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Traditionally people have worked 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week. Although this is still agreed as nominal working hours, it is not necessarily the amount of hours people actually spend on working. A significant part of this time is spending on brakes and other work stoppages. The actual working hours measured by time-use studies tend to be on the average between 30 and 35 hours a week, but there can be a lot of individual variation in it.

Many people work actually 50 or 60 hours a week also if asked they would still report working for standard 40 hours. But does it really pay off working so much? The answer to that question depends on what are these workers aiming at.

Hard work and effort are definitely rewarded on many jobs. For making progress and winning promotion you have to beat the others and working more can be one option to beat the opposition. The employee who starts early and finishes late can be noticed by his boss and it gives him an opportunity to impress the boss. On some jobs there are possibilities for earning good extra pay for working additional hours. But in case of more and more jobs nowadays employees are evaluated for accomplishing their tasks and not just for working harder and longer. If you work long hours but if it does not help you to get good results, then why should the company pay you more.

Do working long hours allow you to achieve greater results? The answer to that question can be yes and no. On one hand, if you work longer then you have more time to achieve your results. For example, if you have to compile a market report, then you have more time for searching information or making corrections to the final version of it. On the other hand, if you work longer you will become more tired. So your productivity is going to drop. The longer your working hours are, the smaller the share of time you actually spend of working will be. In case of long hours it will be difficult to concentrate on work and employees tend waste more working time.

Working smarter and not longer can produce better results. While you may work 25 or 50% more hours, it is difficult to achieve equal productivity gains by working so long due to the diminishing productivity. For example, a report by Circadian Technologies in the US showed that white collar job performance can decrease by as much as 25% when workers put in 60 or more hours a week for prolonged periods. It means that by working for 60 hours you can do only the job equivalent to 45 hours work on normal productivity.

At the same time working smarter can increase your productivity by 100% or 200%. If you plan your day and avoid time wasting then it is possible that you can achieve your days work in only a couple of hours.

Working smarter means that you will have to manage your time. First, you have to set clear goals. You have to know what you are aiming at. Many of us waste a great deal of our working time because we do not know what the right things to do are. Equally important you should work out detailed action plans who to achieve these goals. And finally, you have to work efficiently in order to save your working time. For working efficiently you need many different skills. Besides being good at your profession, you have to be able to communicate efficiently, use computers in a rational way, be able to read and write documents fast and to motivate yourself for beating procrastination.

Long working hours can generate stress and have negative effects on your health. It is typically regarded that it is OK to work extensively for some periods, when you have greater work loads, but if long hours are a continuous practice then it may have sad long-term consequences.

Working for longer hours means also that you have less free time. You have less time to spend together with your friends and family and that is going to affect your quality of life. Although you can make more money (which might not be true always), then would you be really happy. Actually it may happen that if you work too much then you do not have time to spend your money. For example, you may have money to travel around the world to the most exotic places, play golf at the world’s best golf courses or enjoy meals at the finest restaurants, but what is the use of it when you cannot afford it to yourself because you have so much work to do.

So, how many hours is an optimal solution? There is no single solution to that question, but I am pretty sure that most people will benefit from cutting their working hours down a bit. It is often possible to achieve more by working 30 hours instead of 40 hours of weeks. Actually we are not working the 40 hours anyway in many cases but we cast procrastinate these 10 hours. If we could eliminate it, then we could finish hours working days earlier, have more rest, which will result in better health and happiness.

kristjan time management concentration, efficiency, productivity, working hours