Archive for May, 2009

I had an essay in the Wall Street Journal on Friday called Overestimating Our Overworking. Here’s the text, below:

—

Summer is here again. It heralds the return of barbecues, white pants, barbecue-stained white pants and, for many workers, that perk known as Summer Fridays: half-days that allow everyone to start the weekend early.

Heaven knows we need the time off — or think we do. Over the past two decades of rapid technological deployment and globalization, it has become an article of faith among the professional set that we work sweatshop hours. Sociologist Juliet Schor started the rumor with her 1992 book, “The Overworked American,” which featured horror stories of people checking their watches to know what day it was.

Then God created the BlackBerry and things got worse. In late 2005, Fortune’s Jody Miller claimed that “the 60-hour weeks once thought to be the path to glory are now practically considered part-time.” In late 2006, the Harvard Business Review followed up with an article on “the dangerous allure of the 70-hour workweek,” calling jobs that required such labor the new standard for professionals. The authors featured one “Sudhir,” a financial analyst who claimed to work 90-hour weeks during summertime, his “light” season. He’s got nothing on a young man I met at a party recently who told me he was working 190 hours a week to launch his new company.

It was a curious declaration; I would certainly invest in a start-up that had invented a way to augment the 168 hours that a week actually contains. The young man turned out to be kidding. But he felt overworked, and so he indulged in some workweek inflation. Research shows that this is a common affliction among anyone claiming to work more than 50 hours a week. Indeed, almost no one claiming to work 70-, 80- or 190-hour weeks is actually doing so. This doesn’t make Summer Fridays any less sweet. But it does raise the question of why our perceptions of work are so different from the reality.

Sociologists have been studying how Americans spend their time for decades. One camp favors a simple approach: if you want to know how many hours someone works, sleeps or vacuums, you ask him. Another camp sees a flaw in this method: People lie. We may not do so maliciously, but it’s tough to remember our exact workweek or average time spent dishwashing, and in the absence of concrete memories, we’re prone to lie in ways that don’t disappear into the randomness of thousands of answers. They actually skew results.

That’s the theory behind the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ATUS, like a handful of previous academic surveys, is a “time diary” study. For these studies, researchers either walk respondents through the previous day, asking them what they did next and reminding them of the realities of time and physics, or in some cases giving them a diary to record the next day or week.

Time-diary studies are laborious, but in general they are more accurate. Aggregated, they paint a different picture of life than the quick-response surveys featured in the bulk of America’s press releases. For instance, the National Sleep Foundation claims that Americans sleep 6.7 hours (weekdays) to 7.1 hours (weekends) per night. The ATUS puts the average at 8.6 hours. The first number suggests rampant sleep deprivation. The latter? Happy campers.

The numbers are equally striking with work. Back in the 1990s, using 1985 data, researchers John Robinson and his colleagues compared people’s estimated workweeks with time-diary hours. They found that, on average, people claiming to work 40 to 44 hours per week were working 36.2 hours — not far off. But then, as estimated work hours rose, reality and perception diverged more sharply. You can guess in which direction. Those claiming to work 60- to 64-hour weeks actually averaged 44.2 hours. Those claiming 65- to 74-hour workweeks logged 52.8 hours, and those claiming workweeks of 75 hours or more worked, on average, 54.9 hours. I contacted Prof. Robinson recently to ask for an update. His 2006-07 comparisons were tighter — but, still, people claiming to work 60 to 69 hours per week clocked, on average, 52.6 hours, while those claiming 70-, 80-hour or greater weeks logged 58.8. As Mr. Robinson and co-author Geoffrey Godbey wrote in their 1997 book “Time for Life,” “only rare individuals put in more than a 55-60 hour workweek.”

I thought I was one of them. So I kept a time diary. Alas, even during a week that left me feeling wrecked, an honest accounting of my hours didn’t top 50.

There are many reasons for such discrepancies. The first is the gray definition of much white-collar labor. If you’re watching “Talladega Nights” on a flight to a conference, are you working? Is reading the Taste page of The Wall Street Journal in your office work? Anyone claiming an 80-hour workweek is definitely putting both in the “yes” category — though this mode of calculation is going to result in more generous estimates than an observer might tally.

