Seriously, how much time do you waste at your job?

Photo by Kyle Hanson on Unsplash

If you work or have ever worked in corporate America, this has happened to you at some point. You’re in your office or cubicle doing work when you get an email from a co-worker. You read it, taking time away from your current task, notice that it isn’t urgent, and go back to your task.

15 seconds later that person who emailed you appears in your office. Sometimes I think they appear magically after they hit send, transporting themselves to your area along with the email. They open their mouth, only to say, “Hey, did you see the email I just sent you?”

A conversation about something not important ensues and before you know it, 10 minutes have passed because now you’re talking about Game of Thrones.

Time is the only element that we can control as human beings. Well, what we do with our time at least. I’ve worked half of my life. I’ve been a member of the workforce starting at 16 years old. I’m now 32.

My family has always been a blue-collar family. You work for X amount of years, retire, and live “happily ever after.” My dad worked split shifts for most of my life, waking up at 3:30 am, coming home at 9 am, before returning to work from 1 pm-6 pm. Even when I worked in the career I loved, I still didn’t understand working a certain amount of hours.

When you trade time for money at a 40 hour per week job, you’re also trading your time for a lesser value of your worth. One could argue that you’ll never be paid your worth. In the case of working for someone else, your employer is outsourcing a task they don’t know how to do (my first marketing job) or do not want to do anymore (my second marketing job). Most of the time, they’re not willing to pay more than a flat rate (salary) for you to complete this work every week.

You trade more of your time than your actual value as you have to commute to this business and possibly put in overtime without being paid for this extra time. I began thinking about this concept after I moved to Orlando for my first marketing job.

I spent 30 minutes in traffic each way, plus I was required to work 9–6 (1 hour was lunch). Let’s say I left my house at 8:30 to arrive at work at 9. Then I arrived home at 6:30. My employer really received 10 hours from me but since they don’t have to pay for your commute or your lunch, it’s reduced to 8 hours of work. 50 hours per week and you’re only paid for 40 of those hours

Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash

Let’s be honest. Do our jobs even require us to work for 8 hours per day (or more) for 5 days per week? I work in what most would call a knowledge or creative field. I estimate that I could do my work tasks in approximately 30 hours. We hear employers complain about lost time every year due to employee fraternizing, tardiness, and sick leave. A shorter workday, and week, could eliminate a large amount of this cost.

This was the case for nurses at the Svartedalens retirement home in Gothenburg, Sweden. The Swedish government conducted a trial for the nurses in 2017, allowing them to work six hours per day and still receive their full 8-hour pay.

At the time of the study, it showed that 68 nurses participating in the six-hour workday took half as much sick time as those in a control group working normal shifts. They were also 2.8 times less likely to take time off during a two week period.

These nurses were 20% happier than the control group, had more energy for their job, and even reported feeling healthier (Source: Replicon).

There is an extensive amount of research to back all of this up as well. For instance, the average worker only completes about 3 hours of productive work each day on the job.

Workers spend the rest of the workday on trivial tasks, such as checking social media (44 minutes), discussing non-work related subjects with co-workers (40 minutes), and even searching for new jobs while on the job (26 minutes) (Source: Inc.).

In 2018, German workers lobbied for a 28-hour workweek and they won. Their labor union, IG Metall, secured a deal to let the 2.3 million members of their union work less AND receive a pay raise. They won this right for 2 years. Once it’s finished, they’ll resume working 35-hours per week (Source: CNN).

Experiments with a shorter workday have found their way to national headlines, most notably with 2 Australian based companies. Steve Glaveski is the CEO and co-founder of Collective Campus, a corporate innovation and start-up accelerator based in Melbourne. He conducted a 2-week trial of a 6-hour workday for employees of his company.

“The shorter workday forced the team to prioritize effectively, limit interruptions, and operate at a much more deliberate level for the first few hours of the day. The team maintained, and in some cases increased, its quantity and quality of work, with people reporting an improved mental state…” -Steve Glaveski (Source: Harvard Business Review)

Early in 2019 Andrew Barnes, director of Complectus Limited, presented his experiment with the four day work week through a book and this TED Talk below. The results for his New Zealand based company were exceptional.

He discovered that productivity, engagement, job satisfaction, and work-life balance were all factors that improved; Barnes enjoyed the results so much that now his company only requires employees to work four days per week.

While there are other countries that work longer days than the United States, such as Japan (start at 8:30 am & end at 7 pm with 1 hour for lunch) and Romania (workdays usually last 10 hours per day) there are other countries that believe less is more.

Finland’s and Canada’s workdays average six hours, 45 minutes. As a worker in Finland, you would be entitled to three different breaks during your workday (Source: Insider)

Following An Archaic Model

If you’re a millennial, like me, your parents worked long and hard 40+ hour work weeks in order to make sure you could do something better with your life.

A generation later, we’re supposed to continue this same way of labor?

People believed that our generation was going to change the world. We’re supposed to be challenging these same structures and entities that took away the youth of our parents.

Instead, we fall into the same trap. “Debt is the American way”, is a joke told in my family. We get caught up in being materialistic and enter the workforce to buy things, not to achieve financial freedom or any sort of freedom for that matter.

I’m not here to cast judgment if you enjoy what you do for a living. I worked 40+ hours per week when I worked in radio but I loved my field.

However, why are 40 hours of work the standard? Why are we still basing our work off of an archaic work model that doesn’t fit with how our society looks in the 21st century?

People with an entrepreneurial spirit can’t sustain spending this much time away from their ideas. If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly thinking and dreaming of ideas that are perfect for what is probably now your side hustle.

Take a look at your job duties. A long and honest look at what you do at your job on a daily basis. At my first radio job, I hosted my show, scheduled music, managed our online prize catalog, uploaded pre-produced shows for other stations, managed social media, and produced station liners. I was paid $22,000 per year.

Not only does your employer pay you under your worth, but they are paying you to do two or three jobs for those 40+ hours you’re giving them each week. Employers expect you to be great at everything you’re assigned.