I often hear, especially from folks working at younger companies and the tech giants, that the 40 hour workweek is a lie. That “the company” secretly (or not so secretly) always wants you to work more hours and doesn’t care if people are unhappy or burn out. That “they” will keep piling on work with no regard for mental or physical well-being. And while that is certainly true in some places, I think it is the exception, not the norm. More often than not, I think reality is far more nuanced.

Unfortunately, companies tend to fail to correct this impression whenever they are asked about work/life balance, burnout, or workload management. An all too common response is “we believe work/life balance is something the company cannot dictate - it is a personal choice”. With a prior of “the company doesn’t care”, this comes across as (slightly condescending) weasel-words that dodge the question.

The reality is that “what’s the right number of hours to work in a week” is not an easy question to answer. It varies not just from person to person, but from week to week, and even day to day. And ignoring the nuances involved does a disservice to both employees and employers. Cultivating the cultural norms and organizational policies needed to strike a sustainable balance, while still treating employees like adults with agency, is difficult but worthwhile. Ultimately, I argue, the right mixture of individual flexibility, internal back-pressure, and well-adjusted expectations yields positive, healthy outcomes for everyone involved; there’s no need for good intentions (although it is of course welcome!).

I’ve chosen not to get into the question of “what about the time I spend thinking about work stuff in the shower or on the toilet?” here. As you’ll soon discover, this article is on the long side, so I had to declare the semi-philosophical discussion of what “work” even means out of scope!

Area under the curve

So, let’s explore some of that nuance. To do so, let’s start with a chart: incremental progress made per unit time, where “progress” is an abstract value to measure the degree to which that time was spent furthering something that’s valuable to the company either directly (actual work done) or indirectly (hiring, skill development, people managing, etc.). Let’s plot this over one week of five working days, each with eight hours. My contention is that it would look something like this:

It’s worth highlighting that the Y-axis here is actual progress made towards impactful outcomes. If you’re tired or distracted, you may spend the same number of hours ostensibly working, but you’ll make more mistakes, take longer to arrive at solutions, get more easily distracted, and thus have a lower overall progress per unit time.

I’ve included what I think are some common patterns here. By the end of the day, most people are less productive. By the end of Thursday, we feel our energy levels and productivity drop. By Friday morning, our productivity is diminished from the get-go, and drops severely as the day progresses.

This is obviously a generalisation; the nature of the curve will depend on a whole host of factors including general health condition, other things going on in life, amount of time since last vacation, how engaging the work is, or just whether the person stubbed their toe one morning. It also probably applies more so to creative knowledge work than to, say, chopping trees in the forest.

But don’t take my word for it. Even if you ignore the various trial results from 4 Day Week Global, there is a mounting body of evidence showing correlation between number of hours worked and decline in both mental health (including increased depression) and physical health, as well as productivity overall across a variety of industries. Interestingly, the detrimental effects do not seem to stem solely from an increased workload, but also from downstream effects like working “unsocial hours”. It’s also not clear that 40 hours per week strikes the “right” balance in any meaningful way.

What employers ultimately care about is the area under this curve. That is, the sum-total progress made in a given time interval. So, armed with this visualization, let’s look at some common “get more work done” patterns might look like in this model.

Anecdotally, I also think the area under this curve correlates with our own happiness – at least I know that I enjoy the feeling of getting things done that mattered,

Longer days

The exact shape of this curve will differ from person to person. For some, an extra hour or two at work is no big deal and doing this would just increase their overall output. While for others their ability to concentrate, be creative, and pay attention to detail drops precipitously as the day stretches longer. Also, with longer days, you have less time to fully recover by the next day, so the detrimental effect cascades.

So, as an employer, would you prefer this curve to the one above? The area under the curve is somewhat greater, but not by a huge margin. You’re also likely paying a cost in attrition due to unhappiness. That cost in terms of hiring + retraining isn’t captured here, but is substantial. Furthermore, work at the lower ends of the Y-axis here is more likely to have mistakes that must be corrected later, further adding to the cost.

A friend of mine who read an earlier draft of this article also made the excellent point that 2 hours at work often aren’t equivalent to 2 hours at home, especially for those with care duties. If you spend less time at home with your children, pets, loved ones, etc., that “saved” time can easily result in a much more severe backlash down the line. You might end up with kids who are harder to put to bed or relationships that need repair, which not only come with a mental toll, but also require a lot of time; the very resource you had hoped to save in the first place.

