BY GARY JOHNSON
Loose Change Reprinted from TwinCitiesMagazine.com

I’ve heard hundreds of wails from people who claim they work 60- to 70-hour weeks. Occasionally, I’ll even hear about someone working 100-plus-hour weeks, the most recent example coming from my own company. The individual just had a heart bypass at age 47. Ahem.

I mostly don’t believe the hours-worked stories any more than I believe compensation stories. However, if one does the math on a 70-hour work week, over a five-day period one must work 14 hours per day, i.e., a 6 a.m. start would land you home at 8 p.m., every single flipping day of the week. Actually, working that schedule would not land you home—more likely you’d end up in a clinic or psych ward.

Even 50-plus hours is excessive, if on average. For anyone who works more than 50 hours per week, I have some advice. Stop! No business has the right to work you like that. It’s flat-out toxic, unless of course you’re getting rich ☺.

The fact is, working more than 40 hours is statistically bad for you and for business. Inc. magazine published an article recently calling out “handfuls of studies” that reinforce the assertion that working long hours is “unproductive . . . useless and harmful.”

To the hard-nosed business executive, the logic of expecting long hours has been the go-to notion since the beginnings of the industrial revolution. In the days when factories were chugging out a lot of black smoke and widgets, it was de rigueur to force workers to remain on the job for 10–15 hours a day. Theory was it delivered more product, more sales, and bigger bottom lines. The facts proved otherwise. Hundreds of studies demonstrated that domineering business managers got no more widgets in a 10-hour workday than an eight-hour workday.

Working consistently late hours isn’t good for anyone. On average, a 40-hour week elicits the optimum productivity from employees. The stereotype that long hours is a measure of an employee’s worth is tantamount to judging a child’s worth by the amount of time they spend doing homework.

When Peter Drucker said, “Time is always in short supply, yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource,” he wasn’t suggesting that we work longer hours. Rather, he was suggesting that we seriously consider how we conduct ourselves during the hours we work. There are people at our place who, observing normal office hours, perform at an insanely efficient pace, knocking out formidable amounts of work. Yet they go home at day’s end. Others meander through their day, and odds are good that the meanderers could work 15-hour days and still not get the work done their frenetic counterparts do in half that time.

The majority of work force psychologists, business consultants, gurus, experts, and myriad other small and large companies agree. People are more productive, loyal, and effective, particularly knowledge and service workers, when they can live balanced lives, going home at a reasonable hour, having available leisure time to enjoy life and family, and some soul time to dream, digest, and create those innovative solutions, creative applications, and improvements we managers all hope for. Seriously, go home.