The second reason people overestimate is that they discount exceptions that don’t fit the mental pictures they create of themselves. If you work four 14-hour days, then quit after 8 hours on Fridays, you’d think a “usual” day was 14 hours, meaning that you work 70-hour weeks. But you don’t. You work 64 — maybe. You probably work less than 14 hours on holidays such as Memorial Day. Plus, odds are good that your 14-hour days feature some late arrivals, lunch breaks or phone calls to your spouse. Pretty soon we’re back below 60. You might have worked on weekends. But here we tend to overestimate time devoted to small, repetitive tasks. People think they spend far more time washing dishes than they do. Likewise, if you pulled out your BlackBerry 10 times over the weekend, you might give yourself credit for several hours of work, even though each incidence took five minutes. Total time? Less than one hour, even though you feel as if you’re in work mode 24/7.

Finally — and this is the big one — work is a competitive sport. In an era with little job security, we all want to seem busy and hard-working. If publications such as Fortune call 60 hours “part-time,” what professional would claim to work less?

Of course, even if we work fewer hours than we think we do, perceptions matter. Taking numerous breaks during the day so you have the stamina to stay until 8 p.m. is more draining than going home at 6. Even if your BlackBerry isn’t buzzing at 10 p.m., the fact that it might is a source of stress. So maybe we can all take a little time to relax this summer and enjoy our Summer Fridays, instead of complaining to our friends about how overworked we are.

Ms. Vanderkam is writing a book, “168 Hours,” to be published by Portfolio in 2010

As readers of this blog know, fitness during pregnancy is one of my personal crusades. I ran 5 miles this morning at 24 weeks, and plan to continue that pace more or less as I enter my third trimester. I have found that exercising about an hour a day, vigorously, is key to keeping my weight gain on track.

I also know that this kind of exercise schedule is pretty rare among pregnant women. According to a new report from the Institute of Medicine, about two-thirds of women of childbearing age are overweight, with about half these women clocking in at obese. The IOM decided to set new guidelines recently to discourage excessive weight gain among these women. Overweight women, the new guidelines say, should only gain 15-25lbs, and obese women should gain 11-20.

These are tough limits to stick within unless you’re doing some serious exercising and watching what you eat. Of course, if you’re starting out overweight or obese, chances are you’re not doing that. And since many people seem to think pregnancy is an all-purpose excuse to be inactive and eat a lot, few pregnant women start up a vigorous exercise program. Consequently, only about a quarter of women stay within the recommended weight limits.

I think this is a shame. Excess pounds put on during pregnancy can be very hard to take off, and even small amounts of excess weight cause lots of health problems. Personally, I think that inactivity during pregnancy should be viewed the same way that smoking during pregnancy is. I suspect the overall medical outcomes aren’t orders of magnitude different.

It must be tough love week at Time magazine. First, there’s an interview with The Biggest Loser’s Jillian Michaels, who points out that if you want to lose weight, “I don’t mean just take the stairs. … I want half an hour, five times a week. ” You shouldn’t overdo it, of course, but that means “Don’t do more than eight hours a week,” Michaels says. Based on the interviews I’m doing for 168 Hours, 5 hours a week of exercise can get you in excellent (though not professional) condition. Of course, given how many exercise DVD offers I get promising results in 20 minutes per week, I think it’s safe to say that only 0.0001% of Americans are even risking overdoing it.

But that’s not what this blog post is supposed to be about.  I was most struck by an essay pointing out what should be obvious as Congress debates a credit card “Bill of Rights.” Yes, a lot of Americans are in credit card trouble in this economy, and no one likes the credit card companies. But people get in credit card debt the same way they become overweight: by failing to exercise discipline over their spending (or eating and exercising) . So Barbara Kiviat has a piece called “The Real Problem with Credit Cards: The Cardholders.” You can have all the disclosure you want, and you can regulate interest rates and fees. But it is just as possible to get into trouble at 19% interest as it is to get into trouble at 29% interest. Somehow, most Americans managed to get through life all right 40 years ago before consumer credit became widespread. Likewise, there are very few good reasons for building up debt now.