Longer workweeks

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

At first, working more days seems attractive. Sure, the 6th day isn’t super productive, but it still adds a lot of area! Once viewed over time though, the detrimental effect becomes clearer – seen across a month, the area you added in the first few weeks is quickly eaten up by the losses in later weeks.

Interestingly, none of the studies I’ve looked at seem to distinguish between “more hours per day” and “more days per week”.

Burnout

When someone has hit burnout, progress is sporadic and slow if any happens at all. Or in the extreme case they stop working altogether. It goes without saying that this is terrible for area-under-the-curve. As an employer, you never want employees to hit burnout no matter how cynical you are; if they burn out, you are effectively paying for someone at minimal efficiency. Sure, you could fire them, but now the progress over time for this person is 0, and in addition you have to now spend other people’s time hiring and training their replacement – that’s negative area!

Crunch time

The graphs above show that you can indeed get more stuff done by working more, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, you end up with a compounding negative return. But therein also lies a clue: crunch time is fine as long as there is a recovery period afterwards. By giving time “in lieu” after a crunch, you can bring the baseline back up and then progress as usual.

Now, when people take time off after a crunch, the area under their curve (obviously) goes to zero, which hints at what I believe is a fundamental property of crunch time work: it does not give you more time over all, it merely borrows time from the future. That borrow also comes with a marginal interest cost, but that may be a cost worth paying occasionally if the deadline is important enough, or if you are crunching with others and the high-bandwidth concurrent crunch yields an outsized impact.

At ambitious companies, increased work output may also come with significant (possibly uncapped) financial upsides. That can increase the tolerance for increased work, at least for a period of time, and can be a worthwhile investment if made intentionally. However, even with high rewards, most people will inevitably hit diminishing-and-eventually-negative returns at some point, and will feel the consequences if they push past it.

It should go without saying at this point, but “constant crunch time mode” is clearly unsustainable – the diminished progress rate will only compound, and eventually you’re spending lots of hours but getting very little done. And making everyone miserable in the process! Giving time in lieu is essential for a company that wants to pull the “crunch time” lever frequently.

Exerting back-pressure

With the charts above, I hope I have demonstrated that it’s actually in the company’s interest that people don’t overwork. However, a common failure mode is that the insight that people are overworking is binary: there is little signal that someone is overloaded until the one day where it all boils over and they burn out. Perversely, this happens more in companies where the employees feel particularly dedicated to the company’s work; employees absorb more work and tighter deadlines by working harder because they care about what they’re working towards. And while they may occasionally mention there’s a lot to do, it goes unnoticed because, frankly, when isn’t there a lot to do? But as a result, they keep stretching themselves until they break.

The solution to this, which as we’ve seen is both in the employee’s and employer’s interest, is for people to be willing to push back as the work burden grows. This serves as a signal up the chain that work is being fed into “the machine” faster than it can be acted upon with the expected quality. There are a variety of ways that the leadership of the company could act upon to that signal, including hiring (though beware the mythical man-month; see also work is work), but that’s beyond the scope of this already-long article! The important thing is that the signal exists such that they can act upon it, which as we’ve demonstrated is in their own self-interest.

I want to stress that back-pressure does not mean “just say no”. Instead, effective back-pressure is all about negotiation. That is a topic for a blog post all on its own, but very briefly: when you’re near capacity and someone approaches you with more work, you should present them with what work would need to be dropped in order to take on their work instead. It could be that their piece of work is more important than what you’re currently prioritising, but if so, that other piece of work should be dropped! If both are important, something else has to go. That’s what “at capacity” means. The choice of what gets dropped may be difficult, and may need to propagate back up the leadership chain, but that’s the back-pressure working as intended.

Performance expectations

Concerned (likely leadership-shaped) readers may see the advice above and be worried that telling employees to push back will lead to a naysaying culture where ambition goes to die. Where minute-counting, card-punching types leave no room for rising to a challenge. And while that is a possible outcome, it also has a natural counter-weight: the performance evaluation process.

Performance evaluations is, in my opinion, one of the linchpins of company culture. It may seem cynical at first, but hear me out. It’s in performance evaluations that the company is forced to make extremely explicit and public judgement calls on what it values and what it does not. Behaviour that is rewarded is, naturally, reinforced, sought, and promoted. And a bar quickly emerges that represents what the company considers “good enough” performance, usually under a label like “meets the bar” or “meets expectations”.

