In Scientific American, a computer science professor at Harvard describes her typical workweek and how she balances the stresses of being on the tenure track at an R1 school with the demands of home. Despite a chipper tone to her article, her life sounds just awful to me. She says that her peers and superiors expect her to work an 80 hour week, but she can only fit in 56 hours of work into her week. That disconnect between expectations and the reality must be very stressful. She has to read old e-mails from people who complimented her in the past, so she can feel good about herself.
Her breakdown of her time during the week was unbelievable. It sounds like she never sees her husband or has a family dinner together. There doesn’t seem to be any room in the week for emergencies or spontaneous fun with the kids. To each to their own. I think she might make more money and have less stress in the private sector, but whatever.
Even with all those stresses, that woman seems to be surviving, because she “only” works 56 hours per week. I can’t see how it’s possible to raise two kids with two 60-80 hour per week jobs and not lose your mind.
This article led to a discussion among my friends about what a normal workweek should look like. What’s a normal amount of hours? A few friends are teachers and professors at schools with low expectations. They put in big hours for six months of the year, but have very laid back lives for the other half of the year. A few do no work at all during their 6 months off from teaching. Other friends think that 60-80 hours is normal.
What’s a normal work week?
Apt. 11d 
37.5 hours.
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Obamacare requirements kick in at 30 hours a week. So, the new work week is 29.5 hours. Mind you, lots of people will be working two of them. dave.s.
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I work in IT consulting, and by dint of being super efficient I manage to get by on about 45 hours a week. (I end up traveling for work typically once a month, for perhaps 3 days.)
I should mention that it’s part of consulting culture to work a ton. It equates directly with job security, and people are not above fibbing about it if they have to. I am cynical enough to believe that at times this is even reflected in inflated timesheets, although I can’t absolutely prove it. Note that consultants are often bonused quarterly based on whether they make their chargeability target. They know they need to put in 36 billable every week, and that it could be the difference between a $15K quarterly bonus and nothing at all. In such circumstances if they’re even close to their number when submitting a timesheet, they will be sorely tempted to pad.
Long story short – if you were a colleague, or a member of leadership at my firm, and were to ask me how many hours I put in, I might well lie to you and say “60, minimum”. And strategically stay late/be visibly present at odd hours to reinforce the lie. It would depend on how secure I was in my job.
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“60, minimum”
They’d better watch just how far down the org chart that culture goes. Lots of lawsuits are now happening for misclassification/unpaid overtime. I’m required to certify that I haven’t worked any over time each week.
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Most of our parenting lives, my wife and I have averaged 50 hours a week. That’s an average, so it goes higher at times. I can imagine working 80 hours a week, but I can’t imagine combining that with being a parent or a spouse.
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“A few do no work at all during their 6 months off from teaching. ”
Huh?
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Yeah–Laura, did you mean work 9 months a year? Otherwise……
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I see the academics with these 60 hour workweeks. To me, there are two separate issues.
To me I find it surprising that she and her husband don’t see each other during the week. My PhD supervisor had this arrangement and it confounded me until the day he announced his divorce (a year or two after tenure). But I think some couples are more efficient with their communication than we are 🙂
The second issue, the actual hours, I don’t really think translates to the same number of hours outside of academia. I’ve seen many a type-AAA prof answer emails 15 minutes after sending them, but still manage to take time off during the day for a school event, or sick day or even head off on vacation for a week or four. I was surprised to talk to friends in politics or business that spend their entire day in meetings without any time to do what I’d consider actual work (the enjoyable part), let alone flexibility for a doctor’s appt or school event. All of the sudden my ~50-hour work week that enables me to be home every night for dinner and bedtime before I log on again at night didn’t seem so bad.
Lastly, as someone who eagerly sat through work-life balance panel discussions before having kids (and now just rolls her eyes), I think that the ‘here is how I do it’ way of offering advice is kind of useless. People need different things (TV veg-out time, romantic nights with spouse, exercise time, computer game time, you name it!) and most of all, different kids have different needs at different times of their lives.
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Thanks to a state legislature that believes “ethics” are important, all state employees, including university professors, are required to provide a record of the number of hours we work each day. (No one checks to make sure that we do work these hours, and we cannot be punished for how much we work, only for not recording the hours.) Most people do not bother making an actual effort, seeing it as a huge waste of our time and our administrators’ time, which it is, but I have done my best for the last couple of years. This includes thinking about things like: well, I went for an hour walk, and I spent about 2/3 of that time plotting out tomorrow’s lecture, so that’s 40 minutes. Time spent in committee meetings counts even if I zone out and think about other things, of course….
