Should you work 70 hours a week? A 360° view

There are many possibilities, all valid. Know the tradeoffs.

Written by Arsh Kabra based on my notes.

The debate over how long a person should work has a long and often vitriolic history. Many of the most successful people in the world advocate for a longer work week, while many others advocate for a shorter one. Proponents of the longer work week include Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, the Richest Man on Earth Elon Musk, and Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma. However, figures like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Venture Capital superstar Vinod Khosla, billionaire Harsh Mariwala, founder of Marico (Parachute and Saffola oil brands), Marissa Mayer ex-VP at Google and ex-CEO of Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg, ex-COO of Facebook, all say that people need more balance between their work and their lives. Hard work, they say, is not synonymous with the number of hours someone has worked.

The issue is shrouded by the language of politics, which encourages ideological posturing rather than truth-seeking. Mostly, people pick a “side” and then everyone else is “either with us or against us”.

Let’s look at the sides, shall we?

Team 70 Hours

Narayana Murthy says that India's work culture needs to change, and youngsters should be prepared to work for 70 hours a week if the country has to compete effectively on the global stage.

Elon Musk agrees. Says you can't change the world without working 80 to 100 hours.

Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, Taobao, TMall, and father of ecommerce in China, is famous for endorsing 996 (9 to 9, 6 days a week). “I personally think that 996 is a huge blessing,” he said. “How do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?”

Mark Cuban, billionaire and top investor and a shark in Shark Tank, says, “work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.”

Steve Jobs: “If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it … it’s pretty much an 18-hour-a-day job, seven days a week for a while.”

Ratan Tata, Mukesh Ambani, Sundar Pichai, and Amitabh Bachchan have all extolled the virtues of working long hours.

And Team 70 hours also has the guy who said, “How long can you stare at your wife?” In fact, he’s Team 90 hours!

Team 70 hours has a bunch of heavy hitters. Who do we have in Team 40 hours?

Team 40 hours

Satya Nadella suggests we need empathy and mindfulness to balance work and personal well-being. Harsh Mariwala points out that “hard work is not synonymous with number of hours worked.”

Vinod Khosla says that working less is fine as long as you're willing to live with the consequences. “You may not get the biggest house or car to show to your neighbors, but you can make that choice.”

Marissa Mayer, former VP at Google, CEO of Yahoo, suggests finding your rhythm and avoiding burnout.

And Sheryl Sandberg used to leave the office at 5:30 pm to spend time with her kids.

Team 40 hours also has a point.

So maybe we should take a step back and view this issue for what it is. What do we get if we look at all the arguments with equal standing, on their merits, without really looking at who was saying it? What do we get if we play this game with Science as the referee?

Team Secret Third Thing

So, who’s right? A 70-hour work week, putting everything into your work to reap the rewards of dedication, or a 40-hour work week, focusing on a healthy balance between work and play? Or is it a third thing that gets lost in the ideological fights?

Team 70 hours says that success is a direct result of hard work. If you aren’t giving 100% of yourself to your work, you cannot hope to find success. If you’re not doing this, you’re failing at life, is what they seem to imply.

Team 40 hours instead says that working for forty hours, and then spending the rest of your week on things you enjoy—family time, hobbies, anything—is, in fact, the point of life. The point of work, they point out, is to earn enough money so that you can enjoy the other things.

And our secret third option, let’s call it “A little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B.” The 40+30 approach. The idea is that you spend 40 hours working at your job for your employer. And then, you spend thirty hours after that on career-related things, but for yourself. Working on growing the skills that you need to get ahead in life. It’s still career-focused, but it’s for your personal growth. It’s not something your boss asked you to do, it is something you know will help you, possibly in your next job.

You don’t owe your employer more than 40 hours, this team points out, but maybe you owe it to yourself? The best of both worlds?

Team Science

All these options have pros and cons. Let’s see what the science has to say.

Economic studies tracking productivity have produced some clear results. Productivity is at its peak for up to 35 to 40 hours of working in a week. After that, between 40 and 55 hours, it dwindles. Your total output goes up, but it’s not going up as fast as it was for the first forty hours. After 55 hours, things begin to go bad. The output is pretty much negative—you’re undoing the work you’ve already done.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? When you’re firing on all cylinders, and at some point, you’re going to run out of fuel.

Note: This is probably true on average, but might not be true of everyone¹. So, Elon probably continues to be productive long after 70 hours. But remember that you are probably not Elon, and also, Elon takes drugs to be able to do this.

Anyway, let’s continue looking at what science tells us.

A different study looked at what happens when you reduce the number of hours. It tracked productivity in a four-day work week as compared to a normal five-day work week. It found that out of 24 different measures of productivity, 22 improved or stayed the same in the four-day week. Not just that, but the motivation and mental health of the workers improved. And turnover, the likelihood of people quitting their jobs, dropped by 39%.

Another problem is the effect on sleep. People who work long hours sleep fewer hours, and even that sleep is of a lower quality. And the problems caused by bad sleep are endless—there’s literally a full book on this topic.

But an even bigger problem is stress. Long hours are also associated with stress, and stress is not good. Stress can kill you—literally. And I’m not using “literally” like the kids use it, when they say they’re “literally dying”. I mean literally literally.

Stress can cause problems in the cardiovascular system, the lungs, the kidneys, your skin, your immune system, your gut, your brain, and your heart. Oh, and it can increase the risk of getting diabetes.

