Open Thread for February 3 - 10

NancyLebovitz

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

I'm seeing a lot of things claiming that over the long run, people can't increase their output by working much more than 40 hours per week. It might (so the claim goes) work for a couple weeks of rushing to meet deadline, but if you try to keep up such long hours long-term your hourly productivity will drop to the point that your total output will be no higher than what you'd get working ~40 hour weeks.

There seem to be studies supporting this claim, and I haven't been able to find any studies contradicting it. On the other hand, it seems like something that's worth being suspicious of simply because of course people would want it to be true. Also, I've heard that the studies supporting this claim weren't performed until after the 40 hour work week had become entrenched for other reasons, which seems suspicious. Finally, if (salaried) employees working long hours is just them trying to signal how hard working they are, at the expense of real productivity, it's a bit surprising managers haven't clamped down on that kind of wasteful signaling more.

(EDIT: Actually, failure of managers to clamp down on something is probably pretty weak evidence of it not being wasteful signaling, see here.)

This seems like a question of great practical importance, so I'm really eager to hear what other people here think about it.

The answer hugely depends on how intensely you work. Using hours as a measure of your productivity is a bit pointless I think. It also matters how the work is distributed in time and what kind of work we're talking about.

I can work all day without my productivity suffering if I take it easy enough, but I can exhaust myself in a few hours too if I work super intensely. Increasing work intensity produces diminishing marginal utility for me. Also the fact that I've accomplished much in the few hours isn't much solace if I'm too exhausted to enjoy anything for the rest of the day.

8Nornagest12y

Well, it's quite unlikely that 40 hours/week is exactly the right value. I'd expect that what's going on involves researchers comparing the cultural default to a grab-bag of longer hours, probably with fairly coarse granularity, and concluding that the cultural default works better even though it might not be an absolute optimal. There's also cultural factors to take into account, both local to the company and general to the society. If we've habituated ourselves to thinking that 40 hours/week is normal for people in general, it wouldn't be surprising to me if working longer hours acted as a stressor purely by comparison with others. Similarly, among companies, expecting employees to work longer hours than the default would probably correlate with putting high pressure on them in other ways, and this would probably be very hard to untangle from the productivity statistics.

5lukeprog12y

I think this is just false. It seems to me that lots of people work long hours throughout their entire career, with output much higher than if they only worked 40 hrs/wk. But I haven't looked into studies.