So I recently saw a job description for a position in my line of work (professional, creative, graduate degree required) that had a work load expectation of 62 hours a week. Yikes! I do a similar job with similar results and deliver it in 45 hours a week. Strangely, everyone else in the meeting seemed perfectly fine with a 62-hour-a-week demand.
Then I noticed: Everyone else in the office is either single or divorced.
OK Dopers, what’s the maximum amount of time you would feel comfortable spending at work without jeopardizing your family life?
(P. S. I’m not talking about occasional overtime, but flat-out every week work time.)
45 hours tops.
I am skeptical about people that claim they work a sustained workweek over 50 hours let alone 60. I know a few people do it in spurts especially when they are young but it is unsustainable for most people if you are truly honest about it.
To work 62 hours a week, you would have to be at work (not leaving your house) by 8:00 am Monday - Friday and not leave until after 8:00 pm every night (and lunches, breaks, and personal activities don’t count so you have to make those up somewhere). That still only get you to 60 hours tops so you still need to put in some more time on the weekend. People say they do it but few people really do unless you have a lifestyle job like CEO.
You can’t have a healthy family life and work that much.
I have a hard time doing 40 fairly often. By the time we drive to tennis/baseball/clarinet lessons, go to the orthodontist, pick up the puking kid, get to the 6:00 band concert, have teacher conferences (in the middle of the day?!) - and I need to get my own hair cut, see my own doctor, etc. Plus the commute time.
MOST of the kid duties over the years have fallen to me - my husband works longer hours (and gets paid a lot more). If you had a stay at home spouse, and your schedule was 7am - 6pm, with a 9pm - 11pm email/Powerpoint, etc time, and some more catching up on the weekends - and a short commute - you MIGHT be able to pull off Shagnasty’s 60.
I, personally, wouldn’t commit to anything over 40, but I think 50 would be doable if you had an understanding SO. More than that and you don’t have much time/energy for your family.
It depends on a lot. Is it career driven? Are the hours at all flexible? I have a friend who is rapidly moving up in management and she has 2 smallish children who participate in a million different activities and a husband who can’t drive and travels a lot. She manages by giving up sleep and putting in the missing hours between 9pm and 2am every night. I don’t know how she does it but it’s apparently possible. She’s got a fair amount of support from their family, both grandmothers babysit a couple times a month but it’s a crazy schedule.
I really hate how people assume that just because an employee is single it’s okay to demand ridiculous hours, as if “having a family” is the only legitimate reason not to sell your soul and your entire life to the job. How about simply “having a life”?
I don’t “have a family” (not in the sense of having people biologically related to me living in the same space), but I wouldn’t even consider applying for a job that demanded that kind of time commitment. Sure I’ll stay late if there was an unforeseeable emergency, but if my normal work day is expected to be 10-12 hours long, that tells me the company are cheap bastards who expect me to do the work of two (and probably not at double the salary), and have no concept of what actually makes a worker productive. (Hint: working them to exhaustion ain’t it.)
“Having a family” is not the thing that should dictate maximum work hours.
I am a teacher (7am-3pm, Mon - Fri (plus correcting ) ) and a bartender (4pm-2am Thur - sun ). Plus I co-coach a sport Mon, Wed, Fri. So I definitely get in over 60 hours.
Sorry.
And I ride my bike to it all, which gets cold in New England, but that’s my own fault.
But yeah, you’re all right , I don’t have any sort of wife/girlfriend or kids, nor could I at this point. I just wanted to brag bc I’m proud for once, haha. sorry. Just let me have this one thing :).
The only things I do when I’m home are correct papers / prepare lessons, watch documentaries, read the Internet in bed on my phone, or translate poetry / work on my Latin dictionary. So, I figured the more time spent out of the house around people, not laying alone, the better. Work is my hobby / social life too.
Apparently Americans work some of the longest weeks in the western, developed world according to "The Overworked American " by Juliet B Schor. It’s a great book.
ETA- I’m 28 .
I did 55 plus for 8 years straight. But that was as much due to convenience as anything. I am contractually obligated to 45 minimum (compensation for hours beyond 45). Until 2 years ago, I was a 5 minute drive from the office. I was in the office 6:30 AM to at least 5:30 PM and Saturday AM for 2.5 hours. It wasn’t horrible, with the commute my spouse had, I left the house a bit earlier, but arrived home about the same time during the week.
