Surprisingly, the top 10% of employees with the highest productivity didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else – often they didn't even work eight-hour days. Instead, the key to their productivity was that for every 52 minutes of focused work, they took a 17-minute break.

While our culture may be pushing us towards working 24/7, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a Silcon Valley consultant and author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, believes this is not helping us to be more productive or to come up with creative solutions.

The research instead points towards the importance of rest, he says.

“Generally, short bursts of long hours do lead to increases in productivity, but over time those gains disappear,” says Pang. “The odds of costly mistakes rise, and as a result the gains that come from working longer hours disappear.

One study from Illinois Institute of Technology by Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr in 1951 found that scientists who spent 25 hours per week in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent just five.

In fact, as few as one to three hours of concentrated work could serve to be as effective as a traditional workday. For Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, this is because being busy is simply a proxy for productivity.

“In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner,” says Newport.

Working for show, it seems, is also futile. A study of consultants by Boston University’s School of Business found that managers could not tell the difference between employees who actually worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to.

Deflecting distraction



To combat the trap of putting such a premium on being busy, Newport recommends building a habit of ‘deep work’ – the ability to focus without distraction.