I don’t do it that precisely, but based on my general daily calculations, I average 50-60 hours a week for nine months of the year (mid-August to mid-May), and that includes all breaks – I work so much before finals in December that the time I take off over Christmas doesn’t take me down below 50/week. At the start of the semester or during certain periods it’s more like 70.
I have practically no commute time – 5 minute drive to school – so that is a big factor in other areas.
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The answer to how child-rearing is compatible with a 50+/w job for two people is that one must have help and children who are “easy.” Help means full-time help, child care, combined with flexibility with parent’s schedules (so that you can stay home, take the kid with you when the emergencies arise) or flexible child care (grandparents, nannies, etc.). “Easy” children means children who can be cared for by many caregivers without significant disruption, who do well when taken along to work, or on errands, and with their downtime, who do well in school, are flexible about the activities they engage in, who make friends easily without requiring a lot of attention to social life.
And, it especially works when the work itself is rewarding and enjoyable, as it can be in academics, when you enjoy teaching, hanging out with your students. going to conferences, traveling to meetings, when your friends (and even your children’s & spouses friends) are also colleagues. Then, some of that work is also social time, vegging time, cooking time, etc. Does a conference where you hangout on the Adriatic coast discussing neural noise and autism with an international group of colleagues count as work? If it does (and, it does), the 50+ hours isn’t as onerous (though it still requires balance with other responsibilities). Is returning to your computer at 9 PM after the kids have gone to sleep your creative fix? Again, makes it all work. As Amy has mentioned, a high energy level is a necessity, too.
I know a number of families who balance their lives that way, with both the perks and difficulties of 100+ hour workweeks for the parents and thrive. The thriving depends on everything working out well though (and, I suspect the Harvard CS prof has that sweet life, where the difficulties are balanced with the perks).
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PS: Money helps, too. You can hire the extra people you want, not worrying about saving as much money (though the perk of hard-money tenure & tuition assistance has real economic value, and should be calculated into the value of academic careers).
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Including commute? 50 hours (8-6), essentially. Same for my husband. It is pretty tight. But it is somewhat flexible: I can come in late if I need to and leave early if I have to and no one cares if I have to take kids to the doctor. This makes it all worth while, even needing to log in at night a few days a week.
Funny, I thought her plan was pretty reasonable considering she is a professor at an R1 school. Then I thought about implementing it. Aside from never seeing my husband during the week (and that is the part my kids would hate too…I don’t know how her kids feel about it but my kids like me and my husband and like to see us both even for just an hour) it seemed to make sense. After all, she takes the whole weekend off. So for her, this makes sense. I personally work late at least once a week, when my husband picks up the kids. These are important safety valves for my work in a number of ways.
No, I don’t think it Makes Sense in the perfect world, where we’d all work 9.30-4.00 and pick our kids up at 5 sharp and maybe 3 pm two days a week so we could see them in activities, and don’t forget taking lunch to do pilates but I don’t really think those jobs exist. you either work early in the AM (and miss drop off so someone else has to do it) or you work late. That’s why so many women and some men quit their jobs when the partner gets a bigger job with more responsibility.
What I really liked is that she put limits on things. No more than 5 trips. no more than 10 extra work things. That’s not a lot if you are trying to move up. My job is less prestigious but I have to do some of those things. i am going to think about doing less and being happier and doing what I want.
I actually would have a terrible time doing my job if there wasn’t that flexibility. I’d have to move closer to work or get a babysitter in the afternoons. As it is this year we will now have three soccer practices for two kids. We’ll see how it goes…I really don’t know. As it is we barely have family dinner except Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We usually have family breakfast though. That said, one parent is always home for dinner. I don’t know, you do what you have to do.
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Considering we have no family in within 1,000 miles of us and we both work full-time, I feel pretty fortunate that my average workweek is absolutely no longer than 40 hours. If it goes over 40 hours, I get to “bank” the extra time & use it later. I work as a public employee where the union rules are strict but don’t fit really well with those of us in professional positions that require flexibility, and am lucky that my boss just kind of lets us be a little flexible. So I generally spend about 35 hours in the office and 4-5 hours in the evenings at home. And occasionally, like today, I get to work from home.
My husband is up around 45 hours. I really really really cannot imagine us working any more than that & holding it together. Our 2 year-old is not “easy” as the commenter above mentioned. And this schedule allows us to have dinner together at least half the nights, plus we each get a night out with friends.