2 years ago it changed. Company relocation and crappy housing market leads to 45 minute commute each way. Decline in business leads to reduced workload and elimination of compensation for hours over 45. I now am in the office 7:30 to 5:30 but take an hour lunch to run errands and no longer “pop in” on Saturday mornings. Yet due to the commute I am away from home as long or longer. :-/
My husband works at least 60 hours a week. Closer to 72 some weeks. Salary, of course, so no extra money for OT. It’s freaking ridiculous. But, I suppose he’s able to “still have a family” in the sense that we haven’t left yet. He claims it’s evil bosses, etc., but this has happened in each of his last two jobs. He worked about 50 hours a week in the job before that when our daughter was small. I suppose he’s simply a workaholic. If he doesn’t work, he fills his time in with all kind of other commitments…volunteering for Scouts and other groups, going back to school, World of Warcraft, starting a home business. He’s mad his job doesn’t give him time for his business.
I work about 40-45 hours a week these days. My daughter is a teenager and able to walk to the activities she participates in. I leave for work when she leaves for school and get home not long after she gets home many days. It works for me. I need time to recharge and relax.
I work as salaried consultant for a high-tech manufacturing facility. I am capped at 40 hours for pay although I will give them a few at my discretion if the need arises. I am officially on-call 15 hours a day 5 days a week and 6 hours on Saturday mornings plus unofficially 24/7/365 even on vacation but I have them running smoothly enough now that after-hours calls are rare and I deduct any time they call for anything at all at a 1 hour minimum and put it towards vacation. If they call during my on-call hours, I will answer it and do something to fix the situation right away no matter how long it takes or how many people I have to pull away from dinner. It generally works out to a 43 hour week and I have the option to reclaim time through discretionary time off.
We have some 20-something hourly employees that are quite eager to make as much money as possible and work a full-time schedule plus up to 30 hours of overtime with overtime pay. They make a whole lot more than typical recent college grads but they basically give up their life to make more money. I am glad that they have that option but it isn’t sustainable in the long-term even physically.
It is a completely different story when you are salaried and do not get paid extra for insane hours. In my experience, any company that requires 62 hours of committed hours for less than 2x normal pay is doing something horribly shady and has an abusive business model that uses up and spits out employees. I would never work for one because the insane hours wear on everyone and are always the result of bad management in general. There are a handful of companies in the Boston area that are known for that in the professional world and they depend on a steady supply of foreign workers on HB-1 visas to fill their positions because they can trap them into working like that with few other options.
In my experienced opinion, stay very far away from any company that advertises the fact that they like to treat their employees like that. Anything over 40 hours doesn’t just mean extra work hours. It changes the work/indiscretion time ratio so you are adding to one while deducing from the other. After about 50 hours, you will find you have very little free time left and after 60 you will have essentially. Almost all free hours just go to taking care of basic needs like grocery shopping, washing clothes, or going to the doctor (which becomes almost impossible without taking off work).
My auto-correct betrayed again in my last post. Please follow the spirit and not the letter of what is there for some selections.
I live and work in Japan. I could end the post with that and rest my case.
The long version: no one goes home on time. There is no “on time”. Everyone I’ve ever met in over a decade living here works — minimum — an hour overtime virtually every day. Most people work 10–12 days. They often work weekends too.
Almost everyone working in a company is a salaried worker. Paid overtime is extremely rare. The legal maximum work week without compensation is officially 60 hours. That is routinely ignored. Everyone works unpaid overtime that they theoretically could claim, but no one does. Social and practical considerations make it basically impossible for most people to do anything about it. The legal system has traditionally supported business, not labor, so you’re likely to be fired if you cause too much trouble and not be able to do anything about it even if you’re in the right.
My work hours are better than most of the people I know, and my minimum weeks are 46 hours, with a 6 day work week. A couple of my friends don’t start work until 9:00 and have Saturdays off, but they log 50–60 hour weeks standard. One friend said the guys he liaises with in engineering are regularly clocked in for 80 hours or more.
I get up at about 6:15. It only takes me about 30 minutes to get to work, which is a short commute by most standards. Morning meeting is at 8:20; official work time starts at 8:15. A typical week is around 50 hours. I usually leave between 17:00 and 18:00. I’ve been responsible for reports over the last couple of months that keep me at least a couple of hours later than usual, so my hours have been pushed over 60 for 2–3 weeks of the last couple of months. I’ve been leaving at 19:00 to 20:00 most days — and there are still people there when I leave.
We sometimes have to work Saturday afternoons (they are usually a half day) and/or Sundays and holidays during intake season. These are “voluntary,” but you’d be in deep shit if you didn’t “volunteer” for your share of the days. We don’t get time off in lieu, but we do get paid an extra $100 for Sundays or holidays, which feels like a shit sandwich when you’re looking at working a 13 day week and your normal hourly salary would be twice that, if you were getting paid at hourly rates. Forget time-and-a-half. No one ever gets that. You’re lucky if you get any paid overtime at all.