Scientists from University College London studying people who work 55-hour weeks, observed a 33% increased risk of stroke and a 13% higher risk of coronary heart disease when compared to those who work fewer hours.

And finally, when you’re running on fumes for long enough, you run out of fuel, and your body just stops working. This is called burnout. And I don’t mean “burnout” in a casual way that we use in day-to-day conversation. I mean Burnout, which is a serious medical condition. Multiple long days with high stress and low sleep can cause enough burnout that can not only completely destroy your mental health, but also crash your productivity to zero. Of course, it is important to us, individually, to avoid burnout. However, it’s vital that people in Team 70 hours (usually the founders and owners of a business) also understand how dangerous it can be. Your people can’t work hard if they’ve been turned into zombies.

Stress vs Passion

So what’s the solution, then? What’s the best way to work hard? What’s the best way to succeed?

I like the following quote from Simon Sinek, the author of Start with Why:

“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.”

This sounds like a cool line, but it’s fascinating to me that we have empirical proof that “the love of the game” is the difference between stress and passion.

Drive by Daniel Pink talks about where stress comes from. Pink says that stress is based on three factors: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

Autonomy, or freedom, refers to the freedom to choose what you do with your time. An environment that includes micromanaging bosses and high levels of surveillance and oversight can be said to have low autonomy. It causes stress because we all like doing things our own way. Just following a set of instructions can sometimes be arduous and even counterproductive, especially if you have a more efficient way to do things that you’re not allowed to use.

Mastery refers to being good at your job and continuously getting better. If you don’t have the skills, tools, or competence to do your work well, then you will be frustrated. Conversely, if your work isn’t challenging enough, you will be bored and disengaged, leading to a different kind of frustration. And finally, if you feel like you’re not getting to the next level of your job, if you’re not getting new challenges, you feel stagnant and resentful. All three of these can lead to stress.

Purpose, here, refers to an alignment between yourself and your work. Specifically, your values and your beliefs. A mismatch in your values can lead to frustration and sadness, and ultimately stress.

Another secondary cause of stress could be bad communication. Unclear expectations, or lack of clarity on whether you are meeting expectations, or not being recognised for your work: all of these also cause stress.

You can work backwards from this and figure out what is needed to avoid stress at work. You need an environment where you have autonomy over how you work, you feel challenged to get better, but not so challenged that the work is impossible to do, you feel like your ideologies and values are aligned with your work, and you have clear communication with your superiors and managers. In other words, a place where you can feel comfortable and free to do your work in your own way.

TMKK

So what does this mean for the larger debate between Team 70 hours and Team 40 hours?

First of all, it is important to acknowledge that it is completely acceptable if someone chooses to work just 40 hours a week. Some people would rather spend the rest of their time on other things, and that is fine. Some people cannot work more for various reasons, including health issues, physical or mental, and that is fine. People who want to make a dent in the universe shouldn’t look down on the people who want to enjoy life—those are different philosophies.

And of course, it is easy to forget that hard work is not synonymous with the number of hours worked. Like Bill Gates says, “We underestimate what can be achieved in ten years, and overestimate what can be achieved in one or two years.” There are people who can work just 40 hours a week and still achieve greatness. It requires focus, but it can be done.

Another variation is that you could choose to work long hours for a part of your career. This is easier when you are young and/or single. As you get older, you might choose to spend more time with family. Also, as you get older, you can compensate for the fewer hours worked by being wiser about what to work on and how.

So, what is all the controversy about, and why all the fights? We can arrive at an answer by adding a clarifying question to the debate. Are you being forced to work 70 hours, or are you choosing it yourself? And a hidden question there is, who benefits?

“Do it for yourself, do it for the nation,” says Team 70 hours. The opposition points out that often the people saying this are the owners/founders of businesses who benefit most from people working long hours for them. And both sides have a point.

So instead of just arguing over the number of hours, you should think through the reasons for working harder.

You could work longer because you’re paid more. Or because you’re learning something that you wouldn’t otherwise learn. Or because it’s adding something to your career by boosting your resume or portfolio. If you are choosing that work, you can work however long you want, because you’re working through passion, not stress. (Or, I should repeat, you could choose to work 40 hours and then do something else with the rest of your time.)

In my own life, I’ve been in both places. When I was studying for my JEE exams, I was working around the clock. I knew that getting a high rank in that exam would be extremely good for me. But it was also stressful. After I did well enough to get my preferred programme at the college of my choice, I decided that I would never work that hard ever again in my life. Today, I work 40-hour weeks and spend the rest of my time with my family and playing board games. But a lot of that time is also spent reading—as a family, we spend a lot of time sitting together and reading. And depending on how you’re counting, this can count as work, because a lot of my reading is work-related non-fiction.

At the end of the day, there isn’t one uniform system that works for all of us. Humanity isn’t a monolith, and not everyone is going to be able to pull 70-hour weeks. At the same time, we shouldn’t be constraining those who can and want to, either. Instead, we need a system wherein people have the freedom to choose the system that works for them. And the awareness of what tradeoffs they’re making with their choices.

About the Writer

Thanks to Arsh Kabra for writing this article based on my notes because I’ve not been getting the time to do that myself. Arsh, who is my son, is a freelance writer who lives and breathes stories. Whether it’s scripting for YouTube channels, running epic Dungeons & Dragons adventures for young minds at Flourish School, or bringing plays to life on stage, he’s always finding new ways to spark imagination--both for himself and anyone else he can get a hold of.

1. I need to write an article on the tyranny of averages