I don’t think it should come as a surprise that achieving a career breakthrough will require you to work hard. Ingram spent two years putting in time, every day, to lay the groundwork for becoming a frugality expert. There is much to be said for working efficiently. But there is something to be said for sheer volume of hours, too. Though I know this is heretical for a time-management book, for some people, working more—at least to the point where additional hours don’t help much—may be the key to career advancement, and to making all parts of your life work better.
Here’s what I mean. Much of the literature in the work-life-balance or time-management genre—
including from experts I admire—approaches this issue from the perspective that this thing called “work”
is keeping you from having a personal life. Leave aside that, as I’m writing this in summer 2009, the average American workweek is down to 33 hours and that, as I’ve noted many times already, most people claiming to work 80-hour weeks are mistaken. Nonetheless, we feel overworked and so, to make the pieces fit, the work-life-balance literature tells us, we must negotiate a way to change our work schedules. I’m a big fan of flexibility and telecommuting, but a growing number of women in particular think that a bigger accommodation—working part-time—is the key to “having it all.” (Very few men work part-time by choice). A Pew Research Center survey found that between 1997 and 2007, the percentage of working moms of kids under age eighteen who say full-time work is the best solution for them fell from 32 to 21, and the percentage who said part-time work was ideal rose from 48 to 60. (Interestingly, some 16 percent of stay-at-home moms said full-time work would be ideal and 33 percent said part-time work would be, meaning that while more than 80 percent of working moms want to be in the workforce, only half of at-home moms prefer their status).
I am not surprised by these numbers. But I worry that this widespread—and I’d say inaccurate—
perception that full-time work and a personal life are invariably at odds leads to some unnecessary and often career-limiting trade-offs. If you are serious about advancing your career, there really is a limit to how low your work hours should go, but not because you need to impress the boss or keep him from assigning you to the “mommy track.” Many of us don’t have bosses to blame these days. There are certain economic principles that limit the efficacy of part-time work.
Economists often talk about something called “returns to scale,” which basically means how much additional benefit you gain from additional inputs. Because most activities involve start-up costs, there are often increasing returns up to an optimum point. After that, returns diminish, because demand is not infinite, and the inputs can be more profitably used for other things. For instance, it is just as easy to make a pan of brownies as it is to make one brownie, and if you have kids, they will definitely lap up that whole first dozen. However, if you make a dozen pans of brownies, you’ll run out of space in the fridge and your family will get so sick of brownies they’ll start hankering for fruit. The brownies will go stale and you’ll have to dump them, meaning that the eggs you used for the last few pans would have been more profitably employed as breakfast.
So it goes with work hours. In order to do 1 hour of work, you need to get to your workplace and—
even if you work from home—figure out what you should be doing and start attacking the problem. All of these actions involve effort, which means that if you only worked 1 hour per week, you wouldn’t get much out of it. But the second, third, and fourth hours are more productive. Each hour has additional benefits as you roll through your projects and get in a groove, or start seeking out new opportunities. At some point, these benefits stop accruing because you lose intensity, but right up until that point, every additional hour can generate a huge return. And unfortunately, for many reasons, including cultural assumptions, procrastination, and workplace distractions, a number of people who otherwise love their work stop before that point.
The ideal workweek for feeling like you’re getting somewhere varies among people. Given that the
overwhelming majority of workers clock fewer than 60 hours per week, I’d wager that the point of diminishing returns is almost universally less than that. That’s certainly the impression I’ve gotten from visiting or interviewing people at some dysfunctional workplaces where you can show up at 8:00 p.m.
and people are clearly in leisure mode—lingering over takeout, shooting the breeze, wandering the hallways—but won’t go home because the culture says success means staying late. For me, the point of diminishing returns is 45-50 hours per week, which is on the high end and is a function of my stubborn refusal to specialize. Many others do better with less. But from talking with hundreds of people about their careers for this book and other projects, I have learned that in most fields, it is very difficult to get to this state of forward momentum—where you are improving at your craft, seeking out new opportunities, and making a name for yourself—working fewer than 30 of your 168 hours.
