Nelson - Taming the work week : work smarter not longer

Introduction

There is much to write about in how our culture has evolved to make being busy and stressed a status symbol. There is also much to write about in how corporations extract ridiculous hours from their employees, and about how our social institutions leave people feeling like they have no choice but to acquiesce to their bosses demands for more work and more time. There are many changes to laws and corporate practices that would help to bring a healthier balance to workers lives.

This book does not cover any of that.

Those are all important topics, but beyond both the scope of what I felt I could cover in a short eBook and the control of most individuals. Instead, this is a book about how an individual employee can try to carve out a reasonable approach to work, despite the insanity of the surrounding culture. It is about things we can do to be more productive so that our work week doesnt stretch to 50-plus hours week after week. It is about the little (and not so little) things under our own control that can make the difference between constantly staying late in the office and making it home for dinner most nights. It is not meant as a replacement to meaningful change in our culture, laws and corporate practices, but as a source of ideas for surviving- and even thriving- while we work for those changes. It offers no panaceas, and some of the ideas it presents may not be relevant to all situations. Reading this book wont magically make your work life better, but if you put in the effort and try some of the suggestions, I hope it will help you tame your work week without trashing your productivity, and let you rediscover time for the other things you love in life.

At work

I was in the company kitchen heating up my lunch when two colleagues came in, talking to each other about their work schedules. Im so busy, the first said, that I dont really have time eat. Im here until 7 at night even without a lunch break. The second nodded agreement, adding oh, me too! Ive been putting in 60 hour weeks for as long as I can remember, and it is still not enough! I greeted them as I took my lunch from the microwave and headed back to my desk to eat. But I wasnt planning to work through my lunch break, I was just choosing to use it for exercise that particular day- I would be out for a 30 minute walk after I finished my food. I was busy, too, but I couldnt join them in their lament about long hours because I wasnt working them. I have opted out of the craziness. I work a 40 to 45-hour work week most weeks, with the total creeping up towards (and occasionally even beyond) 50 only when deadlines loom.

Why are people so proud of how many hours they work? We wouldnt dream of telling anyone how much money we make, but we brag to each other about how many hours we put in at the office or lab, as if needing to be at work 60 hours a week in order to get your work done is something worthy of praise. This is insane. Perhaps we should be proud of our productivity, but needing to work at the expense of all other aspects of our lives is not a goal to which we should aspire. Even those of us who do not participate in this madness fall victim to it, shrugging apologetically when we confess that we only work 40 hours a week.

When I tell people about my work hours, they often assume that either I am lazy and not productive or I work in some sort of cream puff of a job. Neither is true. I am consistently praised for my productivity on my performance reviews, and I work in biotechnology, which is not a sector known for its slow pace or lack of deadlines.

If I do manage to convince the skeptic that I am neither inordinately lazy nor unbelievably lucky, they often want to know my secret for working so few hours. Well, there is no secret, and I think I work plenty of hours, but I will describe my thoughts on the subject, and explain some of the techniques I use to keep my work hours to roughly 40 per week.(1)

Why Work Fewer Hours?

For most people, the revelation about the insanity of long work hours comes not long after their first baby arrives. They realize how quickly their child is growing, and notice that there is something new almost every day, and want to spend more time there, watching it all happen.

This is certainly a valid reason to decide to fix your own personal work-life balance, but it would be better to leave the kids out of the general discussion. Even people without so much as a houseplant depending on them deserve a life outside of work. The real reasons to get your work hours under control are that doing so can make you happier and healthier, whatever you choose to spend your non-working hours doing.

It will probably also make you more productive. I noticed well before I had any offspring that the number of hours I spend truly working is not equivalent to the number of hours I spend in my office (or at my work computer at home). Furthermore, the amount of actual useful work I produce is not equivalent to the number of hours I spend working. The relationships look something like this:

Not only does trying to spend more hours working lead me to start wasting time reading blogs and news stories rather than actually working, but at some point, putting in more hours leads me to produce less actual work.

The symptoms are clear when I have reached that point. I spend far too long trying to figure out how to accomplish a relatively simple task. Finally, I get someone else to look at the problem, and that person sees an elegant solution that I should have seen- and that I would have seen if my brain wasnt trying to work past capacity. Im at my work limit. If I keep pushing to get more work done, Ill start making stupid mistakes and my actual productivity will begin to plummet. Eventually, Ill be making negative progress, creating more problems than I solve. It is better for me to walk out of the office without my laptop, and give myself the night off from work.

I have been aware of my work limit since graduate school. Looking back, though, I was starting to get an inkling in college that such a limit might exist. I never pulled an all-nighter in college, because it was always obvious to me that doing so would be less effective than going to bed and getting up fresh to tackle my work the next day. It was in graduate school, though, that I noticed that the more and more I tried to work, the fewer and fewer solid results I was gathering. I was working on a large, complex data analysis, and making very little progress. I had a deadline, so I was working long hours. Id work all day, and leave exhausted after a more than 10-hour day, feeling like Id made good progress. Then Id come in the next day and realize that I had to discard large swaths of the work Id done the day before. This continued for awhile, as I applied the traditional techniques of consuming more caffeine and junk food, to no avail. Being a good scientist (or perhaps just a very frustrated one), I tried an experiment, and scaled back my work hours. To my surprise, I made more progress, faster. I stopped having to repeat work due to mistakes. As a bonus, I was happier and healthier. Ive never worked insane hours since.

My opinion about the futility of working extremely long hours was further solidified by a stint as a contractor. I was an employee of a contracting firm, so I had a regular salary, but I had to assign every 15 minutes of the work day to a specific charge code. Sometimes when a project was under deadline, wed be offered the chance to work extra hours and be paid for them. This was before I had children, at a time in my life in which I valued extra money over extra free time, and I always tried to take maximum advantage of the offer. I was surprised to discover that try as I might, I could never actually charge more than 55 hours per week- at least not while also adhering to our strict code of ethics. There is no charge code for sitting and staring slackjawed at the computer screen, and that seemed to always be what I ended up doing if I tried to work more than about 10 hours per day. Once again, I had bumped up against my work limit.