Our commutes are 20-25 minutes with traffic, not too bad. But even with how reasonable this all is, it still feels like a lot. How do people handle these 50-60-70 hour weeks and keep a marriage going and get to have any downtime with kiddos or deal with emergencies or lateness or lost shoes or whatever??
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Sarah asks: “How do people handle these 50-60-70 hour weeks and keep a marriage going and get to have any downtime with kiddos or deal with emergencies or lateness or lost shoes or whatever??”
I can’t comment on a 70-hour week, but many people in my field manage 50-60 by giving up the time after the kids go to bed, and Sunday evening. At my office, the flood of catch-up e-mail begins Sunday night around 7pm and lasts until midnight. Same with people committing to conference calls very early on weekdays (5:30 – 7am from home) and after bedtime.
Personal stamina is very key in being able to maintain this pace, clearly, as is being very, very organized. In my world when the kids lose their shoes, they switch over to their backup immediately and we walk out the door at the same time. I cannot even imagine dealing with serial lateness. But I am lucky to have easy kids, as mentioned above. These days it’s my 12YO who is reminding her dad about his shoes, not the other way around.
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I am extraordinarily lucky. My scheduled work time is 7:30-3:30, so a 40-hour week. However, most days I’m at school until 5 for meetings and then there’s the not as rare as I’d like 12 hour day. Plus grading, planning, etc. I really do try my best to not bring work home. When I’m home, I’m off. But if the grading/planning has to get done at night, it does. I’d say that I’m usually between 40 & 50 hours/week and if I went over that, I’d start to feel grumpy.
Summer is fabulous, even though I’ve spent at least a couple of hours/day preparing for classes and dealing with some administrative tasks. I relish the flexibility, the ability to work outside, at the pool, etc.
I will also say that I *could* work more if I wanted to. With the kids being older, I don’t need childcare, etc. And in fact, they’re often involved in activities that keep them occupied until 5 or 6. I can either work through to that time or go home and take care of business there, which I like having that opportunity. I lvoe my work, but I’m not looking to climb any ladders. I just want to do my job well, spend time with my family, and enjoy life. If my job were to upset that balance, I’d probably find another. Part of why I am where I am is that I realized life as a professor was a 60-hour/week job at best. I didn’t need that stress.
Mr. Geek, btw, now that he has tenure, is probably down to 50 hours/week of “real” work. It’s hard to tell, though, because some of his “hobbies” are actually work.
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I agree. My wife and I have had all these things. Most people in professional jobs have all these things. (Academics have less on the money front than practicing lawyers, but probably more on the flexibility front, so it evens out.)
It would still be a difficult step up to 80 hour weeks, though. I think most people who work those kinds of hours only do so for a few years at a stretch, until they get tenure, or finish their residency, or make partner, or make senior managing director, or sell the company, or whatever.
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“most people in professional jobs have all these things. ”
Most professional people who stay in the workforce, that is. A number decide that the perks don’t out value the costs (including not earning enough money) or have complications in their non-work (or work) lives that cause them to drop out.
And, yes, Jen’s comment about kids who can take responsibilities is also part of the solution. Again, different children (even different neurotypical children) will vary in their ability to take on responsibilities for their own needs. That’s one of the ideas that comes out in this collection of “How she does it” among science professors: http://fairhalllab.com/careers/
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I can’t seem to get the reply function to work properly at this site. My comments that begins “I agree” is in response to bj’s comments above.
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I agree with the comment about having “easy” or flexible kids enabling me to have a 50 hour work week. I realize I am lucky: my kids are neurotypical and don’t have learning disabilities. they bond with their caregivers, who luckily have been consistent over months and years (ie after school program teachers have been the same for years…this is super helpful!) However, I have one daughter who has had some health issues. lots of doctors appointments, several surgeries over the last 3-4 years. Suffice it to say we’d never get health insurance on the open market! but we weather it together and that is when I am very fortunate about the flexibility regarding doctors appts or the ability to take 2 days off while she has surgery and recovers (dad took another 2 days). If any of them had some serious issues, my schedule would not work, probably.
Also, it can be a grind. When it works, its fine. if there’s a problem, you start to wonder what your deal is and how to get out of it.
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Yes my girls are easy enough that they can be parked at the library at the uni, in my office, sent to the student dining hall to get cookies etc. etc. etc. My Aspie child — not so much. This has created problems over the years. He’s also the type that causes nannies to quit.
