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Workaholics

Are elite "road warriors" laboring 80-100 hours a week at their jobs? A new Fast Company article says so, though when you read the article they're not talking about actual work, necessarily – many of the hours are devoted to travel. [Link to Fast Company article on "Extreme Jobs"]

I'm a known workaholic, so I've thought about this a lot, and I've observed other people who have "extreme" jobs. I find that people who are "at work" from 6am to 10pm don't work 100% of the 16 hours. They do all sorts of things, but because they never officially went home and called it a night, and they're doing stuff that's work-related along the way, they're still "at work" in a sense, even though the actual focused labor may not exceed 6-8 hours.

Is travel "work"? The Fast Company article talks about constant travel; I don't travel as much these days as I used to, but I remember pretty well what it was like. I once conducted a training session for a group in Chicago. I left Texas in the early AM and came back that night. It looked like I had a very long day, but I actually worked 4-5 hours that day. Much of the time I was in transit to or from, and I was reading or sleeping.

Most of my business travel was like that, and I didn't see profound differences in other people I knew.

I was also aware of people who would stay late at the office and who gave the impression they were working, though if you paid attention you'd find they were doing other stuff, like surfing the web at the office because the connection was faster.

People go to mixers and business events, and they're still "working" though much of the time is spent hanging out.

We call all of this stuff "work" when we're still tethered, still operating within your company's ethos. But I hate to perpetuate the myth that this is hard labor.

And just incidentally, I'm trying to learn to spend less time "working," not more. I think we should all do that for the sake of our clearly-imperiled sanity.

Right now I have to get back to work, though.

jon posted this at 10:06 AM
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