I continue to find friends who work 60 hours a week or more. That doesn't count the number of hours they spend looking at their e-mail the rest of the time.
This is a fairly new phenomenon dating from the early 1980’s. It seems much more extensive now than it did then. What is going on?
I see three interacting forces at work to make a significant portion of Americans work harder than anyone ever expected. My guess is that out of 140 million people in the workforce, I'm describing more than 40 million who work 60+ hours a week.
Since I first noticed this in the early 1980’s, I have seen a rapid acceleration in delivery services and communication. It was in the ‘80s that we got used to FedEx, DHL and UPS. We got accustomed to overnight delivery of paper and packages. We got fax machines. We got answering machines that allowed for asynchronous communication at any time of the day and night.
The situation has only gotten worse over time with improvements in communication including portable phones, Internet and smart-phone texting.
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The consequence of this acceleration in communication and delivery is that it encouraged people to work faster to keep up with the increased flow of production.
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That goes along with the second serious problem: inadequate management. My wonderful friend Michael Doyle introduced improved technology for meetings in the 70s and 80s. His book was How to Make Meetings Work. This was a minor step. As I see the problem, we have widespread poor management. The reason for this is that good management is rare. Management can only be passed along in person very much like mystical lineage transmission. With the absence of a draft Army, we have very few people who have learned management directly from the military where it has been perfected.
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The last reason for such hard work is that we have changed the nature of the workforce. We've introduced more than 15 million self-employed people. Self-employed people tend to be self motivated and work much harder than the rest of the population. We also have vast numbers of people working at home and in coffee shops. Again these are self-motivated people who work harder and longer than everyone else. And lastly we have a dramatic increase in the number of contract workers. These people are also self-motivated and hard-working. This entire category of self-employed and contract workers creates a category of hard work and long hours.
With these three explanations I feel satisfied in my explanation of the magnitude of hard working people in our society.