I have never seen any research showing net negative productivity for any job for under 60 hours a week of work. Overwork sucks but if you have evidence that it’s bad for productivity please cite it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/01/26/wor...
> the hours at which output is a maximum is at 67 and at 64, respectively. In fact, there are a few cases in which actual observations on hours of work exceed 67 and 64 meaning that, in these instances, average observed hours were at levels where the estimated marginal product of hours is negative!
The Productivity of Working Hours John Pencavel April 2014
I believe this is in line with what I wrote
> I have never seen any research showing net negative productivity for any job for under 60 hours a week of work.
In repetitive work of course more time is always gonna be more productive, with diminishing returns. Until the worker/slave mind or body breaks at least.
Mind you, I'm not saying the same doesn't apply for knowledge workers. Just that this specific articles doesn't provide evidence for knowledge workers.
I imagine that there will be more science being done for productivity on knowledge workers once there's some decent way of measuring productivity for knowledge workers.
There is no reason to believe knowledge workers are any different than manual workers here. Your productivity turns negative when you make so many mistakes that you’re destroying value, not creating it. The article may be only weak evidence for knowledge workers but it certainly isn’t no evidence. Other forms of evidence while not rising to the standards of publication certainly don’t point to 40 hours work a week being optimal for productivity of most knowledge workers. Physicians, professors at research institutions, top tier lawyers, all these people work insane hours.
There is no evidence that working less than 60 hours a week is better for productivity, anywhere, just a bunch of people wishing really hard.
One thing to consider about knowledge/skill workers vs unskilled labor is that most complex systems are house of cards style situations where a single mistake can both destroy a network effect of value, but also take several orders of magnitude of time and effort to detect and rectify the actual issue.
Introducing a subtle, but value destroying, bug into a system can do value damage to the N systems it interconnects with, and can lead to a near total loss of the whole system (eg: drop table). Of course there are safeguards that can help avoid this like backups, but still the point is a carpenter wouldn't make the whole house worthless by a misplaced nail.
Manual laborers are people no less than accountants or mathematicians.
Seriously? Of all things, something so obvious like this needs needs citation?
The actual research on this is scarce to the point of non-existence. It may actually be non-existent for knowledge workers, at least published work.
Specialist doctors are not staying late on a Friday or working the weekend. While a walkin clinic doctor might be pushing 60 hours.
An average business owner might spend more than 40 hours a week. The most successful business owners hire people to work for them while they enjoy their lives.
8 hours of tired programming gets less done compared to a well rested 3 hour work session.
Annual Work Hours Across Physician Specialties
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
Pop article in magazine for physicians
> 2018 Average Physician Hours Worked Per Week Physician Type Average Physician Workweek Age 45 years or less 54.73 hours Age 46 years or more 49.87 hours Male physicians 51.89 hours Female physicians 50.46 hours Practice owners 51.96 hours Employed physicians 53.73 hours Primary care physicians 50.64 hours Physician specialists 51.76 hours
https://www.locumleaders.com/physician-news/the-average-phys...
This isn’t true. Obstetricians work 24 hour shifts as standard. Babies don’t get born 9-5.
If you come into the ER on a Friday night with severe brain damage you’re seeing the neurologist immediately. If you have a punctured lung you’re not waiting for the pulmonologist to clock in at 9AM.
Nearly all medical specialties work shift patterns or are required to be on call.
YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company.
And the only reason unpaid overtime was the norm was that managers, specially skip-level management, did a piss-poor job establishing sane goals based on realistic time-frames, and typically threatened to fire people pretty much each and every single week if they did not met those unrealistic goals.
Strangely enough, everywhere else people managed to do their job within the 40hours work week.
The US's post-WW2 dominance doesn't explain why layers of lower management from the US stationed abroad insist in scheduling 3 weeks worth of work into 1 week in spite of being fully aware of how long the task takes, and afterwards boast to their leadership that their non-US teams outperformed US-based teams by a long shot while leaving out that team some non-US developers had to pull consecutive all-nighters to pull it off.
Irish lawyers and doctors work well over 40 hours a week on average too. I feel pretty confident the same is true in finance. Tax professionals in Spain do too. That about exhausts my personal knowledge of working hours in Europe but I kind of doubt management work less than 40 hours a week anywhere, even the civil service.
> and typically threatened to fire people pretty much each and every single week if they did not met those unrealistic goals.
The secret to greater American productivity and hence wealth. People just work more hours.
Even in France, where the base legal hours are only 35 hours a week, intellectual/upper professions in a full-time position work an average of 43 hours a week.
That's the average which includes women, who work 10% less (in terms of number of hours worked) than men. If you only consider men, you reach an average week of 45 hours for those professions.
Just because something is considered "normal" does not mean that it's actually efficient, or "good".
Certain job sectors, like social jobs, have been chronically overworked and underpaid for pretty much as long as they existed. Even during non-pandemic times burn-out, depression, and suicide rates of people working in healthcare have been way above those of the average population, particularly the people who actually do all the "grunt work" like nurses.
A situation has become much worse during this pandemic, yet remains largely ignored.
> It sure looks like people who work more than 40 hours a week on average do better than those who don’t.
Tell that to people working in logistics, those people delivering you packages the next day. Ask them how many hours they work and how "well off" they are financially in exchange for giving up large parts of their private life.
As a matter of fact, only two out of the 4 professions you listed are actually considered overworked to a degree of burnout: Physicians and attorneys [0].
The vast majority of the rest of the list is populated by professions that are generally not considered well-earning even when working massive hours: Nurses, social workers, teachers, school principals, police officers, public accounting, fast food or retail.
Most of these professions would have a very lasting and visible impact if they were gone, it would make society overall objectively worse to be missing them, yet somehow society at large still refuses to properly recognize that trough proper financial compensation even with many hours worked at very important tasks.
[0] https://stress.lovetoknow.com/Which_Professionals_are_Prone_...
In some cases people want to work, to some extent, because their job is more pleasant than their free time activities, but it cannot be considered "normal".