How much is too much work?
I said last week that my overlapping assignments resulted in “objectively too much work.” I know this because I got sick after completing it. But let’s break down how much I actually did. These are my stats for those busy days from RescueTime, which is essentially spyware I use on myself to see how I actually spend my computer time.
Wednesday Oct 30: 7 hours, 43 min, 80% productive
Thursday, Oct 31: 7 hours, 6 min, 85% productive
Friday, Nov. 1: 4 hours, 38 minutes, 90% productive
Saturday, Nov 2: 2 hours, 10 minutes, 83% productive
Sunday, Nov 3: 7 hours, 15 minutes, 85% productive
Monday, Nov 4: 6 hours, 24 minutes, 86% productive
In total I worked (meaning, somewhat problematically but let’s just go with it, “I was at my computer”) about 35 hours and 17 minutes over six days. I didn’t take much of a weekend. My productivity was high, but also not particularly unusual according to my RescueTime weekly reports. (I’ll break down my problems with this productivity metric in a future issue, but again we’ll just go with it for now.) I definitely worked more hours than usual. For comparison, during a typical week in October with no big deadlines, I worked 27 hours and 11 minutes, with 82% productivity. Usually, RescueTime records me doing between 20-30 hours of computer work per week.
What do these numbers leave out? That the 2 hours of work on Saturday were devoted to writing this newsletter, as were some of the hours on Sunday. That the days with the lowest amount of time recorded (after Saturday) actually felt the most draining: Friday’s 4.5 hours were almost all back-to-back interviews, and Monday’s 6.5 hours were spent jumping back and forth between focused editing of the news story and responding to final questions and changes on my feature, which entailed a lot of exhausting and unpredictable *digital availability*. That I spent the 7.5 hours of Wednesday anxious to the point of tears, and that I can’t even remember of the top of my head what I spent Thursday’s 7 hours doing, except that I didn’t feel nearly as bad. That I had been on vacation in Mérida from the Friday to Tuesday before this crunch. That I made it to yoga class Thursday, Friday, and Monday.
You can see that even during an exceptionally busy and stressful week for me, I didn’t work 40 hours. I never worked eight hours in single day, though I got close a few times. If you’re a freelancer who makes things, 40 hours a week is not an achievable goal. I’ve never done factory work or manual labor for money, but I don’t think it’s reasonable there either, the work this arbitrary metric was invented for. I’m positive that of you tracked people’s time in an office the same way as I track mine, you wouldn’t come up with 40 hours for hardly anybody. Forty hours of availability, sure. Forty hours of office presence, probably. Forty hours of thinking about work—at least, and likely more. But the amount of time you’re actually doing something, writing something, creating something? You can’t do that work for eight hours a day without breaking down.
In a science writing Slack group I’m in, a wave of people recently admitted they can’t and don’t work eight hour days. Everybody was more in the five to six hour range. And until we shared that with each other, everybody was secretly feeling guilty and lazy about it. Five hours is the ideal creative workday, I think, and our problematic fave Cal Newport agrees. He describes a start-up in Germany that has a strict 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. workday:
To support this new approach, he has employees leave their phones in their bags at the office and blocks access to social media on the company network. Strict rules reduce time spent in meetings (most of which are now limited to 15 minutes or less). Perhaps most important, his employees now check work email only twice each day — no drawn out back-and-forth exchanges fragmenting their attention, no surreptitious inbox checks while at dinner or on the sidelines of their kids’ sporting events.
It will surprise no one that it’s completely possible to be more productive in five hours under these conditions than in eight in a regular office environment. If your job is making things, that is. There are plenty of important jobs that couldn’t be done well in five hours of solitary focus—human resources, high level management, even editing, a job that has far less in common with writing than you might expect. I also wonder how the employees feel about the rules. They probably love the two email checks per day, but do they miss on-the-job socializing? I would. (Office gossip is the best part of working in an office! I pine for it.)
But for those of us who do have creative, focused, relatively solitary jobs: Five hours is enough. Sometimes, it’s more than enough. Cal Newport and I absolve you, and me.
Recommendations
How’s Work? Drop everything because Esther Perel, the bossy therapist with the world’s best accent, has a new podcast entirely dedicated to work relationships. Shoot the vicarious office gossip directly into my veins, please. It’s available only on Spotify, the first sinister wall erected since that company’s acquisition of Gimlet, but I would go to the moon to listen to this podcast if I had to.
“Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” I recently read this ten-year-old blog post for the first time and found it very affirming of why I can’t get anything done on a day with a lot of interruptions. Different jobs have different needs!
“The world is going to hell. Here’s how I’m coping as California burns around me.” For fans of Sarah Miller, an essay on the intersection of the climate crisis and the achievable goal: “I will often try to accomplish one thing, because it helps my brain settle down, and because it helps me get out of that loop of ‘why do this, it doesn’t matter anyway.’ Once it’s done, it no longer matters whether it matters.” Amen.