Crucially, “good enough performance” should be tied to impact (which I could write another whole article on how to define…) and progression, not hours clocked. With the mental model we’ve established, the measure of performance should be equal to the area under curve across a quarter/year, perhaps with some weighting for particularly strategic impact. Furthermore, I would argue, a rating of “meets expectations” should be calibrated to what is reasonable to expect from a competent employee with 40 hour work weeks on average over the period. Under such a definition, an average employee who sticks to normal working hours should get a rating of meeting expectations. Which, to be clear, is a perfectly fine rating! And those who push back too much are likely to not meet that bar, to their own detriment.

Concerned (likely employee-shaped) readers may see the advice above and contest that this will lead to a system where people are rewarded for overworking. Such readers may also suggest that this is equivalent to punishing people for not overworking. There’s some truth to the first part of that, though only up to a limit; as I’ve hopefully managed to illustrate above, it’s not as though you can just put in infinitely more hours and end up infinitely more productive. You can increase your output slightly if you tolerate more work, in which case you will likely be rewarded for that, but that just seems… fair? That is, as long as the baseline is set such that it’s possible to meet when working 40 hour work weeks (again, on average). For the latter though, if you don’t find the reward above that bar commensurate with the added stress or unhappiness you would experience from doing so work week (again, on average), that’s a perfectly fine choice. Getting a “meets expectations” and the pay check commensurate with that (which should be fair wage of course!) isn’t a punishment, it’s just kind of how jobs work.

Of course there is a risk that the company’s Overton window shifts and the expectation moves to align with those who work more. And vigilance is required on the company’s part to fight that trend. However, as we’ve shown, it’s in the company’s interest to do.

At this point it’s important to acknowledge that companies differ in their ambition. Some companies are looking to solve harder problems in shorter time frames, which requires a higher sum-total area under the curve. Some of that can be helped with more people, but given Amdahl’s law it’s also necessary to get more out of each individual person. That is, to expect a higher area under the curve for each person. As we’ve shown, adding time is not generally the way to do that sustainably over longer periods of time. Instead, companies with such ambitions have to require more progress per unit time – that is, they require higher-output employees.

This is where tensions arise, especially if a company’s ambitions rise over time. As the company requires more area under the curve, some are able to deliver that while staying within sustainable working hours, but others will struggle to do so. Unfortunately, when that happens, the instinctive response tends to be to put in more hours to try to meet the demand. For some people with a high tolerance for spending time on work, that may work, but for the vast majority it will unravel in the medium- to long-term.

Part of the burden in adapting to this lies with the employer. To increase output, you need to invest in your employees’ skills, limit bureaucratic overhead, mitigate scope creep and shifting requirements, invest in infrastructure, reduce friction of repetitive tasks, exhibit consistent and reliable leadership, give increased autonomy and trust, etc. But while employer efforts are necessary, they aren’t sufficient – the burden on employees will also increase with increased ambition. And the right response to that isn’t to work significantly more hours, as we’ve shown. It is to increase progress-per-unit-time. In other words, to “work smarter, not harder”.

An important aside here on choosing your employer: it is worth thinking about what kind of area-under-the-curve demands you want to be subject to. Higher demands tend to correlate with better pay and larger impact, but that may not be worth the trade-off to you. Assuming your current progress-over-time is Y, you can choose to work for a company where the expected progress-over-time is <Y (you get to relax more), ~= Y (you work full days), or >Y (you need to stretch your skills and sometimes your time, but you get rewarded for it). The delta between your current Y and the expected progress-over-time can also be an opportunity to grow, though the need to grow can also be stress-inducing and require you to invest more time into growing your skills (which can in turn feel like “more work” – more on that below).

In the end, you need to factor in your own stress tolerance, your desire to grow, and your life situation, and pick accordingly. And yes, be willing to re-visit that decision over time; early in your career may have been the right time to work at a super-ambitious, high-octane company to give your career and skills a boost, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right place three kids later (although hats off to you if it is!).

Working smarter

On LinkedIn and in bookstores you can find endless guidance on how to work smarter, and as this article is already long, I’m not going to give any kind of comprehensive tutorial here. Instead, I want to stress what I see as the primary directions in which you can “work smarter”.

