105 hours: Total work hours
No, the crux is that how many free days we take in the year must factor into our definition of how much we are working – and it often doesn't.
I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.
It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.
For many of us, most of those hours are spent at work.
Or so we think.
A COO has to work a lot.. right?
It was April. I became a startup COO for the first time in my career in January, which meant more than half the company reported to me.
I was on vacation and took my family to this beautiful resort with thermal springs, and we were talking about my work hours while relaxing in one of the resort's natural pools. My wife was echoing my inlaws' comment that I worked too much. I agreed, but I was the company COO, and the hours come with the job, I said.
About a year earlier, I started writing down what time I started and stopped working and how long my lunches and other breaks took.
It was a busy year, and I worked a lot. I didn't do any calculations on my timekeeping and skipped several weeks sometimes. But by the end of the year, I had detailed logs for about 80% of the year.
As a reflection exercise, I input all those entries into a spreadsheet for some analysis – I wanted to see how big the hole was and how much I was overworking myself.
To my surprise, I wasn't. Adding it all up, it actually all seemed pretty reasonable.
Yes, there were 14 and 15-hour days. I remembered those vividly.
But there were also many 8 and 9-hour days, and even some 7 and 6-hour ones. Additionally, many other days were full days off from vacations, holidays, sick days, and personal commitments.
As an exercise, I grouped days in the year by the total hours worked.
Even though I thought I worked a lot as the year went by, the group on the top of the list was 8 hours/day: 29 times. The second on the list was 10 hours/day: 24 times.
The third place on the list? Days off, no work at all, 0 hours: 20 times.
Free days
While there's overtime, there are also free days: holidays, vacations, ad-hoc personal activities that can't be scheduled around work, etc.
In my experience, free days and other such things more than make up for overtime, but most people don't track them precisely enough to be aware of it.
Most people think they work a lot of hours, but they don't.
Here are some stats and testimonials about free time and work hours from Meik Wiking's book The Little Book of Lykke. Lykke means happiness in Danish, and the book talks about Denmark's perspective on happiness compared to other Western countries, particularly the US.
Here's the author reporting on a British couple, Kate and Simon, who moved from the UK to Denmark to achieve a better work-life balance.
“We were just tired: tired of the long working hours; tired of the long commute; tired of feeling a bit like strangers when we finally had time at the weekends. I go to bed early and Simon worked really long hours, so some days we wouldn’t see each other at all.” [..] For many expats, the greatest change is in fact the shift in work-life balance; they describe Danish offices as being like morgues after five p.m. If you work on the weekend, Danes suspect you are a madman working on some secret project. [..] You leave work at four p.m. or five p.m. And no excuse is needed. Last week, I left the office at five, I cycled home — I have gone full-on Danish — and was home twenty minutes later. Simon had picked up the girls and was preparing dinner.” [..] The average annual hours worked per worker is 1,457 in Denmark, compared to 1,674 in the UK, 1,790 in the US, and an OECD average of 1,766.
Wiking, Meik. The Little Book of Lykke (The Happiness Institute Series) (p. 167). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.
Total hours worked in the year
When evaluating how much we're working, my preferred way is to consider the total hours spent at work in the preceding year since it considers all the free days and other weekly variations.
Repeating the last line from the quote on the countries' average number of hours worked in the year (which, by the way, I suspect is somewhat imprecise since nobody tracks their time):
- 1,457 hours: Denmark
- 1,674 hours: UK
- 1,790 hours: US
- 1,766 hours: OECD average
Assuming two weeks off federal holidays and three weeks of vacation, someone that works 8 hours/day on average will have taken 200 hours off, plus any sick days and personal commitments. Someone working 10 hours/day will have taken at least 250 hours off.
Of course, many of us take more days off in a year than ten holidays and fifteen vacation days.
Those hours off then get sprinkled back into the weeks as overtime, rebalancing our average work week in the year.
Note: my point is not that we shouldn't take days off, that we should take less vacation, or even that overtime is ok because there are holidays in the year. I'm also not saying we're lazy.
No, the crux is that how many free days we take in the year must factor into our definition of how much we are working – and it often doesn't.
In the context of the year, even an average of 2,000 hours, way above the US average, is only about 40 hours a week.
This is a novel concept and, therefore, worth emphasizing: when thinking about how many hours we're working and whether it's a little, a lot, or just right, there's only one figure that can tell us the correct answer: how many total hours we've spent at work in the year.