Is the 20-hour work week a myth?
Flex-time, telecommuting, job-sharing. It seems as though these ideas hit their peak a few years back, before the financial crisis struck fear into the heart and soul of every company. Rather than working fewer hours, those lucky enough to have jobs appear to work around the clock, consistently tethered to work by the device of their choice (personally, I have a very unhealthy attachment to my BlackBerry.)
Logically speaking, productivity should determine our work life and not some rigid adherence to the clock. But in most corporate environments, the pressure of presenteeism can be overwhelming. One senior editor at a high-end celebrity magazine told Femmeonomics that she often stays late at the office unnecessarily, despite having two young children waiting at home, so that she doesn’t seem like a slacker to her subordinates.
For professional women with young children, the panacea seems to be the mythical “20-hour work week.” I say mythical since I’ve yet to meet a professional under the age of 65 who enjoys a rewarding career and a solid paycheck while working so few hours.
Still, many smart people insist that it can be done, at least at certain points in their career. In 2008, entrepreneur Adam McFarland blogged about cutting down on his workload, citing studies that show working fewer hours forces you to be more productive. (By the way, having worked in a corporate environment for close to 15 years, I concur. I’m not convinced anything other than checking emails and cc-ing others gets done after 2 p.m most days.)
“After our initial ‘start-up’ phase, my business partners and I created flexible schedules for ourselves that allowed us to work in shorter, more intense bursts. For a while I was pretty rigid with my schedule and was able to routinely accomplish my day-to-day tasks and my programming projects in 20 – 30 hours a week,” explains Adam, co-owner of Pure Adapt, Inc.
Unfortunately, as their company grew, so did the number of hours Adam and his co-workers clocked. He now works more than 40 hours a week. Adam feels this added workload is temporary and hopes to hire next year in an effort to return to his ideal work week.
“I absolutely think that a 20 hour workweek is possible with the right systems in place.”
Jennifer Sabatini Fraone, assistant director at the Boston College Center for Work & Family agrees but acknowledges that these workers only compose a small part of the workforce.
“In general, we see workers moving more toward a “Protean Career” model, where the individual is really self-directing the progression of their careers rather than relying on an organizational ladder,” says Jennifer. ”We are also seeing a rise in the number of entrepreneurs who are using their skills to start their own business or create a ‘portfolio career’ and not be constrained by the parameters of a typical full-time position.”
In other words, done correctly, a savvy-entrepreneur can enjoy success without being chained to a 40-plus-hours-a-week-in-a-cubicle scenario.
So here’s the question: how do we get people to pay less attention to the clock and more to productivity? If you happen to be one of those mythical 20-hour-a-week workers, I want to hear from you.
Category: Women@Work
Try asking to pull a 20 work week here at Google….seriously what planet do these people live on????
Planet happy!!!!
Listen, at some point, someone has to do all the details/grunt work. There is always going to have to be someone to do.
There is going to be time spent hunting down clients and colleagues, looking for paperwork, waiting for a response from some third party, deadlines to meet, unexpected events…..maybe if you work in some sort of bubble, don’t depend on clients for business and never have anything out of the ordinary come at you, maybe you could do this, but thats a really big maybe
I spent about 15 years on the corporate side and left to start my own thing a year ago. It took me months just to relearn how to NOT waste time. The company I was with practically trained us how to not get things done because of all the tape and the “cc” culture.
I’m getting more productive each day and I’m hyper aware when I’m not being productive (like right now when I should be wrapping up a case study). Time blocking has been the most successful. Focus one one thing for 90 minutes.
It takes practice.
Good advice, Amanda. I’m trying to retrain myself to be productive again. I agree on the cc-culture — in a corporate setting, it seems as its the only way to prove you’re working.
You all are writing from the same perspective we did in the 60s believing, based on projections of productivity increases that ‘in 20 years Americans would be working 20/hr week or half a year, hence women could have “meaningful” jobs like our husbands, and both have “meaningful” quality time I think the ideal got named. But what’s happened? Most women, including many more working mothers, single and partnered, are working more than 40 if they have “meaningful” which “means” about the same as the President’s “good jobs,” to hold onto them if competing internally, and/or beat or at least survive the competition if they are on their own “small business women. Meanwhile there are more people with no job and people working multiple jobs and begging to work more hours because they can’t make ends meet. Now I say leave pursuit of meaning and experimenting with what may or may not be become or be bought out by a jillion dollar Corp, and go for uniting left and right political ideologies with a call for legislation guaranteeing every citizen who applies 20 hours of labor a week for a livable wage. Labor, defined as bossed and paid. The activity and skill set of one’s great WORK of art, or to start a new venture, or play scratch golf, may be the same as one’s LABOR but not necessarily
Thank you for the thoughtful response and insight.
I worked 3 days (24 hours) a week and was able to live completely within my means without any additional income. What it meant was that I had to make corresponding lifestyle choices (having roommates, living in a “less desirable” neighborhood, etc.) – something I don’t see addressed here. But in the end the lifestyle compromises were well worth the time I got in return to live my real (non-work) life.