Debt, and obesity, both seem to be results of giving in to “hot emotions” — or at least that’s the phrase used by writer Jonah Lehrer in a recent issue of The New Yorker in a piece called “Don’t!: The Secret of Self-Control.” Lehrer writes about a long-term study following children studied at the Bing Nursery School near Stanford in the late 1960s. These 4-year-olds were put in a room with marshmallows. They were told that they could eat one now, or eat two in a few minutes when the researcher returned. Most of the children could not wait. But about a third could. It’s not that they didn’t want the marshmallow; they developed ways to distract themselves and so conquer their hot emotions. Decades later, these children grew into adults who did a much better job saving for retirement, controlling their weight, and even returning laptops to the researchers who tracked them down and asked them to complete some programs they’d installed on there.

This raises the nature-nurture question again. Are some people born more disciplined than others? Or can anyone learn these behaviors? Can a person who receives a Suze Orman smack down about her credit card debt learn to live within her means? Can an overweight person lose weight for good?

The answer seems to be yes — witness Jillian Michaels, who was overweight in her younger years. Her new book is called Master Your Metabolism, and while some of her scientific ideas are a bit odd (”remove all of the chemicals in your environment” — huh? Does she not understand that water, whole foods, air, etc. contain chemicals too?), the idea of daily self-mastery seems to be key. Tackling the idea of losing 50 lbs is overwhelming, but you can learn to say yes to healthier eating and exercise on any given day. I didn’t want to run 5 miles when I started this morning, but I did it anyway, and pretty soon I was enjoying it. Getting out of debt is also hard, but you can learn to say no to buying extraneous things and yes to saving on any given day.  Eventually, all these days add up, and self-discipline becomes a habit like any other.

We are all concerned with our “productivity” these days. While writing 168 Hours, I’ve been reading through the various “Getting Things Done” literature, as well as the life-hacking websites and so forth. Some of the ideas on how to squeeze more minutes out of the day are downright hilarious. For instance, Lifehacker profiled a new iPhone application that lets you safely walk while emailing by changing the screen to be a view from the iPhone’s camera.  Yay, no more walking into leashes, toddlers or cars!

Of course, the larger questions of whether those emails really needed to get sent — or whether you need to be walking where you’re walking — are different matters. You can be the busiest person in the world, with an empty in-box because you’re so organized, but if you’re not using that time to get you where you want to be, then all that productivity is for naught.

So I’d like to propose a new definition for productivity. It’s not whether you can walk and email at the same time. It’s the proportion of your day spent on activities that are advancing you toward the career and life you want. Truly productive people spend almost 100% of their time on these activities. There’s also a corollary to this. If you’re packing in the prospects as a high-end rug salesman, but you want to be a teacher, and you are not spending any of your time on activities that are moving you toward your new career, then your productivity is 0%. Harsh? Sure. But you’re not helping anything by digging the wrong hole faster.

My review of Megan Basham’s Beside Every Sucessful Man was recently linked to by the Mama Bee blog. I’m glad it was, because the blog also linked to Linda Hirshman’s 2005 piece called Homeward Bound at the American Prospect. Duly nudged by the link, I finally gave the piece a read, and have been thinking about it much of the day.

For starters, I deeply disagree with Hirshman (author of that manifesto Get to Work) on the idea that having just one child is the key to having it all. I’m profiling several high-flying women (and men!) with big families in my new book, 168 Hours. However, her survey of brides profiled in The New York Times Sunday Styles section over three weekends in 1996 is just fascinating. The vast majority of American moms are in the workforce, including the majority of moms married to men earning over $120,000 a year. But the Sunday Styles section gives an insight into a very elite slice of America (well, at least sort of elite — Michael and I were written up in there in 2004, and there’s the old joke about not wanting to be in any club that would have you as a member…) The New York Times brides are often very expensively educated, often with professional degrees, and working in fields such as medicine, law, business, etc., when they get married.

Hirshman was able to interview 32 of the 41 Times brides eight years after their weddings. Of the 32 she interviewed, 30 had children. Of these, 5 were working full time. Ten were working part-time, but often not in something related to what they’d trained for. Half were not in the workforce at all. You can talk a lot about inflexible workplaces pushing moms out of the labor force, or the lure of adorable babies pulling them home, but what’s most interesting is that a reasonable number of these Times brides made anti-career choices — up to and including quitting — before they had children.

