“If you want to change the world you have to work between 80 and 100 hours a week.” Elon Musk tells you, one of the richest men in the world and a successful model. He is not alone. Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, has ever talked about how she works 130 hours a week. According to estimates by the CEOs themselves, they work an average of 60 hours, and it is not uncommon to see trends and articles in the media to reduce the time spent on basic functions and thus work more.
In front of them, the rest of us salaried mortals became figures of progress. But that’s how it is?
to study. In 2009, the London Schools of Economics tracked, through secretaries and assistants, dozens of CEOs who claimed to work “55 hours or more.” When it was time to break down the day, it turns out that about 35 hours are real work and 20 fall into the category of miscellanywhere trips, gym hours and personal activities are added.
Six hours of leisure a day. Another independent Harvard study tracked the daily lives of company bosses. In their findings, the authors noted that the prototype CEO spends about six hours every day on his personal business (hobbies, family), 45 minutes of daily exercise and 6.9 hours of sleep. “To maintain the intensity of a CEO, they must train like athletes, and that means planning time for their health, their body and rest.”
What is work? Apparently, the definition, a priori little open to interpretation, depends on whether you are an employee or a manager. In the United States, where the CEOs of many of the companies analyzed are concentrated, the average white-collar employee in the country spends 47 hours in his position, and that is taking into account that the calculation does not consider the hours of transportation as time dedicated to work. .
“I don’t stop working.” Overestimating working time is a human reaction. The project proved Americans Use of Time, which has been giving realities to the different generations of workers since the 1960s. Those who think they work 50-60 hours a week actually spend an average of 47.3 hours of their time. Those who reported 70 hours or more, stayed at 58.8. It happens to us similar with respect to the hours of sleep. If you say you have not slept more than three hours tonight, it is very likely that you have slept five or six.
better six than ten. A separate issue is the dubious benefit of overwork. In general, it is better to spend six hours a day than ten. This is the case for jobs that require mental effort, such as that of a manager, a nurse or a programmer. The goal is efficiency. A senior engineering manager explains it to you: Employees under him who work long hours start to have bad ideas, slow work pace, and “often end up writing code that is overly complex and full of bugs.” They get tired.
If your job is your life, hours don’t count. With the progressive automation of work and the high division between low-skilled and high-skilled employees, researchers have found that less-skilled workers have gained more hours of free time in recent decades, but more-skilled workers have lost it.
There are at least two theories about it. The first, that competitiveness and the fear of being left behind leads them to try to improve their results. The second, and the one that CEOs who work 60 hours a week may be left with, is that there are jobs that do fill to people, blurring the line between work and play and everything can be counted as job development, including gym time.