Workin’ for the Weekend
Posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 11:00 am
photo credit: Peter Martin Hall
How many hours a week do you work, or not work, as the case may be? If I estimate my hours back in May or before, I get something like this, on average:
Monday: 15 hours (7 am-10 pm)
Tuesday: 8 hours (10 am-6 pm)
Wednesday: 9 hours (10 am-7 pm)
Thursday: 10 hours (10 am-8 pm)
Friday: 9 hours (10 am-7 pm)
Yep, that’s about 51 hours a week, based on low/middle estimates of hours—office time only, that doesn’t include working from home or checking my BlackBerry at odd hours of the night. And it meant that if I was also going to the gym, and keeping my apartment clean, and maybe having dinner with a friend every now and again, not a ton of time for living.
A lot of people work way more. My friend who’s a lawyer, for instance, might labor diligently as many as 70 hours a week. Sometimes she wakes up on the floor of her office bathroom. That saves time.
Listen, there are only 168 hours per week. It’s a pretty finite number. Unless we start fiddling with the calendar, we can’t change that.
Let’s say you sleep 7 hours a night (I prefer 9, but that’s just me). You’ve got 49 hours of sleep, plus 70 hours of work, for 119 hours of combined work and sleep. That means 49 remaining hours per week for going to the gym; cooking and eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner; watching movies or TV; doing household chores; paying bills; shopping; scrapbooking; knitting; off-roading; going to friends’ weddings—and whatever else it is you do.
That’s not much, given that a weekend itself (always too short, I hear) is just 48 hours in toto.
That’s why today’s news of our “most dramatic” unemployment rate yet (9.8 percent) had a bright spot in it for me. Sure, the jobless rate is now at a 26-year high. BUT…
The average weekly hours of work dropped to a record low of 33 last month, indicating that employers are continuing to impose furloughs and reduced work hours.
A 33-hour week? That sounds positively dreamy.