My wife is Japanese. She’s usually pretty sympathetic, but the reality is that in this society, I’m pretty lucky. My work hours aren’t normally very abusive. I have some flexibility in how some of my duties are structured, and I’m not under intense supervision. I don’t have to entertain clients, and I’m not “required” to go out with people from the office more than a couple of times a year. If I were a typical salaryman, my current job would look like a cushy deal. Hell, I even get paid a bit better than at least one of my friends who holds a position with more responsibility and most of the salaryman bullshit I listed above. So while I do complain, I know that it could be worse.
If you look at the divorce rate, Japan looks pretty good in comparison to the US, as far as marriages holding together. I personally think that it’s a severely dysfunctional society in many ways. That usually doesn’t come across in statistics, but is obvious when you live here. The adult suicide rate (typically double that of the US, which is in turn usually higher than most Western industrialized nations) is one of the few statistics that hints at the underlying problems. The flat-to-declining birth rate is another.
To finally answer the question of what your work hours should be without having a negative impact on your life: To have a decent life, I think you need to work less than 50 hours, 5 days a week. More hours or days than that are definitely problematic. I don’t see my wife or son enough, and I don’t get much, if any, time for myself. If I’m really lucky, I can use part of my usual one day off to do one of the many little projects that living usually requires, and maybe have some fun.
Doing anything online often requires staying up late (like now), or stealing time away from work. Blogging and posting helps keep me sane, and probably adds up to less than 1% of my total work time most of the time, so I feel absolutely no guilt about doing it at work. The only problem is not being obvious about it; Japanese offices are all open plan with not even the minimal privacy of a cubicle.
Question: I’ve heard that Japanese offices can be pretty inefficient and that you can spend a lot of time just pushing papers and sitting there for the longer hours because it’s socially expected - is this true? The long hours aren’t necessarily because of too much work, just that you’re expected to be at work?
During my time in academic chemistry labs, about 70 h/w was expected. You pretty much need to have as close to zero commute to make that work. Lots of single folks, but still many with spouses and children. Grad students made about $25k, postdocs about 50% more, and faculty $70k to a lot. Usually the non-academic spouse did most of the child and house care, but one professor was married to another. They took turns on who had the evening and weekend off.
Totally doable, but I’m happy to now work less and get paid more 
Needless to say there was not a lot of vapid discussion about TV shows in these offices.
40 is about the most I can do and still have a life, let alone a family.
There is a Cracked.com article about things nobody tells you about living in Japan that touches on that in the beginning. Yeah, it’s Cracked but it is written by an American that lives and works in Japan. If you don’t want to read it, he says that Japan is surprisingly inefficient when it comes to business technology and work practices.
Here’s the thing: We have a three year old son. He’s obviously not old enough to be on his own. He needs adult supervision all the time. Both my wife and I work full time, so during the day he is at day care. But in the evening, one of us has to be home taking care of him.
It’s not fair if either of us does that all the time, so we each have that duty sometimes. That means that there are many evening where I cannot work late because I must be home minding my son. That’s the way it is, so I can’t work for any company that would require me to stay late at the office every day.
This is a totally different situation, but I just added up the hours for when I used to work in an orphanage in Brazil and it added up to 89/91 hours.
It worked like this:
3x twenty-five hour shift as “educadora” (if I took them in a row it takes 2 hours off the total)
1x eight hour shift as “educadora” with the teenage girls
days when not working as educadora: 2 hours in “ambulatorio” (ie nursing)
or, if not doing ambulatorio, teaching
(and sometimes both)
That was excluding activities, other helping out etc. It includes sleeping with the children, but sleeping did mean getting up every two hours to put kids on the toilet and kids waking up and needing you. I also slept with the kids on other people’s shifts if they couldn’t do it. It boiled down to working 24/7.
Obviously, as I was living there, they were also my free time, all my hobbies and my family. The situation is pretty different from a normal job, but it was still very intense. I did that for three years, and it was bliss.
Personally, I have always wondered how people with workweeks over fourty hours can find the time to cheat on their spouses. They don’t even have time for one relationship; where on earth do they find the time for a second one?
QFT. I worked for a very well known company on a project which was not going well, and to make the managers look good they started serving dinner. This was long, long before the actual crunch should have started. It was purely voluntary :rolleyes: and they took names only to know how many dinners they served.
Very few people got anything done. A guy who worked for me planned his honeymoon. People threw balls around. I was working 56 hours a week, and put in another 8 pr so commuting. I got smart and quit, and in my final two weeks went home at a normal time, and got a lot more done from not being exhausted. The project was still a disaster, and I don’t think anyone on it profited professionally from this death march.
I have a favorite paper (not online last time I checked) in a management journal which shows that after about 50 hours or so you make so many mistakes that your additional productivity is effectively 0. I wrote a column about it at the time, and couldn’t say that everything in there was borne out by my experience at this place.
And of course I hardly saw my kids during the week and I was such a mess I wasn’t much use to my wife.