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Women at Work wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nikish.

I'm Kurt Nikish. Back in 1817 a Welsh textile mill owner turned labor activist named Robert Owen

came up with the expression 8 eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours

rest. That simple formula was a radical idea at a time when workers could spend

nearly every daylight hour at their machines.

It was more than a century later that the US Congress mandated the 40 hour work week, one big way

that still defines how we think about work and its share of our lives today. But everyone

knows that work is not like clocking in and out for a shift at a factory anymore

and whether it's the gig economy or working alongside intelligent machines, we also know

the future of work will be even more different than today.

Today's guest says our modern notions of work and economy and productivity really did take form

during the Industrial Revolution, but he says the human experience of working goes

back much further and that to understand the future of work can help to look way back throughout history and even prehistory.

James Sussman is an anthropologist and the author of the book Work, a history of how we spend our time.

James thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me.

Well I want to ask you what got you interested in thinking about how humans think about work, this notion of work.

Well, it's, you know, work is something that we all, you know, we grow up thinking of it as very much part of life and we think of all sorts of different ideas around work, that it is something virtuous that laziness is a sin that one has to work hard if you work hard you'll succeed and so on and so on and so on and so on and

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