The Myth That Americans Are Busier Than Ever
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I wouldn't be surprised if the same were happening in the States. I don't believe people can be super-productive more than 5 hours a day unless they work on something they are passionate about or are on drugs.
From my experience, just walking away from a difficult problem, taking time to walk in the forest, relax on the beach, playing sports with friends, doing completely unrelated relaxing things with total focus often leads to sudden inspirations on how to tackle difficult problems. It's like life is telling me to relax and rewards me with great ideas that can be immediately executed, for being just well balanced.
I remember flying with one US businessman between Hawaiian islands, and he curiously asked me how many vacation days do I have - when I told him it's 6 weeks, he went on to complain about how crazy is it in the States, with average of 8.5 day or so of vacation per year.
People, please live your lives!
FWIW, I'm in the US and we have ~5-6 weeks vacation.
Most of my friends in the US start with 2 weeks, after a few years they get 3 weeks, then these are reset if they change the job, and if they take a vacation, they are either frowned upon or they have to be available to work on a moments notice. I find this utterly crazy.
I know people who feel pressure to work on vacation. The pressure is very real and isn't always related to ambition on the part of those people. Usually they're being exploited by an ambitious manager who has a "hold" of some kind, e.g. exploited person has a child with 2 years left of college and can't afford to lose his/her job.
One Seattle-based eCommerce company forced you to keep pager with you all the times, even on a vacation, if you were an unlucky part of operations.
This can't happen in most European countries, unless the company desperately wants to lose plenty of court cases.
One member of my US family in the midwest worked in an unionized menial job with 1 week of paid vacation including sick days. The rest was unpaid.
Only after I left the unit I was in, was it respected that I was not to be contacted.
Edit: I'd also add I had to work all day on Christmas one year, and I know others in very similar situations.
Friends with a security engineer at a company everyone would know. He can't even get a normal work day right now, or a single day off in a week.
It certainly happens.
In my experience, to get that much leave, you have to work at the same company for 5+ years. And either be highly-paid white collar OR highly paid union.
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/the-unite... http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
I assume you're a software engineer? It's a particularly mentally intensive job, and I don't think your experience is easily generalizable. Jobs that don't require that level of creativity and where you can rely more on memorized processes are easier to do for extended periods of time. Say you're an insurance adjuster. Most of the claims that cross your desk are not unusual and do not require special handling. I bet you could do that productively for 8 hours a day.
My other job doing email tech support I struggle to not take a five minute break every hour to clear my head. I still get bellow five hours a day of productivity because I have to sit in a ton of meetings on the off chance that I might need to say something or they just want more eyes on whatever they're doing.
My wife's sister and her husband are both the two "busiest" people you will ever meet. Yet when I spend time with them, I'm reminded of the fact that neither of them is very intelligent (perhaps the wrong word, but put another way they have no depth of understanding about anything outside of their jobs in cargo transport, zero creativity or appreciation of any kind of art, and little to zero knowledge of world events) and they don't seem to progress any quicker in their careers. In fact, as my wife has noted, they have lagged behind us and all of our friends who enjoy a healthy work-life balance. There is nothing scientific here about this anecdote, of course. I think that perhaps the easiest way to be extremely busy all the time is to not step back, take a breath, and think about a more efficient way to accomplish task X.
In a culture where status is attained through work, if you lack the creativity and skills to be a standout wizard who breezes through and builds cool shit that others think they could never do (translations: anyone on HN) then perhaps "busy" is the other way to earn some semblance of status.
The fact that they both told my wife that they feel art is a waste of time and that artists should all find better things to do didn't help me view them as remotely on our level.
I'm very critical of myself. It is people who lack the capacity to be critical of themselves who act and think like they do. I am better than they are, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I'm not better than them by anything given to me, but because I recognize that I suck and constantly seek to improve myself. They view themselves as amazing people. They aren't.
I used to be a construction worker. I know what arrogance towards human beings looks like because I experienced it every day by being looked at like an insect by every white collar asshole that walked by. I also know that my wife's sister and her husband didn't think I was good enough for her back then, but now that I make a decent salary they think I'm kosher. Fuck them.
