Day 54 - 80 hour work weeks; 100 hour work weeks(!!); BURN OUT

12 Apr 2017 Tweet 100daysofwriting · btp · productivity · work · work-life

I found myself thinking about how people survive and put in 80-hour work weeks or 100 hour work weeks. Assuming that you put in 80 hours over the 7 days of a week, that gives you about 11 hours of work each day. On top of this, there is the commute time from your home to your office. That will be atleast 30 minutes for most people anyway. Add 1 more hour for lunch, and that comes to an even 13 hours each day. Say you leave your house at 7:00 AM, you will come back at 8 PM. Sufficiently exhausted to not be able to do anything except eat and sleep so that you can get back up the next morning. And I am assuming that people put in the same amount of time on saturdays and sundays as well, so basically you would never have any holiday! It’s more likely that you will put in MORE time on weekdays and less time on the weekends. Still, WHAT?!

100 hour work weeks are even more insane. To put it all in perspective, a week has 7 days, which is 168 hours. You have just decided to give up 2/3rd of your whole week to work! With 8 hours of sleep everyday, the total number of hours that you are literally not working or sleeping every single day reduces to a meager 3 hours! It is a concept that I couldn’t wrap my brain around. Pop culture has a plethora of references to investment bankers having to put in 80 hour weeks or 100 hour weeks or how Elon Musk did that for years on end. It’s fascinating to me that someone would actually spend so much time working and still enjoy it. Burn out seems unavoidable, and I have read several articles about how it’s going to come and you should embrace it rather than trying to fight against it happening or making it go away.

I have been thinking about all of this because for the past 5-6 days I have been having 16 hour days, I have been awake from 7 AM to literally 1 or 2 AM every single day!

The time that I posted to this blog under #100DaysOfWriting is perhaps the best metric for when I was just about to go to sleep (on most of these days I didn’t go to sleep right after, but instead hung out on the internet for still some more time and then finally slept around 2 am in the morning!)

Tomorrow is the BTP Final evaluation. Wish me luck.

POST #54 is OVER