what’s the right number of hours to work in a week

is a question behind work/life balance.

Longer days

there is a mounting body of evidence showing correlation between number of hours worked and decline in both mental health and physical health

Longer workweeks

A friend of mine who read an earlier draft of this article also made the excellent point that 2 hours at work often aren’t equivalent to 2 hours at home

Burnout

The graphs above show that you can indeed get more stuff done by working more, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, you end up with a compounding negative return. But therein also lies a clue: crunch time is fine as long as there is a recovery period afterwards.

Exerting back-pressure

Perversely, this happens more in companies where the employees feel particularly dedicated to the company’s work; employees absorb more work and tighter deadlines by working harder because they care about what they’re working towards.

I want to stress that back-pressure does not mean “just say no”. Instead, effective back-pressure is all about negotiation. [...] when you’re near capacity and someone approaches you with more work, you should present them with what work would need to be dropped in order to take on their work instead.

Working smarter

The first is to get a given thing done faster.
The second is to better choose the order in which you do things such that your time is spent where it matters most. [...] The most needed; is blocking other people; or the closest to completion.
The third is to be more cognisant of what you work on.
the fourth is to be strategic about when you work.

As a wise mentor of mine has pointed out repeatedly to me, working smarter helps, but the real superpower is resting smarter. [...] The important thing is that you feel like that time is replenishing the same batteries you exhaust at work.

Finding the time

The important thing is that you feel like that time is replenishing the same batteries you exhaust at work.