How many hours is ideal for working to be productive and to balance work and personal life

It also falls off a cliff after 55 hours, so much so that someone who spends 70 hours does not produce anything else with those 15 hours of overtime. In addition, not taking at least one full day off per week results in an overall drop in hourly output.

Time management expert Laura Vanderkam recently conducted a study to determine how the number of hours worked affects how much time the person thinks they have.

Of the 900 people included in the study, they worked on average 8.3 hours per day. The results showed that there was barely an hour of difference between those who thought they had a lot of time and those who felt pressured for time.

Those who felt they had less time overall worked 8.6 hours, while those who felt they had more time worked only one hour less, or 7.6 hours.

That is to say In order not to feel like you have time for nothing, the ideal would be a 7.6 hour working day. This would be the equivalent of a 38 hour work week.

Surveys in the United States have shown that due to the current lifestyle, 48% of working adults feel pressed for time and 52% feel a lot of stress because of this lack of time.

A 38 hour work week is very similar to the number of hours worked in Denmark which, according to surveys, is one of the countries where people say they feel the happiest. This Scandinavian nation has been ranked among the three happiest countries in the World Happiness Report for the past eight years.

These rarely extend their working hours beyond 37 hours per week and generally, those who work in offices, they finish their tasks at 4 or 5 years, which allows them to reconcile work and personal life.

The happiness expert, Dan Buettner, examined data provided by more than 20 million people worldwide via the Gallup-Sharecare Wellbeing Index and conducted extensive field research in the happiest countries around the world. “As far as your job is concerned, try to work part-time, 30 to 35 hours a week,” he advised.

But Buettner went further by recommending taking six weeks of vacation per year whichThis is, he believes, the optimal amount for happiness. If that’s not possible, he said, all available vacation time should be used.

Thus, Buettner’s conclusions would indicate an ideal working week of only around 30 hours and a month and a half of vacation per year, something that for many people would not be practical.

Meanwhile, for the time management expert Laura Vanderkam has the perfect combination of productivity, happiness and plenty of time and, with a more realistic goal, is to work just under 40 hours per week.