Working Long Hours: Is It Worth It?

In this age, when the 40-hour work week is increasingly viewed as part-time, many of us are pulling long hours at the office. But at some point, all that time spent in the cube reaches a point of diminishing returns and it's worthwhile just to call it a day and head home.

Determining that point, however, is tough, as Laura Vanderkam writes in a recent piece for Fortune.com. Vanderkam, the author of the helpful time-management book "168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think," examines the academic research on hours worked and actual productivity to try to come up with an answer.


Researchers at Harvard Business School, the London School of Economics and other institutions have launched a CEO Time Use Project to determine how a chief executive's time corresponds with a company's performance, defined as revenue per employee and the profitability of the firm. (The project uses time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, among other data.)

The study, which so far only has data from a group of Italian CEOs, found a strong correlation between the hours worked and the productivity of the firm; every one percentage point rise in hours worked meant firm productivity rose by 2.14 percentage points, Vanderkam writes.

However, the research doesn't necessarily mean we should all simply put in longer hours to be more productive. The researchers found that how the executives spent their time was key to their productivity. For instance, meeting with employees correlated with increased productivity, but meeting with other outsiders did not. What's more, the Italian CEOs in the study were working what, for many Americans, is considered a short workweek: 48 hours on average.

Vanderkam, not surprisingly, doesn't come up with a magic number for the optimal number of hours to work, but readers, I'm curious if there's a magic number of hours you can work in a day or week before you hit a wall or start to achieve diminishing returns? Or a number of hours worked for you to achieve maximum productivity? For you, do more hours equal greater productivity? Or are you more efficient with a shorter window of hours to work?