I take off a lot during the week to take kids to activities but then pay for it big-time by working late at night, on weekends, early on Sunday morning, etc. One of the things I”m looking forward to when we become empty nesters is the ability to stay late at work — which I do not currently do.
I recently became a Dean, and now I have to go to a lot more meetings. We have a bunch of grad students who help a lot with picking kids up, etc. (We pay them.)
Yes, I liked her inviolable rules regarding travel, etc. I now have a lot of things that I’m required to make an appearance at on our campus, including activities in the evening and I am finding it challenging.
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Congrats on the promotion, Louisa!
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We’re also really organized to the point that every Tuesday I pick the kids up, get a baked chicken and a loaf of bread and a bag of salad at the grocery store, and the kids have that for dinner while I teach a seminar.
We never go the store for stupid stuff because we have things like cases of toilet paper in the garage.
I order stuff online when kids need school stuff, etc
I found a math tutor who will come to our house.
We have cut back on activities.
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I love hearing these stories. People aren’t usually truthful about work hours and salary, so it’s refreshing to hear real stories.
I did not have easy children, obliviously. Ian was kicked out of three daycares; we bribed the last place to keep him by paying them an extra grand per month. He wasn’t bad. He needed an aide to follow him around, because he had no idea what anyone was saying. They made us pay for the aide for a full day, even though he was only there in the afternoon. Even Jonah wasn’t easy until he hit elementary school. He was a super active kid who only ran, never walked, until he was five. He had babysitters for as much as 20 hours per week, but he would have been miserable in a place that kept him inside for more than that.
Steve works 60 hours per week, including commute time. At his old job, he got 4 weeks vacation, but no personal days or sick days. If he had to go to the dentist, it was considered a vacation day. He went into work with high fevers. He had a half hour lunch, which he ate in front of the computer. He could take care of zero family business at work. No calls to a sitter or to the school. He went for days without seeing the kids awake when they were little. There was a lot of pressure on him to spend even more time in the office. Now, he takes 2 weeks of unpaid vacation and has mostly the same deal. He leaves the house a half hour later, which is nice, because he can eat breakfast with the boys.
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What I think is really interesting is that the difference between having children or not.
I met Pesto when I took my first tenure track position (switching a year later for something closer to the city and a lighter teaching load) and I was working on two large projects and some articles. I didn’t have to “reign in my hours” because aside from seeing my husband or exercising, I could work as I needed. In general, I think I tended to work weekends because I was too tired to write/do research on days I was teaching. While my total weekly hours increased, I could be productive in ways that I might not otherwise be able. We have 5 year tenure clock (super short) so it means working intensely for the first 4.5 years (because you really won’t have time get anything published the 6 months prior to being “up”). I suspect I was logging between 40-60 hours.
The choices I made were both good and bad. I was tenured–that’s good. But, I delayed child bearing–that wasn’t good. (Note: I didn’t meet Pesto til I was 37, and married at 39 so even if I pulled the trigger and tried to get pregnant the day I met him, we still might have had difficulties.)
I think I’m on the feast or famine model. Intensely doing whatever it is I’m doing. The irony, is that I think I have a lot of “balance” compared to other academics.
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So, I left a snarkish comment above that with Obamacare kicking in at 30 hours a week, the work week is now 29.5. And our high-minded commenters went right past it. This is an attempt to revive it: If your job is complicated, demanding, takes a lot of skill, there’s a lot to keep track of: congratulations! It will be worth it to your employer to squeeze as many hours as possible from you, and besides pressuring you for huge work weeks that includes paying for your health care. If your job is none of the above, you are running a cash register or (in New Jersey only) pumping gas or grooming shrubberies – or working in a phone bank trying to recruit people for Obamacare… then it is very attractive to employers to keep the number of hours below the magic number. So I expect a big class divide in number of hours worked, widening in the years ahead, from employers setting out to evade paying benefits.
It’s hard to be worth $16 an hour, flipping burgers. There’s always a teenager out there who will do it for $8. That’s the point of EITC and food stamps – to make it worth while to work while topping wages up enough that low-wage people can live.
NY Times had an article about low wage earners, with complaints from a woman who worked for a department store that she had been responsible for a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS in sales last year, so she should make a lot more money. Zowie: department stores are making about a three per cent profit these days – so, the profit for which she was responsible is, well, $7500? Hard to pay her a living wage out of that. dave.s.
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Profit would already be net of her current salary. Also, specific industries differ, but the returns to capital have been rising far faster than wages. As for health care, I think I’d like to hear the Republican alternative, and hear it from someone who might be able to make it happen, before I give a rat’s ass. I’m sick of people on Medicare or a few years away from it telling me the government is going to screw up health care. That’s about a quarter of my Facebook these days.
