Weekends aren’t what they used to be. And it’s become a serious problem.
That’s the message of Katrina Onstad’s new book The Weekend Effect: The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork. Onstad, a Canadian novelist and journalist who has written for the The New York Times, starts off by documenting the origins of our 64-hour escape from the office (Thank you: religion, unions, and Henry Ford).
Then she dives into the ongoing struggle to step away from our smartphones and make the most of that time, with compelling stats, quotes from progressive CEOs, and anecdotes that will make you nod in agreement or shake your head in recognition.Not that there’s much chance you’d argue with her thesis. Nearly 40 percent of Americans reported working 50 or more hours per week, putting us far ahead of our European counterparts, with less to show for it. But that’s starting to change. Onstad interviewed leaders who are capping workers’ hours to brilliant effect (including Jason Fried of Basecamp and Dustin Moskovitz, formerly of Facebook). And she offers myriad ways we can reclaim our leisure time with meaningful pursuits, as opposed to another Netflix bingefest that leaves you wondering where the weekend went. Here she speaks with 99U about her findings.
Early in your book, you compare the United States and Canada to typical working hours in other countries. What stood out to you?
The one idea that surprised me is that shorter-hour cultures are more productive, and have stronger economies, which seems counterintuitive. But over and over, researchers have discovered that after about 40 hours a week, our productivity drops off. Sometimes people can go through crunch periods, particularly in the creative industries: If you have a big project, you may be able to fight through it and hit 50-60 hours for a few weeks without a degradation in the work.
But it’s not sustainable beyond that. It’s not just the health issues that arise, with exhaustion, substance abuse, heart disease, and all the physical ramifications of overwork, but people start to introduce more errors. So the argument in favor of overwork becomes much more of an emotional and social-status argument rather than what we know about how people work and how to get the best out of employees. Germany has a short-hour work culture and is one of the strongest economies in the world. Mexico and Korea have the longest hours and are among the least productive. The U.S. and Canada are somewhere in between.
It’s really interesting the way a work-first mentality can grip an entire nation: France recently passed “right to disconnect” legislation that essentially says that after 5 or 6 p.m. and on weekends, your boss cannot contact you unless it’s an emergency. We’re so tethered to our workplaces and our devices that that concept seems almost sacrilegious or a sign of weakness, but France is recognizing that asking people to work crazy hours just isn’t helpful economically.
Much of the efficiency research cited in your book relates to manual labor, which isn’t surprising because creative work is really hard to measure. Has anyone tried?
It’s definitely hard to gauge. There’s a whole body of research around wartime industries and mechanized environments that are easy to measure, but with creative workers we have to look at case studies. In the book, I talk about the Electronic Arts scandal about 15 years ago where programmers in the gaming industry were working 70-80 hours a week and completely exhausted, and not being compensated for overtime.
What happens in those environments is this conflation of work and play. As creative people, we often think of ourselves as artists, and we’re even encouraged to do so—you’re supposed to do it for the love of the job or the love of the art, which sets up a dynamic that’s really open to workplace exploitation and exhaustion.
If you love your work, it’s really hard to turn it off, and there are all kinds of forces at play that are opposed to you turning it off, including your own sense of self. If you’re a creative professional and you’re in a museum and you get a…
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