How Long Are Your Working Hours?
This blog will be a little different.
I ran three LinkedIn polls asking about the working hours of participants. I had done this kind of thing before, but not as a set.
There was no guarantee that many, or even any, would respond to all three polls. Looking at the engagement I can see various names in common.
There were well over 500 responses in total, albeit for a set of single day snapshots, and that feels like a decent sample size to explore some conclusions.
Most of my audience is in senior leadership positions or they are running their own ship. Given my professional background, plenty of my followers are in teaching. A chunk of those who are not are in other public sector jobs, such as local government, NHS or the police but there’s plenty in the private and voluntary sector too.
Let’s start with the polls themselves.
Polls
Poll 1 - What time did you start working this morning?
Three quarters said before 8am, including almost a third before 7am. Very few, of my audience at least, are starting work after the school run or at a time within a ‘traditional’ 9pm to 5pm.
LinkedIn only allows for four options in a poll, but comments added a little more detail. One respondent gave 4.40am to 5am as the normal start time.
I am going to make an assumption or two and work on the basis that 7.30am is the average start time.
Poll 2 - What time did you finish work yesterday?
These responses formed a neat normal distribution shape.
Given this I will work on the basis that 6pm is the average time for finishing work.
Rather disconcertingly I would also say that 7.30am to 6pm is a pretty typical routine for me.
Having said that there is nothing to say that the majority of those who started work the earliest are those who finish early, or late.
As a result I asked the third question below.
Poll 3 - How many hours did you spend working yesterday?
The poll asked for responses to be given on the basis of ‘work done at any time’.
So the minutes and hours spent clearing an inbox, talking to a colleague or finishing a document which might have taken place before ‘arriving’ and after ‘leaving’ needed to count.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the responses to polls 1 and 2, the most popular answer was the one with the longest hours. More than 10 hours was the standard.
Given the breadth of potential answers covered by ‘10+’ it is not too much of a stretch to suggest double figures is the standard. The fact that the ‘average’ working hours from polls 1 and 2 was 7.30am to 6pm means that this is not a surprise. I didn’t ask but I am not confident there are a lot of lengthy lunch breaks going on.
There will be outliers with any average. As indicated above ‘more than 10’ hours can mean anything up to 20, and possibly even beyond.
You might find this far-fetched, but I’ve seen it to the point of asking a coaching client ‘any particular reason you went to bed?’ The answer is obvious, but the implication is that if you know you have to stop then what can you do to stop earlier?
For now I’m going to ask you five questions about your working day, with sub questions underneath, and I will return to this theme in a future blog.
1. Do you plan what time you will finish your working day when you start?
And if you do, to what extent do you stick to it?
If you see an opportunity to finish early, do you take it?
If you had an emergency and had to start later than normal, would you still finish at the same time?
2. How often do you finish all the key tasks you wanted to complete in your working day?
To what extent do you determine the key tasks you intend to complete in a working day? Or is it just what is closer to hand?
Is the set of tasks realistic or do you assume you have far more time available than you actually have?
To what extent do you plan ahead so that every key task has a particular day and time when it will be done?
3. What proportion of your time is spent on your key areas of responsibility?
Are you perpetually ‘busy’ but never making the boat go faster?
Do you deliberately make time for the ‘deep work’ or blindly hope you will be able to fit it in somewhere?
How many projects are burning a hole in your desk?
4. Who decides how you are spending your time?
Are you making the big decisions or are others taking your time as though it was their own resource?
Are decisions made about how long each meeting or call will take? Or is there a default period, let’s say an hour for arguments sake, which is used without thinking it through?
Which types of work do you undertake when you are at your freshest, and what do you leave for the hours when you could be tiring?
5. Are you spending time on other people’s jobs?
Are you doing the work of other people?
Has it become ‘easier’ to carry out tasks for others rather than hold them to account to do it themselves?
Have those you manage become used to not having to deal with their own responsibilities?
Within all of these lies many possibilities for how your time can be used in different ways, including not working and making sure you are fresh to make the best possible decisions.
If you knew that you could be more effective by working 25% less hours - how would you start?
Remember that
Senior leaders can get very stuck in a routine and lose a sense that their job could be done differently. The truth is there are thousands of different ways of doing any job.
Everyone has a point where the number of hours means that the quality of performance not only dips, and may even go backwards. There is also a cumulative effect for those who go to the edge of that number of hours every day.
How can I help you?
1. One to one coaching programmes for senior leaders who are swamped by their jobs so they can thrive in life. Click here to discover where you are on your journey from Frantic to Fulfilled? Just 5 minutes of your time and you will receive a full personalised report with guidance on your next steps.
2. Team coaching programmes - working IN a team is not the same as working AS a team and yet they are often treated as if they are the same. I help teams move from the former to the latter, and generate huge shifts in productivity and outcomes.
3. Talks, workshops and seminars - including topics relevant to the two areas above plus explaining Gen Z to Gen X and dealing with the intergenerational workplace. Speaker showreel here.
4. My book The Snowflake Myth will be published in September 2025 - to receive a free chapter (when available 😬) please click here.