The first is to get a given thing done faster. This usually entails acquiring knowledge, tools, or experience. Domain knowledge gives you access to algorithms, facts, and techniques that let you progress faster. Tools (including learning your current tools better) reduce time spent on menial, repetitive, and mechanical tasks. Experience allows you to short-cut experimentation and trade-offs that you’ve explored before. And each of these allow more net progress per unit time.

The second is to better choose the order in which you do things such that your time is spent where it matters most. My experience has been that most engineers spend a disproportionate fraction of their time in the wrong place. Be that on a task that isn’t the one that most needs doing right now, that isn’t the one blocking other people, or that isn’t the one that is the closest to completion. Working on “the wrong thing” means you’re spending precious time, but getting only small amounts of area under the curve in return. Prioritization is a complex topic, but thinking consciously about where you spend your time is a superpower that can yield large and rapid boosts to your impact!

The third is to be more cognisant of what you work on. It makes a huge difference to your energy levels, focus, and consequently output if you’re working on something that engages you, that you care about, or that you take pride in. And it significantly reduces, although does not eliminate, the risk of burning out from it. While you can rarely choose completely freely what you work on in the context of most jobs, utilize the agency that you do have, including switching teams if necessary, such that the work aligns with what makes you tick.

And the fourth is to be strategic about when you work. If your job mandates 9-5, this may be difficult, but most creative jobs are more flexible than that — utilize that flexibility. If you’re more productive in the evenings, move some of your workday there. If you feel yourself procrastinating excessively one day, take an hour to do something else and make up that hour some other time. And conversely, if you worked late last night to push that thing over the finish line, recoup that time today; it was probably a worthwhile trade! Aligning your work with your own productivity cycle can give significant improvements to your own output even if you don’t work any more hours total.

As a wise mentor of mine has pointed out repeatedly to me, working smarter helps, but the real superpower is resting smarter. If outside of work you’re constantly checking your work Slack or email, or thinking about “this document” or “that demo”, then the path to burnout is short. You’re effectively burning the candle on both ends; working both while at work and at home. Having a clear delineation of when work time ends and not-work time starts can help tremendously. The same can be said for making good and varied use of that rest time – meet friends, exercise, go on a date night, explore the neighborhood, learn a new skill, cuddle on the couch – whatever floats your boat. The important thing is that you feel like that time is replenishing the same batteries you exhaust at work.

Finding the time

While you will naturally get better at working smarter over the course of your career, you’ll improve at a much higher rate if you make doing so a priority. Unfortunately, as with so many things in life, getting better requires time, which is the dimension I’ve been arguing this entire article you can’t easily spend more of. However, there is hope.

The decline we’ve seen in the earlier charts tend to be context-specific. While it’s hard to get more constructive work out of more hours, that doesn’t mean that those hours can only be spend sitting comatose on the couch to recover. You may not be able to get a lot more value out of one more hour of work at the end of a day, but your ability to do other things like socialize or play is hopefully not as compromised!

You may see where I’m going with this: if you can grow your skills in a way that you enjoy and where it doesn’t feel like work, you can invest more hours in a way that your area-under-the-curve will grow sustainably over time!

There’s no one way to make growing fun, and something you’re happy to spend time on – it’s a very individual thing. But it is possible. You can find growth in all sorts of extracurriculars that incidentally teach you relevant skills; e.g., cooking can teach you prioritization, sports can teach you teamwork, and teaching can boost your domain knowledge. For some, growth comes in the form of finding a super interesting (but likely less important) task at work, and then spending a bunch of spare time on it for fun. While this is technically speaking “working more”, it doesn’t feel that way. It could just as well not been a work-related task; work just served as a useful pool from which to source things to play with. And if it also has a positive impact at work, that’s just an added bonus. Ultimately, the goal is just that you find ways to sustainably increase your area-under-the-curve; ways that are conducive to your own happiness and joy.

An aside on work-sourced play: if you see peers spending time on work things in their spare time, take a second to consider whether they’re doing that because they feel like they need to, or if it’s because they want to. If they’re doing it because they need to, that’s symptomatic of dysfunctional company expectations (maybe due to lack of back-pressure). But if they’re doing it because they want to, let them have their fun and don’t take that as a signal that you should also be doing work in your spare time. Each to their own!