Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

by Brigid Schulte

But times and work have changed. Unlike manual laborers, knowledge workers have about six good hours of hard mental labor a day, futurist Sara Robinson found in a review of research on work and work hours. Work late for too long, she wrote, and “people get dull and stupid … They make mistakes that they’d never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they’re fried.”15 A study of medical interns found that those on long shifts made 36 percent more potentially serious errors than those who worked shorter shifts.16 Research by the Business Roundtable in the 1980s found that companies can get short-term gains by pushing employees to work sixty or seventy hours a week, Robinson reports. But after two weeks at that pace, workers were not just fried—they were crispy. Microsoft, like most other high-tech firms, has a “churn ’em and burn ’em” long work hours culture. (Apple once made T-shirts for employees proclaiming 90 HRS/WK AND LOVING IT!) But in a 2005 survey, Microsoft employees reported that in a 45-hour workweek, they put in only 28 productive hours. That’s 5.6 hours a day.17