How productive are we really in the office?

If you work in an office, your life is probably punctuated by intervals of eight hours decided by the company that hired you: from 9 to 5, from 8 to 4, from 10 to 6. By working from home, these hours tend to expand: you check your e-mails at 7 in the morning, you spend hours at the computer interrupted by attention to children and housework, you go back to your e-mails before going to sleep. These times determine our hours of sleep, the hours we can devote to free time and those in which we can be with family. And we slip breakfast, lunch and dinner between the hours we spend at work.

But even if it’s true that you are in the office during those eight hours, it does not mean that you are sitting at the computer working all the time.. You could have coffee with colleagues or make a personal phone call. And probably also spend time scrolling TikTok or browsing Zara.

This is not only reasonable, it is inevitable. For humans, focusing on work non-stop for eight hours is “impossible,” says Malissa Clark, a psychologist at the University of Georgia who studies employee well-being and work addiction.

But how many hours of work actual we should do? How much do others make of it?

In a 2016 UK survey, 1,989 full-time employees reported working an average of 2 hours and 53 minutes per day. This is just a survey. But there is a lot of evidence that office work isn’t as productive as we think. In 2006, Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, collected data from phones and computers and found that the average time people spent working on a device was 2 minutes and 11 seconds at a time. shorter than some TikTok videos. And in a 2018 survey of 1,000 American employees, 36% of Millennials and Centennials estimated they spend two hours a day doing other things on their smartphone.

However well-intentioned you may be, whether you work from home or alongside colleagues, it’s really hard to work consistently. And failing to do so creates feelings of guilt. There must be a better way.

Why do we work eight hours a day?

If we know that people can’t stay focused for that long, why insist on working eight hours a day? ‘The length of the working day is not based on science; it’s based on struggle, ”he says Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back. Eight hours is not a figure that reflects how long a human being can work, or how many hours it takes to run the economy. “It reflects,” explains Jaffe, “the outcome of a struggle waged by factory workers who previously worked 14 hours, then went on strike and fought to reduce it to 10, and then went on strike and fought again to reduce it to 8”.

In 1800, the eight-hour day was the rule. But why is it still applied nearly 200 years later? You know what has changed: we have tools that allow almost any type of production in almost any industry to be more efficient than it was then. In the past, I would have spent hours in a library checking the spelling of the surnames mentioned in this article. It took me about 50 seconds today.

The other problem with the business model of two centuries ago is that it was designed for a time when most women were housewives. “The 40-hour workweek was planned when there was still the family model where one worked and the other stayed at home taking care of chores and children,” says Clark. If you’ve ever had to jump through hoops to work 40 hours a week, prepare meals, clean up, run errands, and take care of your child, this is why. 40 hours of work is a reasonable expectation for someone who has someone who takes care of the house full time.

After all, how productive are we?

With the technology we have, keeping the same hours of work should multiply productivity in an amazing way, right? Not necessarily. “There are diminishing returns when it comes to a certain number of hours,” says Melissa Nightingale, co-author of Unmanageable: Leadership Lessons From an Impossible Year. «The longer the working hours, the more the quality drops».