When I was in the last stages of my doctoral dissertation I was also working a full-time job. I was putting in an 8:30-5 at my job at the fundraising office, going home and taking a nap until 6, then working until about 1 in the morning on my dissertation. Then I’d be putting in about 12-16 hours on the weekend (the only time I could get to the library I needed) so…conservatively I was working 85-95 hours a week, for about six months. Sometimes more during the last month or so.
I could never do that again. With my teaching job now I’m running about 50-55 hours a week and it seems like hell, now that I have a wife and kids. I think the maximum I could conceive working now would be 45 hours on the regular job and 15 on the teaching job, and my wife and I would almost never see each other. Life’s too short for that, I’m already feeling like my kids are growing up too fast.
Two angles to this. First, my personal experience. To make a critical delivery, our VP mandated that the entire organization clock in 55 hours a week, for three months. In direct response to the OP, in that situation, it meant that you were in the office with 55 recordable hours (lunch didn’t count). Nearly every day I was having dinner brought in for my staff who would stay until 8 PM. (For now let’s set aside the wisdom of this exercise.)
Second.
I was just reading an article this morning about how there is a proposal to limit the workweeks of medical residents to 80 hours a week, because many of them work more than that. That means that they are on duty during working shifts that many hours. Another part of the proposal would require 5 hours of sleep after 16 hours of working. So that gives you an idea of the superhuman schedule that these people try to keep.
A friend of mine is a partner at a big law firm. His firm has an in-house child care center. Which is open all weekend. Law is another field that is notorious for a punishing “initiation” with a huge push to rack up billable hours, and at least some of the hours that you work are not billable.
When I was first starting my business, I worked pretty much 7 days a week. I don’t know how often that’s the case, but if you include the extra 1 or 2 days as available to put time into work it makes getting to 50+ much easier.
Now that we’re more established, I work in my office 7 AM to 7 PM 5 days a week. That’s 60 hours right there and I can’t imagine working less, since I never have. In college I petitioned to take more than the standard 18 credits every semester, and worked about 20-30 hours per week to support myself. So currently I am actually working less than I’ve worked since I’ve been an adult.
I usually put about half my attention to “work” from home between 7 and 10 or 10:30, but I tend to not think of it as working. On weekends I put in about 6 hours a day, but almost always from home, and usually in the morning. I don’t normally think of myself as working on the weekends anymore.
When I was more obvious about the fact that I worked constantly, friends and family typically didn’t doubt my ability to sustain it but rather weren’t clear how I did it or had any time to myself. 5 hours of sleep was a good max target and on average I got a bit less. I think this is the piece people tend to not realize - when you don’t sleep 8 hours you just have more time to do stuff. I sleep on average 6 hours a night now, but went 5-6 years getting less than 6 during college and shortly after, and was not excessively tired during the day.
For about six months between the end of college and when my business first had revenue I lived at home with my dad and worked about 30 hours/week to support myself, while putting all my other time into getting the company started. I left the house before 5 AM for an hour commute to start at 6 AM. I got home after 11, usually around midnight from my office and immediately went to sleep. I’m positive I couldn’t sustain this indefinitely, but after 6 months I wasn’t showing any sign of burnout. On the other hand, I had a pretty definite plan to commercialize our product and get it on the market. If I really had no idea when I would be able to pay myself from my business or I had a plan but was missing targets, it may have been a lot harder to sustain psychologically.
Incidentally, the worst sustained week of my life was the week during this time period when I had a very painful abscess tooth.
I work 7-4:30 or 8-5:30, usually working through lunch. If I’m not actually eating at my desk, I’m in a conference room with other folks having a generally work related bull session during the “lunch hour.”
Mondays, I have a lab from 4:30-6. Tuesdays an Wednesdays, I have class from 6:00-10:00. Plus 16-20 hours of homework per week, which I do on the weekends.
So that usually adds up to 70+ hours of “work” per week.
I regularly get downtime in the office, but there are certain days when I’m absolutely on for 9.5 straight hours and have to remind myself to get up and take a leak.
Thankfully, my commute is less than a half hour round trip. If had to drive more than 15 minutes one way, I don’t think I could do it.
I work in a lab that is supposed to have 7 techs. This past summer there was only two of us to all of the testing for the territory, plus call for the hospital. I was there at least 10 hours a day and often 2- 3 hours longer during the middle of the night for call backs. It was tiring, but also kind of fun to see how I dealt with it. Also, the money was awesome.
I used to do exactly this, well, almost exactly. I worked in a hotel while in college, hanging out at night and running the office in the evening. My manager got very angry and left. The owner fired all but two of us. We worked 12 hours each - he worked 7 am to 7 pm. I worked 7 pm to 7 am. Since the other employee was not the most responsible, this often meant 16 hours instead of 12 at least one day a week. and we worked 7 days a week for at least a month or two before we got another worker and could go back to 6 days a week. I left not long after.
When I worked for a large microprocessor company, I came in at 8 am every day and left between 8 and 9 pm. They provided dinner, not a big incentive. That doesn’t count an hour commute to get to work, and considerably less late in the evening.
No, it was not sustainable and I left for a more sane environment, which turned out to be a good move because the project was a bust anyway.
I have lots of hobbies now, writing and editing papers etc. I do these at home in the evenings, but I’m not sure if I’d count them as hours worked, because though work related they are voluntary (and fun.)
The founder of the company I’ve worked for for the last 15+ years once said (approximately), “A hundred hours [worked] a week shows interest [in the company]; actual committment starts at 120 hours”.
That said, I don’t work really long hours very often. At quarter ends I’m on 24-hour call for about 12 days and sometimes I do end up working around the clock a couple of days if there’s a big problem, but I’ve been pretty lucky. I can remember working from 6:00am - 12:00 midnight seven days a week for about 2 months once at another company; that doesn’t happen here, thank goodness.
