How long does it take to write a typical edition of The Leopard? It’s a question I’m often asked, so I timed it. The short answer is about three hours, in this case on a train from Madrid to San Sebastián.
That at least is the bum-in-chair time, for writing and specific research. A more honest answer would include time spent reading books and articles, in conversation with friends, pondering life on my daily dog walks, and various other activities that encourage inspiration and contemplation. In that case, the time spent is both significantly longer and fundamentally unmeasurable.
These additional, uncounted hours are an essential part of the creative process. Not only can they be performed away from the keyboard and the office environment; they must be. To be creative the mind must wander, and so must the body.
Mine is neither the first nor the finest mind to work this way. Luminaries as diverse as Darwin, Nietzsche and Murakami have done essential parts of their work while wandering. Had they been confined to offices for eight hours a day, we might not have the theory of evolution or Norwegian Wood.
And so it’s welcome that the orthodoxy of the eight-hour work day is starting to be questioned. Whereas previous thinking around flexible working focused on three or four eight-hour days a week, over the past year the idea of working five hours a day, five days a week has started to take root.
Cult of long hours
Few office workers out of earshot of their boss will claim to be consistently productive for eight or more hours a day. There are times when everything comes together in a glorious flow state and the hours rush past; but more often a large part of the day is wasted sitting in meetings that could have been emails, or staring blankly at a screen waiting for inspiration to strike.
It can be argued that many people, especially in jobs with a high cognitive load, achieve less in eight hours than they might in five. Not only does a shorter day allow the mind to rest and wander; it creates space for a healthier lifestyle – daily exercise, cooking non-processed food and so forth – that improves cognitive function.
This becomes all the more important when a job requires creativity, problem solving or collaboration. Since these are all markers of high-status jobs, it’s surprising that adopting a Darwinesque working pattern hasn’t become a status symbol. Quite the opposite: From politics to journalism to finance, longer-than-average working days are valorised.
Some cynics have postulated that this is a plot by a nebulous elite to stop us from catching our breath and throwing off our shackles. The late David Graeber best expressed this in his exquisite 2013 essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger”.
I agree with much of Graeber’s essay but this point feels overstated. The cult of long hours runs so high up the chain that it encompasses a large part of the ‘ruling class’ by any sensible definition of the term, and is often expressed most strongly in very senior people.
The problem, I think, is cultural. In a competitive and meritocratic society, ambitious people know they can advance by performing good work. The fallacy is that working longer or harder means working better.
The portrayal of prestigious jobs in popular culture often gives a warped view. Films and TV shows naturally focus on crises or periods of high drama, where the cabinet or spy agency or newsroom is working around the clock and eating pizza.[1] They don’t show the weeks where not much happens.
Like most white-collar workers, I’ve done stints like that in moments of crisis, when it was necessary. The mistake is thinking there’s any additional benefit in working that pattern even when nothing much is happening. On the contrary, it grinds you down and leaves you less able to kick things up a gear when you really need to.
A workplace that’s in crisis mode every week is a badly run workplace. Sooner or later it will burn through its staff, making them unable to scramble effectively when a crisis does emerge. This mode of working should not in any way be seen as high-status or aspirational.
Moreover, as AI continues to advance, it will take on more routine tasks and more of a premium will be placed on creativity. The most prestigious jobs will be artisanal; elite workers will need to use our highest cognitive functions, taking more time for rest and reflection.
Social progress
If shorter working hours are good or at least neutral for daily productivity, they will also bring social benefits. Some of these are obvious: A population with time for sport, leisure and proper food is happier and healthier. The number of people relying on ultra-processed food or mind-altering drugs simply to get through the day ought to fall dramatically.
There would likely be a particular benefit to gender equality, since a five-hour day would allow work to coexist more easily with childcare and men to do a greater share.
What remains of the gender pay gap can largely be attributed to the unequal burden of childcare. Employers go to great lengths to prevent gender discrimination and recruit more women into professions where they are underrepresented. As a result, in most Western economies women now out-earn men in their 20s, when few have children.
Nevertheless a gap persists overall, even though most women are paid the same as men for equivalent work. The problem is a relative lack of women in senior roles, since more women than men choose to reduce their hours or take a career break after having children – and are thereby excluded from senior ranks where the cult of long hours is particularly entrenched.
Even outside senior roles, for a couple to raise young children while holding down two eight-hour jobs is both exhausting and, with the necessary childcare, expensive. It’s rational for one parent to take up flexible work or stop altogether, and more often than not in a straight couple it’s the woman. This isn’t particularly anyone’s fault, but clearly it is a problem if we want to have workplace equality and still produce children.
What if, instead of one parent being nudged out of work, normal working patterns were compatible with childcare? A standard five-hour day would allow working parents to do two shifts, alternating work and childcare between them.
This would benefit men as well as women. Most fathers want to spend more time with their children, but are prevented from doing so by the need to put in long shifts at work. If they could achieve the same productivity in fewer hours they could also, to borrow a feminist phrase, have it all.
From strained gender relations and falling birthrates to the obesity crisis and the burnout epidemic, there are few social issues not touched by the cult of long hours. For our society to keep evolving in the right direction, we should all work more like Darwin.
[1] There’s a theory that you can predict when America or its allies are going to bomb somewhere by tracking heightened activity at pizza joints near the Pentagon. It’s called the Pentagon Pizza Index.
“A workplace that’s in crisis mode every week is a badly run workplace”- 100% yess.
I had a manager who started every Monday with “buckle up” like we were storming the beaches and by Friday we were doing pulse check meetings on why morale was low. Performative chaos and draining as hell