The Real Reasons You're Working So Hard...

By Michael Mandel, with Steve Hamm in New York, Carol Matlack in Paris, Christopher Farrell in St. Paul, Minn., and Ann Therese Palmer in Chicago
BusinessWeek Online

...and what you can do about it

Honk if this sounds like you: While much of America is watching Jon Stewart, Letterman, or Leno, you're stumbling out the office door into a car-service Town Car or groping for the clicker to the BMW in the company parking lot. Once home, you slug down a beer or the last of a bottle of white wine on the door of the fridge, stuff some leftovers in your mouth, and collapse into bed beside your sleeping spouse. A half-dozen hours later, you crawl to the shower, throw on a clean shirt, pour some coffee down your throat, maybe drop a kid or two at school, and jump back on the frenetic work treadmill that you can't shut off.

The good news -- if there is any, time-challenged amigo -- is that you are not alone. More than 31% of college-educated male workers are regularly logging 50 or more hours a week at work, up from 22% in 1980. Forty percent of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, reports the National Sleep Foundation, up from 31% in 2001. About 60% of us are sometimes or often rushed at mealtime, and one-third wolf down lunch at our desks, according to a survey by the American Dietetic Assn. To avoid wasting time, we're talking on our cell phones while rushing to work, answering e-mails during conference calls, waking up at 4 a.m. to call Europe, and generally multitasking our brains out.

This epidemic of long hours at the office -- whether physically or remotely -- defies historical precedent and common sense. Over the past 25 years, the Information Revolution has boosted productivity by almost 70%. So you would think that since we're producing more in fewer hours, such gains would translate into a decrease in the workweek -- as they have in the past. But instead of technology being a time-saver, says Warren Bennis, a University of Southern California professor and author of such management classics as On Becoming a Leader, "everybody I know is working harder and longer."

And the long-hour marathons aren't a result of demanding corporations exploiting the powerless. Most of the groggy-eyed are the best-educated and best-paid -- college grads whose real wages have risen by more than 30% since the 1980s. That's a change from 25 years ago, when it was the lowest-wage workers who were most likely to put in 50 hours or more a week, according to new research by Peter Kuhn of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Fernando A. Lozano of Pomona College.

With so many managers and professionals stuck at work, there is a growing consensus among management gurus that the stuck-at-work epidemic is symptomatic of a serious disorder in the organization of corporations. The problem, in a nutshell-to-go is this: Succeeding in today's economy requires lightning-fast reflexes and the ability to communicate and collaborate across the globe. Coming up with innovative ideas, products, and services means getting people across different divisions and different companies to work together. "More and more value is created through networks," says John Helferich, a top executive and former head of research and development at Masterfoods usa, a division of Mars Inc. and the maker of such products as M&Ms. "The guys who are good at it are winning."

Unfortunately, the communication, coordination, and teamwork so essential for success these days is being superimposed on a corporate structure that has one leg still in its gray flannel suit. Without strict gatekeepers (read secretaries), Tom, Jane, and Harry feel free to plug themselves into your electronic calendar. You and a colleague in another part of the company may dream up a great idea for a new product -- but it takes months to get approvals from your boss, his boss, and their boss. Or the corporate bigwigs order you to join a taskforce that is supposed to promote collaboration and innovation -- but it ends up taking a big chunk of your time. And no matter how many layers of management were supposed to be taken out, there always seem to be more people on the e-mail distribution lists.

You are not imagining things. Despite years of cutting corporate bloat, managers are a much bigger share of the workforce than they were 15 years ago. "We've added a new set of standards without fully dropping the old," says Thomas H. Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson College and author of the new book Thinking for a Living.

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