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Here’s a new piece on NPR about overwork, with the headline claiming that overwork kills 745,000+ people per year. I’d believe that, and I know there are some longitudinal studies about the health impacts of command and control management, and none of them are very pleasant. Over at Numlock News, where I found the NPR piece originally, they pull-quoted this portion:
A new study from the World Health Organization found that people working more than 55 hours each week face significant health risks, facing a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of death from heart disease compared to people working only 35 to 40 hours per week. This is a lot of people: in 2016, the WHO estimated, 488 million people worked such long hours.
Again, not good numbers.
Years ago — April 2015 — I wrote an article about 55 hours/week being a hard ceiling on work, including this paper on “The Productivity of Working Hours.” It does seem to me that overwork — and its cousin, burnout — are issues that everyone kinda sorta knows are problems, but they don’t know exactly how to fix them. See, people want to be valued at work, and usually the badge of honor for value is about answering emails at 11pm and all that bullshit. And then, on the executive side, they see a person who is clearly burnt to a nub, and they think: “Damn, he’s hustling.” As a…
