. Just make sure to check with your team before taking any extended absence, so they’re not left in the lurch.”
The culture at Basecamp is one of calm and trust:
As a general rule, nobody at Basecamp really knows where anyone else is at any given moment. Are they working? Dunno. Are they taking a break? Dunno. Are they at lunch? Dunno. Are they picking up their kid from school? Dunno. Don’t Care. We don’t require anyone to broadcast their whereabouts or availability at Basecamp. No butts-in-seats requirement for people at the office, no virtual-status indicator when they’re working remotely. “But how do you know if someone’s working if you can’t see them?” Same answer as this question: “How do you know if someone’s working if you can see them?” You don’t. The only way to know if work is getting done is by looking at the actual work.
Is this kind of workplace environment achievable everywhere? No. But for many places with desk jobs, organizations should adopt similar policies. Workplaces without desk jobs could, at minimum, implement the honors-system vacation policy. I believe productivity and worker satisfaction would materially improve.
So on the one hand, we should be working less. The potential benefits to employers’ productivity and workers’ well-being are significant.
On the other hand, however, we should be working more.
I mentioned the “Workism” article by Derek Thompson above - here’s another, in which Thompson theorizes that, even if we did have more time for leisure, we would fill it with more work. Work is a fundamental part of human existence, and though the problematic religion of Workism is doing harm, there is a way in which work can be an important part of our identity, but in a healthy way. We want to contribute something to the world around us, to be useful, to matter.
And, while I tend to agree with Mike Rowe’s advice to not “follow your passion” - an important tenet of Workism - we should recognize when work is doing more harm than good, and try to find something we enjoy, to some extent, without projecting all of our hopes and dreams onto a certain position, title, type of work, organization, etc.
A book entitled “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” describes the point at which we enjoy work, a “golden ratio” of “whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities,” diagrammed here:
Flow is the state of mind where we lose track of time, are fully engaged, motivated, and challenged. The task at hand is not boring and requires skill to complete; it has rules and provides clear feedback so you know how close you are to accomplishing the task. Author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers many examples, including one with a game initiated by his dog, where his dog would run circles and dare Csikszentmihalyi to reach out and touch him; when Csikszentmihalyi was tired or unable to reach far, the dog would tighten the circle to increase the challenge (and thus the fun).
Surgeons are a frequent example in the book, as the task of surgery has a clear beginning and end, obvious (at least to the surgeon) rules and feedback, and a high level of challenge the surgeon is confident he or she can meet. Flow activities are “autotelic,” those which we perform for the sake of the activity itself, not for some extrinsic reward.
Personally, my greatest state of flow occurs while playing summer softball. I know the rules, I feel capable of hitting, fielding, and throwing, sometimes make mistakes, but have enough skill that the challenge itself is incredibly rewarding. No hour flies by faster than a softball game. My accounting job can also provide a sense of flow at times, as so much of it is about finding ways to match numbers together; the matching goal is obvious, and the feedback is obvious. If my source document (say, an investment account statement), doesn’t match the ledger balance, I need to go on a hunt that requires skill to find and fix the discrepancy.
So I would propose that we seek out more work to achieve a state of flow. To be sure, it’s not easy to find such work; it can take years to become skilled enough to achieve that “golden ratio” between skill and challenge. Some work doesn’t lend itself well to flow (What kinds of rules and feedback exist for certain kinds of consulting? I haven’t a clue.), and flow can become addictive if taken too far.
But we can create more flow for ourselves, even where it seemingly doesn’t exist. Jane McGonigal argues in “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World” that if we can learn to “gamify” our lives more, we can achieve a state of flow more often, to our benefit and to the benefit of others (including our employers). Indeed, one of the reasons games are so compelling and enjoyable is that they involve all of the flow requirements: rules, goals, feedback, skill, challenge. Games activate our minds in a way that passive leisure activities like watching TV or scrolling through social media do not; they present opportunities for us to improve or develop skills.
As McGonigal says:
In our real lives, hard work is too often something we do because we have to do it - to make a living, to get ahead...We resent that kind of work. It stresses us out. It takes time away from our friends and family. It comes with too much criticism. We’re afraid of failing. We often don’t get to see the direct impact of our efforts, so we rarely feel satisfied...What a boost to global net happiness it would be if we could positively activate the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of people by offering them better hard work...All good gameplay is hard work. It’s hard work that we enjoy and choose for ourselves.
For those elements of our work that are less enjoyable or downright boring, turn it into a game. Make up some arbitrary obstacles and rules, create some stakes. Grading tests was the bane of my existence in my teaching years. I would have done well to develop a spreadsheet that tracked, for example, how many tests I could grade in five minutes, with a reward of some kind for reaching an arbitrary goal (e.g., a snack, or allowing a couple of minutes of Twitter). While some tasks like grading probably have a limit to their “gamify-ability,” it is possible to make the less appealing, mundane tasks better.
By finding work in which we can create flow, we can do something that is rewarding and challenging, with legitimate neurological benefits and skill development.
The key to all of this, I believe, is to find a proper balance. Work shouldn’t be so crazy and stressful. The hours shouldn’t be super long. For some, work should be less important. For others, we should seek out work that is more engaging, without turning it into an altar of Workism. We should work less. We should work more.
Is this balance easy to achieve? Of course not. But the good news is that it can be done, regardless if the work pays well or not. Autotelic work is all around us, and the pursuit of it can be a joyful challenge itself.
Related:
Another article from Farnam Street about the concept of Speed and Velocity
A great diagram from Liz and Mollie:
