Why Do We Work So Much?
Money For the Rest of Us
J. David Stein
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How to structure employment so workers are more creative, productive, and happier.
Topics include:
- What percentage of employees work at home due to the pandemic
- How many hours per week do men and women work in both paid employment and unpaid caregiving
- How workers have been allocating the time saved by not commuting
- Why the economy would still prosper if we worked only four hours per day
- What is the cult of efficiency
- What is the difference between leisure and amusement
- Why employers reward busyness at work
- How work can be more satisfying and create
Thanks to LinkedIn and Policygenius for sponsoring the episode.
For more information on this episode click here.
Show Notes
Mental health: C-suite struggles in the pandemic by Rachel Ranosa—Human Resources Director
Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World) by Cal Newport
In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell—Harper's Magazine
Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
The Art of the Siesta by Thierry Paquot
When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin
Related Episodes
107: Work, Freedom and Leaving A Legacy
184: Massive Job Losses Are Inevitable But There Will Still Be Work
323: The Economy Is Not A Machine
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. |
| 0:03.7 | This is a personal financial on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live |
| 0:09.0 | without worrying about it. |
| 0:10.5 | I'm your host David Stein, today is episode 331. |
| 0:14.2 | It's titled Why Do We Work So Hard? |
| 0:19.4 | Twenty years ago my family and I moved from Cincinnati to Idaho and I started telecommuting. |
| 0:26.5 | I first rented a small office in town because our children were small and I thought that |
| 0:32.4 | might work easier. |
| 0:34.1 | But after a few years we built a new home and I established a home office and that's |
| 0:40.6 | how I've worked out of my house for the past 16 years when I haven't been traveling. |
| 0:48.1 | My typical schedule when I was still an investment advisor was to work 8 hours a day. |
| 0:55.8 | I would break up my day into the before lunch section, I would typically take a nap, I would |
| 1:01.1 | often exercise during the day, but I felt like I had to be at my desk because that's what |
| 1:07.2 | I was paid for. |
| 1:10.3 | When tracking my hours and I looked at a time sheet I did back in 2011, I typically worked |
| 1:14.7 | about 41 hours a week, spent 5% of my time on email, about 2 hours per week, and only |
| 1:22.6 | spent about 17% of my time on what Cal Newport describes as deep work. |
| 1:31.6 | He defines deep work as professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration |
| 1:38.4 | that push our cognitive capabilities to their limit. |
| 1:42.6 | We can call it deep work, we can call it creative work, but it was only about 17% of my time. |
| 1:48.4 | The rest was just on stuff that needed to be done, including having meetings and just |
| 1:53.1 | administrative stuff. |
... |
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