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

How many hours per day and per week is it healthy to work? Is the optimum a four hour day, as they analyze authorization in several countries? Or is it okay to have a 70 hour work week? A study by American time management experts found that the ideal is a 38 hour week. The result of the analysis is thus revealed, but what is the explanation and how did they come to this conclusion? Here is the answer.

It is already proven that increasing working hours does not necessarily imply higher productivity. A study conducted by John Pencavel, Stanford University in 2014 found this employee output drops dramatically after a 50-hour work week and falls off a cliff after 55 hours, so much so that someone who spends 70 hours does not produce anything else with those 15 extra hours. Besides, Not taking at least one full day off per week results in an overall drop in hourly output.

The time management expert Laura Vanderkam recently conducted a study to find out how the number of hours worked affects how much time a person thinks they have. How is?

From 900 people included in the study, they worked an average of 8.3 hours per day. THEThe results showed that there was virtually no difference one o’clock between those who thought they had plenty of time and those who felt pressed for time. Those who estimated that they had less time working 8.6 hours overall, while those who felt they had more time worked only one hour less, or 7.6 hours.

Conclusion: to avoid having the impression of having time for nothing, the ideal would be a working day of 7.6 hours. 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 pressured for time and 52% experience significant stress due to this lack of time. This is probably why the four hour work week is such an enticing dream, even if it is not entirely achievable for most people.

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.

But that doesn’t mean that Danes don’t work hard, but they rarely extend their working hours beyond 37 hours a week and usually those who work in offices finish their tasks at 4 or 5 p.m. allows balance your work and your personal life. The other Scandinavian countries, Norway and Sweden, have similar indices in terms of schedules and self-perceived happiness indices.

Dan Buettner, Posing as a happiness expert, he reviewed data provided by over 20 million people worldwide through 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 and recommended to take six weeks vacation per year which, he believes, is the optimal amount for happiness. If that’s not possible, he said, all available vacation time should be used.

With the latter, he referred to a survey conducted by the workplace Glass door in 2017 which showed that 54% of Americans stop taking half of their annual rest days and that two-thirds, 66%, say they work when they take vacations, a figure higher than in 2014 than in the latter 61% of those consulted were located.

In this way, Buettner’s findings would point to an ideal weekly job of only about 30 hours and a month and a half of vacation per year, which would not be practical for many people. Meanwhile, for time management expert Laura Vanderkam, the perfect combination of productivity, happiness and plenty of time and, with a more realistic goal, is working just under 40 hours a week.

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