In other words, these women, despite their expensive educations and early career preparations, were not really attached to the workforce. When a handful of high-earning men gave these women the chance to shrug off the adult responsibility of earning a living to support themselves and their families, they took it. One suspects that children provided social cover (indeed, I have now met a number of very affluent women who are not in the workforce and have nannies. Go figure!).

It’s a mindset I don’t particularly understand, but I was never into the Cinderella story. I’m very attached to my professional identity.

But that raises the question: why am I so attached to the idea of earning money and trying to get somewhere in my career, when many other women with similar family situations — perhaps smarter and even more expensively educated than me — are not?

Hirshman isn’t entirely sure either, though she has a few ideas. One is that those opting out have a “self-important idealism about the kinds of intellectual, prestigious, socially meaningful, politics-free jobs worth their incalculably valuable presence.” Unfortunately, “there’s no such thing as a perfect job,” but rather than get on with it and do the hard work of creating the right job, these women engage in “solving their job problems with marriage.” There may be something to that, though I certainly think it’s important to do work that you love. Many of the Times grooms, she found, were itching for Monday, so there’s not necessarily any contradiction between liking your work and getting paid well. Every career has ups and downs, and perhaps the difference betweenTimes grooms and Times brides is that the women just decided to chuck it all on the downs. After all, there’s no real social pressure not to, whereas there’s lots of social pressure working against men making similar choices.

The solution, she thinks, is for feminist groups (and, I would add, moms) to work more at training young women in the idea that they should be able to support their families. Young women need to learn to “prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a  position of unequal resources when you marry.” I’m not exactly sure how one imparts that wisdom as a practical matter, though she has her tips: marry a much older man, for instance, or else a much younger one or a starving artist or a liberal who will feel squeamish about undermining your career. Don’t switch jobs too often, and don’t invest too much meaning in the tasks of household work. Simply refuse to always be the party who notices you’re out of milk.

My profile of University of New Orleans paleontologist Kraig Derstler ran at Scientific American last week. Professor Derstler is one of those lucky folks who loved something as a kid (digging up and studying fossils) and is actually doing it, professionally, as an adult. He switched from echinoderms to dinosaurs along the way — actually financing his original research by bringing along paying lay people on his digs (like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence) — but the stuff of the work is the same. I always say that the secret to career bliss is to find something you love so much you’d do it for free and then get someone to pay you to do it. Derstler did that. There will be other stories of such people in the upcoming 168 Hours (I’m still looking for more people to profile for the book — people who use their time to get the lives they want! I particularly need more men for balance. Please let me know if you’d be a good source: lvanderkam at yahoo dot com).

For better or worse, motherhood is a hot-button topic. Given how universally it’s experienced, pretty much any writer of the female persuasion feels compelled and qualified to weigh in on it. So a growing Mother’s Day tradition — along with flowers and brunch — is the annual deluge of books, articles and blog posts by moms justifying their choices, discussing the aphorisms of motherhood, and basically hauling out whatever political ax they have to grind. For example A, see Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s recent tome, In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms (though there are others on the “other side” of the debate, whatever that happens to be).

Whenever we deal with something as loaded as motherhood, I personally think it’s important to base our opinions on the facts. So here are a few that I find interesting:

First, the vast majority of mothers are in the workforce to some extent. Even the majority of moms married to men earning over $120,000 a year are in the workforce.

On the other hand, even those who are working full time hardly log the sweatshop hours that some traditionalist writers seem to think characterize paid work. According to the American Time Use Survey, the average married mom in a 2-income couple who works full time puts in 36 hours per week. Her husband? About 41-and-a-half.

Another interesting number: there are 168 hours in a week. If you sleep 8 hours a night, that leaves 112 waking hours for other things. In other words, the average mom who works full time still has 76 hours per week to devote to her children, her marriage, her personal life, maintaining her home, etc.

That sounds like a lot, and it is. Obviously, her children aren’t going to be awake for all of those 76 hours. But here’s another interesting number from the American Time Use Survey. Stay-at-home married moms, on average, spend only 18 hours per week on childcare. Of that, about 8 hours is spent on their physical care. Less than 4 hours is spent actually playing with children. Stay-at-home moms, on average, spend about 38 minutes, weekly, reading to or with their children, and they spend about 1.75 hours on education related activities.