I can't even tell you how incredibly "busy" I was during recess in high school. Also during free hours and any kind of down time... so much to do!
(For that matter: I didn't really go to "high school", I'm just using that as the name for my school system's equivalent of year 11 to 13.)
Yes, and sometimes meetings serve only this purpose. For example, oh I'm sorry Mr. X is in a meeting that he has scheduled for every time you call.
My parents were teachers and I remember them marking after school and some weekends. My wife is now a teacher and she has after school meetings at least once a week, spends hours marking every night and weekends, plus a lot of her holiday preparing new lessons and admin. Contractually she has the exact same hours and holidays my parents had but her life is nothing like theirs.
For myself I'm a scientist and people have worked long hours since I was a student - but it used to tail off as people got into their 30s and became more secure, maybe got a stable position, teaching, and students of their own. Now this seems to have been pushed back to an ever receding horizon and people work long long hours competing to get the next grant or next placement, to keep their heads above water right up till retirement. Of course academics all contractually work a 40 hour week.
I guess its anecdotal but I see the same sort of things amongst my friends in tech and pharma. Their laptops and mobiles have enslaved them.
Maybe I was blind to it when young but I don't remember my parents generation - their friends, my relatives working like that.
It's collected via time diaries, not contractual hours worked.
Same experience here. This was in the middle of Africa yet students will have to be graded and life has to go on.
> Now this seems to have been pushed back to an ever receding horizon and people work long long hours competing to get the next grant or next placement, to keep their heads above water right up till retirement.
In the U.S. academia is not that competitive after tenure (most of the time). Of course, you may have a drive to have students, which may drive you to acquire grants and so on.
> I guess its anecdotal but I see the same sort of things amongst my friends in tech and pharma.
My experience in tech has been an upward increase in work load with increase in experience. Funnily enough this has been correlated with greater freedom. The less freedom I had, the more I was inclined to put in my 8 hours and check out. Now, the more the freedom that I have, the more I realize that I am always on and I have to force myself to switch off and do other things.
Far too much of this workaholic issue only occurs because people want lifestyles they otherwise could not afford. Two cars, the big house or exclusive location, the island vacations, and such, are not necessary for a happy life. Yet there are many who think so and adapt to make it happen. I don't begrudge them for a minute
Make sure you're not the tallest poppy...
I would call it fear. There is very little actual competitiveness in the workforce, but it looks that way as people go about trying to look important as they fear the next guy who can and will do the same job for $1/h less. The fear of taking vacation is part of this, well, for the few that get vacation time.
American priorities are messed up, work yourself to death so you can retire and enjoy life when your too useless to work.
I'm not sure there's anyone with a spine to make it change; when I've raised the issue of unionization to my co-workers I tend to get blank or vaguely fearful stares for bringing up something so untouchably controversial.
In the US, the capital is the big winner (business owner, investors, etc.) Labor loses hard -- even if you are a highly paid professional you are still going to succumb to an unsustainable culture that ruins your QOL.
And please, nobody counter this with stories about how your cool startup or tech job isn't like that. I'm talking about the majority, not various niches and exceptions to the rules.
Try to look past the writing style you probably won't like at first: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html
We trade time for money. If you enjoy your work, and someone is willing to give you a large sum of money for your time, then working long hours makes sense... but only if you couldn't be doing something that you'd like even more than money with that time. For example, a reasonably high level executive position might pay you $250k/year for 20 years - so $5m - but it'd take you away from your family doing business travelling for 2 weeks out of every month. Would you trade a total of 10 years away from your family for $5m? Some people would. I wouldn't.
Salaried employees can typically be forced to work upwards of the 40 hours they are officially bartering with for money. The money doesn't scale with time or effort put in, which is one of the contributing causes to burnout and do-nothing-but-still-so-"busy"-ism.
Article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/05/26/14052...