Street Analysts, Residents, First Year Attorneys, Trash Pickers in Lagos are all expected to do over 100 hours/week. It is definitely sustainable. It’s just not most peoples priority.
Well…in our house, the alarm goes off at 0600 and both of us are out the door by 0730. We don’t come back into the house until 2100 or so Monday through Thursday. On Friday, we’re in by 1800 or so.
Both of us work full time jobs. When we get off work, we drive over to the Taekwondo school and teach class during the evenings and on Saturday mornings. If we discount drive time, then one can say that we are working 10-11 hrs Monday - Thursday, 8 hours on Friday plus an extra 3 hours or so on Saturday for a total of 51-55 hours a week, give or take.
During the busy time at work it’s not uncommon for there to be a few weeks a year where people are asked to (though people in my position are expected to, not just asked like those below us) to be in 7:30 or 8 to 5 M-F and then 8-4 on Saturday and/or Sunday.
The only time I ever really fantasied about killing my boss was after working 13 days in a row and having him beg me to come in for the second Sunday in a row. I might have actually killed him by the following weekend if I’d gone in that Sunday.
Are you sure you’re not my aunt, Zoe? This whole description fits my grandfather to a T.
And both my father’s sisters are teachers.
That said, my father worked 10 hours a day, 6 days a week when I was very young. It was just what was required. As I got older, his job became more automated and required him to be there less often…which was nice, because in my very early years I only got to see my father if I sneaked out of bed.
My husband easily works more than 50 plus hours since I’ve known him not including travel time. But he is self employed and has his own consulting business so it is hard not to get away from work. Sometimes it is nice for some slow periods but it is hard to schedule anything with someone who works so much.
Hell Week, summer of 2001, Spain. I worked one of the two 4th-shifts (weekends, holidays and backup), as lab tech. 12 hour shifts. There was a week we had to work 6 days = 72 hours (3 days on, one day off, 3 days on). My team happened to get the night shift. The Production Manager had specifically programmed “long run” products so we’d all be able to have long periods of “sitting on your ass doing whatever you want so long as you don’t fall asleep.” Still, by the third day we were zombified and by the 5th we would have been rejected for a Romero movie on grounds of “looking too dead.”
Hell Factory, 2003, Italy. 14h M-Th 10-12h on Friday; one Friday I was leaving at 4pm, turned around and said “you know what, I’m feeling guilty because I’m leaving after ‘a mere’ 10 hours and that’s 2 more hours than I should have been here. Go home soon, ok?” We had to do a lot of unnecessary data entry thanks to a client’s stupidity. I got gastrenteritis and the pleasure of telling the client “oops, I don’t have access any more, you’ll have to fix it yourself” when we went live and it was proven that We Had Been Right about the data entry
Hell Boss, 2006, Costa Rica. We’d been there for 3 months when the boss and half the team got changed. I’d been on time (the only one) but, since I was the one who had most work, The Powers That Be gave me a junior, so I had to give him work: that instantly put me ahead of the calendar. The new boss decides that, since we’re behind, we’ll all work 6x12 “until we catch up” (uh, hello, I’m not behind, can I go home at a decent hour?). After two weeks, I was two months ahead; after four we were all tired, cranky and getting ready to go postal on the boss.
Hell Company, 2000-2004, Lilbro, Spain. He worked 45-55 hours every week, but a lot of it was spent waiting on people. Twiddle. It took him several months to learn that when people went “baa” and headed for the coffee machine, it was more productive to join the herd than to stay at his desk.
Otherwise-Fine Company, 2003, USA. Often we’d be there for many hours due to things like having a phone meeting with the Europeans at 8am (so you had to be in at 7:30 tops) and another with the Asians at 8pm (yawn). Many, many hours were spent in the Overstock webpage. This was known and understood and the bosses were happy to let us work from home when those situations came up.
Working 50 hours a week to me means being in the office and/or handling work related phone calls or emails for 50 hours a week. One of my previous assignments had me working a minimum of 8 am to 6 pm 4 days a week ( 40 hours), 8 am to 9:30 pm one day a week (13.5) for a total of 53.5 hours minimum. Add in a couple of hours a week worth of late night phone calls and emails, and the many days when I didn’t actually leave at 6pm, but rather stayed until 8 or 9 pm and I probably averaged at least 60 hours a week.
Sounds about right. I work with plenty of people who get in at 7am and leave after 7pm, M-F, or else also come in for a few hours on Sunday (first- and second-year analysts in a Wall Street environment).
Even after the “grunt work” phase of their careers are over, 8am-7pm M-F is a pretty unexceptional. While the hours are somewhat flexible, regularly getting in around 9am and/or leaving before 6pm would be noticed. People who need to leave early (like 5pm or so) for child care reasons typically find a way to get in at 7am.
While it is a high-pressure and demanding environment (especially now), not every single minute is work, work, work. One finds ways of working in personal or down time throughout the day. Lookit me. I’m reading the SDMB and typing this as I eat my breakfast.
And this is a white-collar job. I know people who own and run family shops – convenience stores, restaurants, dry cleaners – they easily work 60+ hours a week. For example, my local dry cleaners is 7am-7pm M-F and 9am-6pm on Saturdays (closed Sundays), and it’s pretty much the same people in there every time I go no matter what time of day. And you know they’re getting there before 8am to open up, and staying afterwards to close and clean up.
To me, working 9-5 is a half day. I get in at 8:30am and leave around 8:30 at night. I rarely get out for lunch but do eat at my desk.
However, since I was recently ordered by my doctor to cut down due to high blood pressure…I may need to do 50 hours per week instead of 60. I’ve yet to figure out how to make that happen.