When I point these numbers out to people, they’re amazed they’re so low. There are a variety of reasons for this. For starters, the average stay-at-home mom does not have babies. Children spend very few years in that infant state when they are at home all the time. If a stay-at-home mom’s children are, say, 6 and 8, they are out of the home, in school, for about 35 hours a week. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is almost the exact number of hours the average mom with a full-time job works.  Given the rise of preschool for 2-5 year olds, children are often out of the home for many hours weekly even before school starts. They simply aren’t available to be invested in for all the hours that they might be.

And even when it comes to moms of younger kids, there is this reality of human nature. Most office workers do not spend 100% of their time devoted to the substance of their work. This is why Facebook is as popular as it is — plus emails, phone calls, lunch hours, water cooler gossip, etc. Why would anyone think that the average stay-at-home mom would devote 100% of her time to her main job of nurturing children either?

Obviously, some women do better than others. I would venture to say that, oh, about 50% do better than average. And 50% do worse. The point is also not that stay-at-work moms spend an equal amount of time devoted to high-impact activities such as reading with children as their counterparts who are not in the labor force. They don’t. It’s just that there is nothing about opting out of the workforce full time that guarantees that a woman will invest most of that time in her children. Indeed, it is quite possible for a woman to work 36 hours per week and invest an equal amount of time in her kids as a woman who is not in the workforce. Frankly, it’s possible to work 50 hours a week and still come out ahead.

Here’s another interesting statistic: When women take 3 or more years out of the workforce, they lose 37% of their earning power, according to Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Off-Ramps and On-Ramps. One can debate whether this is fair — it probably isn’t — but it is currently true. Since the majority of women who take time out of the workforce do plan to return someday, it’s also a big problem. In this economy, men have absorbed the lion’s share of job losses (with the unemployment rate hitting 8.9% in April, according to numbers released this morning). So newspapers are filled with stories of “Economoms” trying to move back into the workforce after time out to make up for sinking household incomes. And they are having a devil of a time, even before dealing with the fact that their earnings will be a lot lower than if they’d never opted out.

So, given that the average mom with a full-time job still has plenty of hours to invest in her family — easily as much as the average stay-at-home mom if she desires — is it worth losing 37% of your earning power? I’d say no, though people hate talking about numbers when it comes to things like motherhood. Did I mention it was a hot button topic?

I have a column in this morning’s USA Today called “Bring on the Baby Boom.” It’s a demographic puzzle: Why does the USA have a much higher total fertility rate than our Western European (and Japanese) counterparts? In some cases, the numbers aren’t even close. An American woman can be expected to have 2.12 children over her lifetime, vs. 1.2 in Japan. We do have high rates of unplanned pregnancies, both among teens and grown-ups who should know better, so that’s something. Perhaps we’re more religious, though Catholic Italy and Spain have very low TFRs of around 1.3. We have a growing Hispanic population, and Hispanic American women have slightly higher fertility rates than white women, but a country like Sweden also has a high immigration rate from countries with higher fertility rates, and they’re still at 1.67. And Sweden is supposedly very child-friendly, with year-long maternity leaves and the like.

Indeed, what’s most interesting about all of this is that, for all people fret about work-life balance and how “hard” it is in America to raise children with limited social support, the reality is that America’s total fertility rate has been rising as women’s workforce participation rates have been rising as well. In 1976, our TFR hit a low of 1.76, and 47.3% of women were in the labor force. In 2007? Our TFR was 2.12 and about 59% of women were in the labor force. These days, increasingly, women think they can have their 2 kids, and participate in the larger economic world as well. I think this is worth celebrating.

We did it! Michael and I ran the Broad Street 10 Miler in Philadelphia on Sunday. Our time wasn’t stellar — possibly owing to my being five months pregnant — but we ran the whole way and finished with gas left in the tank. Indeed, we ran the second half faster than the first half. It was a fascinating way to tour Philadelphia — including parts I would never walk in by myself — and 10 miles is quite manageable. So maybe it will become an annual family tradition. Well, minus the pregnancy part!