Overworked photo from Nuvate Solutions
With today’s networked, “always-on” technology and virtual workplaces, I feel like the term “work” has become very fluid and vague when it comes to white collar jobs. This is why I find it curious whenever someone says: “Dude! I work like 70 hours a week, EVERY week!” Really? Every week? What do you do? Is it really value-added? Or are you counting hours that I wouldn’t consider work?
How do you define work? Is it work if you…
…roll out of bed, check your BB and proceed to respond?
…take a 4 hour flight to get to your client?
…sit in the office surfing the web?
…surf the web, while waiting for your boss to get back to you?
…surf the web, while waiting for the system to load?
…sit in a 3 hour meeting but aren’t contributing/learning anything?
…spend 2 hours talking to your colleague about the latest sports trades?
I often see people who are in the office until 21:00, but during the day, they have time to take 2 hour lunches and enough time to come talk to me about what they did last weekend for another hour. You can bet that if I’m going to claim I’m “soooo busy” that I don’t have time to come talk to you for an hour in the middle of the day.
When I say “work”, I mean full intensity, focused, value-added work. Yes, I understand someone needs to do the grunt work, but get that done well and move on to more important things.When I say “work” I don’t mean just being physically in the office. I don’t mean all the time one might consider “on business”. If you count my travel time (I just got back from the airport), time spent in the office and time spent checking/responding to work emails on weekends, of course I clock well over 60 hours/week consistently. However, I don’t count a lot of that.
I understand there are certain “crunch times“, for instance: when deliverables are due, a new system goes live, month-end closes, etc., but when someone tells me that they’re consistently working 70-80 hour weeks and they’re in a white collar job, I feel like something is wrong, but more on that later…
Do you consistently work more than 60 hours/week (12 hours/day)? What exactly do you do?