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Also, I blame the profit incentives favoring capital (which include the low capital gains tax as well as tech-based changes in the value of capital), globalization, and the demise of unions (which has been aided and abetted by changes in the law and the invalidation of the NRLB) more than I blame not-yet-implemented changes in health care law.
The trends in the economy have made low-value labor bad to the point where working is indeed totally worthless except as contrasted with starvation. The McDonald’s budget (wasn’t it a 60 hour work week), but with no money, no perks (including the perk of healthcare, which has been mentioned above as a value of academic work or the perk of trips to Italy, again, a perk).
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“Also, I blame the profit incentives favoring capital (which include the low capital gains tax as well as tech-based changes in the value of capital), globalization, and the demise of unions (which has been aided and abetted by changes in the law and the invalidation of the NRLB) more than I blame not-yet-implemented changes in health care law.”
I expect environmental policy, permit times, and red tape enters into it. I have some relatives who are building some cabins in an area that desperately needs better lodging, and it has taken them literally years to get their papers approved. And that’s nothing very complicated. It boggles the mind to think what you’d need to do bureaucratically to get new manufacturing going in much of the US.
We have to ask ourselves, if I had $10 million, would I want to spend it on a new manufacturing start-up in the US? Wouldn’t it be easier to go elsewhere? Wouldn’t it be easier and safer to do something else with the money–buy some fast food franchises, buy some rental houses, etc.
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“NY Times had an article about low wage earners, with complaints from a woman who worked for a department store that she had been responsible for a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS in sales last year, so she should make a lot more money. Zowie: department stores are making about a three per cent profit these days – so, the profit for which she was responsible is, well, $7500? Hard to pay her a living wage out of that. dave.s.”
Well, the 3% would be after paying her, so you wouldn’t be paying her out of the $7500.
3% profit sounds really low to me for retail, but I suppose they have a lot of fixed costs in the department store world (huge rent, utilities, basic staffing) and they’re probably getting beaten up by Amazon (think of all the people who probably use the department stores as a showroom for online purchasing). I have several sets of relatives in retail (or recently retired from it), and they do a lot better than 3%, but at their small scale, you have to do a lot better than that, or you’d starve. It’s only the really big businesses that can survive on small margins.
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dave s.: I think the commenters want to talk how about we live now more than they want to talk about politics (except in the “personal is political” sense). That said, there is already a class divide, very different from what would have been seen a hundred years ago, and different from any earlier society of which I know, in that the wealthy and high-status (which is pretty much all the readers here) work more than the poor and marginal. Greater labor market regulation, including without limitation Obamacare, may exacerbate that trend. It certainly seems to have had that effect in Europe.
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I’m MORE than happy to talk about the crappy economy, which includes overworked 10%-ers and underpaid 70%-ers. I think I do that quite a bit here though one could always do more.
However, I see no correlation between those trends and Obamacare. None. Zippo. Zilch. Those employment trends have been making a nice upward slope for about two decades now. Long before the State Senator from Illinois thought about a run for the White House.
I would LOVE to link to an awesome article based on significant research on Obamacare, but all I’ve seen is speculation and punditry. All fine, but not enough to make me sit up and take notice.
Macaroni, I’m sending you an e-mail.
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Good, I should have come read your post… but thanks to responding in twitter. Next time just tell me to come to the blog. 😉 I fully agree. And if that’s what I have to do to be a TT & then tenured professor, I don’t want it. Sigh…
Now on to browse the comments…
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Absolutely, Laura, “people aren’t usually truthful about work hours and salary” – as to their work hours anyway, their vaunted “dishonesty” is often inadvertent. According to time-use studies, most folks with full-time jobs don’t work nearly as much as they think they do. Very few people who claim to work 80, 90, or 100 hours a week actually log that kind of time. Perhaps it feels like 90 hours, but usually it is not. Unless someone is actually keeping a written time log, we should take their commentary with a grain of salt.
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I think when people state those kinds of hours, they mean time in the office, not time actually working. But factory workers who work 40 hours a week aren’t necessarily tightening bolts every minute of that 40 hours.
In any case, when I say 50 hours, I mean being in the office 50 hours, i.e., 9 to 7 for four days a week, 9 to 5 on Fridays, 9 to 1 on Saturdays, minus occasional breaks to bring it back down to 50. That has been my schedule for most of the past 20 years.
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