The real problem is "time inflation." This is the name given to the fact that there is more to DO than ever because life is generally becoming more complicated, and because companies and government entities have decided to make you responsible for large portions of their business processes as a cost saving measure. Government is always the worst since the relationship is not voluntary.
Some real examples from my own life: * IRS sends me a letter saying I didn't pay taxes from a stock transaction in 2011, tells me I have 60 days to prove otherwise or I automatically owe the money.
* When I was a kid, grocery stores removed the items from your basket and rang them up. Then conveyor belts became more common and you were expected to place your groceries on the belts. Now, some stores don't even have checkers, you scan and bag your own groceries (fresh and easy for instance).
* Target has a security breach and I need to sign up for credit card monitoring and do due diligence, read my statements etc-- the banking industry has created a massively vulnerable payment system which requires my constant vigilance.
* I ordered an electric weed whacker from woot. It arrived broken (I'm already being used as product testing-- they should have tested it not me). Woot won't take it back, they suggest calling the manufacturer. The manufacturer actually asks me if I have a multimeter and screwdriver so I can test various components so they can send me a new part. Buying a weed whacker has now cost me 5 hours of my weekend, as I have become product tester and repair staff.
* Get pulled over for a missing tail light, police officer writes a "fix-it" ticket for "incorrect instrumentation" or some such nonsense. What was weird about this was, the CHP officer who inspected my car said he had NEVER seen a ticket for this before.
* The city I live in apparently goes through your tax returns, and saw that I had $400 of 1099 income. The city defines ANY 1099 income as operating a business and requires me to get a business license and pay taxes on the income, I have to spend a whole day at the city hall getting a business license (I in no way operate a business) under threat of going to jail.
* Apple recalls my phone, I have to make two pilgrimages to the Apple store, each time backing up my phone completely and restoring it. Total cost, 4 hours.
* Anything relating to medical care is a CLUSTER, I could write a novel on just this.
Some more mundane annoyances are simply plays for my attention:
* Despite being very diligent about unsubscribing I get 40 or so emails a day from random companies I have done business with sometime in the last 10 years.
* The USPS brings me junk mail every day that I never, ever look at. It goes straight to the trash. Still about 30 seconds/day goes to this.
MASSIVE time sinks in my life:
* Inadequate transportation infrastructure in my county means I spend needless hours on the road.
* Purposefully poorly designed store ques. In the US most store ques are about 30% less efficient than optimal and all is required is a slight redesign of the area. The correct type of store que is where there is one line that feeds all registers-- in that way nobody can get stuck behind a customer whose taking a long time. (Think Fry's vs. Costco). I shop as much as I can online but cannot purchase groceries online obviously.
While none of these examples is particularly egregious the net effect of this and hundreds of other of annoyances is that I always have something to worry about. All of these companies / government entities waste my time on to infinity because it costs them nothing to do so and I am powerless to stop them.
Just to let you know, Whole Foods does this in its New York stores. Oh, and you can order groceries online here, Google will deliver stuff from Target, Costco, etc in the same day, public transportation is good and fast. Next time, tell the weed whacker manufacturer to screw themselves and honor their warranty or you'll file a Deceptive Trade Practices Act suit; you're not their diagnostician.
Add to your list: reading social link aggregation sites and writing long comments on them :)
Work-related anxiety has gone way up. People work slightly shorter days (8-9 hours for white-collar workers instead of 9-10) but are a lot more drained at the end of them. In software, this is due to tightly-packed open-plan offices, increasingly unreasonable expectations regarding availability and timeframe, and declining autonomy due to the abuse of technology and processes (like "Agile", which started with great intentions).
The real work has gotten easier (in some cases, so much easier as to be an anxiety-causing factor in its own right, due to boredom) and hours have gone down slightly (but with more variance) but the full-time impression management job has become more competitive, much more mean-spirited, and far more draining.
Watch Mad Men. It explains so much more about white-collar culture than I could ever get into here. At the time, that was the most stressful, painful, and socially demanding white-collar job in the country-- which is why people doing it, by the standards of the time, were paid extremely well. Now, that's the mainstream corporate culture.