This is actually a lot, because these are real hours—not lingering-over-takeout-face-time hours or hours spent on calls you didn’t need to be on, or responding to e-mail you didn’t need to read. I suspect one reason New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, persists in telling graduating classes in his stump commencement speech that “it never hurts to be the first one in in the morning—and the last one to leave”
is that this is the only way you can clock 30 hours of real work in some offices! People interrupt you all day or you put off your most important work until 5:00 p.m., and then you finally get serious. You may stay until 10:00 p.m., but you only really worked 5 hours. A 60-hour workweek can easily consist of only 25 hours of real work if you’re not careful.
But that’s the problem. Most people aren’t. A few are hypervigilant, and can get by with less. But if you’re working only 20 hours per week and trying to build a Big Career, these hours can’t look anything like what other people think of as work. A single stray phone call, a slow-loading Web page or a printer on the fritz can throw the whole week off. Every minute has to be planned and full so that you not only do the stuff of your job, but also the long-range planning and prospecting and occasional “inefficient”
networking that leads to opportunities down the road. Leah Ingram tries to confine her workweek to the time her children are in school, which, if you subtract the hour she spends walking the dog briskly every morning, leaves her with 25 hours. To fit the bulk of her work into that time, she often sets a kitchen timer for 30 minutes and races through assignments on turbospeed. When it dings, she looks up to breathe or goes to the bathroom, then puts her head back down for several more sprints during the day. There is zero downtime. There is little time for e-mail during those hours. This explains why, when I got to know her a few years ago after she had taken on a project editing an education magazine and assigned me a few pieces, much of my e-mail from her came time-stamped at hours like 9:36 p.m., 7:09 p.m., or 8:32 p.m.
These e-mail sessions probably came out to at least an hour a day, or 5 hours a week, which puts us back up to 30 hours.
Now, in most work-life-balance books, working at 9:36 p.m. falls in the “horror story” category. But no boss was making Ingram answer e-mail at night. Like me, she works for herself. If she’d wanted to work fewer hours, she could easily have stopped blogging. But if she hadn’t worked those extra hours on the margins—those hours with increasing returns—she wouldn’t have sold her book. She’d be a much less happy person about life in general if she hadn’t achieved that breakthrough. When people feel like they’re moving forward in their jobs, this gives them a lot of zeal for the rest of their 168 hours. This includes being more present for their families when they are around, and watching less TV.
If you’re not convinced by that fuzzy argument that working more can sometimes help your personal life in addition to your career, then let me try using numbers.
Working the 30-60 hours per week most people find necessary to achieve a career breakthrough still leaves you with plenty of time for other things. If you work 60 hours a week and sleep 8 hours a night, this leaves 52 hours a week, or nearly 7.5 hours per day, for other things. A 50-hour week leaves 62 hours, or about 9 hours per day, and a 40-hour week leaves 72 hours, or more than 10 per day.
This is a lot of time. It’s so much time that it’s unclear what’s “balanced” about working just 20 hours
for pay, and thus having 92 waking, nonworking hours to fill with other things. Just as several of the people profiled in Chapter 4 found that they could force themselves to be more effective at work by limiting their total work hours, I believe that limiting your total nonworking hours forces certain efficiencies there as well, most notably on the housework front. There is more about this in the next few chapters, but suffice to say, if you think in the context of 168-hour weeks, a 40-hour workweek comes a lot closer to being balanced between your professional life and personal time than, say, one of 15 hours.
So, if you really do want to take your career to the next level, take a good look at your hours from the time diary you kept in Chapter 1 and tallied in Chapter 2. Are you spending enough time focused on your professional craft?
If an honest accounting of your weekly hour total is under 30, or it’s over 30 but you don’t feel like you have time to plan and prospect for opportunities, see if you can add 1-2 focused hours per day. You can do this either by clearing your calendar of non-core-competency activities at work, or by scheduling a shift when your kids go to bed or during their weekend activities.
Another solution is to trade off kid time with your spouse, or spring for a few more hours of child care.
If you choose high-quality care, and are truly focused on being present with your children during the times you’re not working, then your kids might like the variety. You may be surprised at how quickly you will earn that investment back. Lyn Franklin Hoyt of Nashville, Tennessee, co-owns a business called Berkeley Tandem, which designs and sells framed recognition products such as employee-of-the-month wall plaques. When we first talked in 2008, she had around 20 hours of child care per week, so that was how much she worked. When we talked again in early 2009, she had added more child care and was hitting 30 hours per week on a regular basis. Net result? Berkeley Tandem’s revenue had jumped 30 percent since she started putting in the additional time.