A former boss of mine had a well-rehearsed response for any employee who complained they had too much work. There are twenty-one 8-hr workdays in a week, he would say; three in each of the seven 24-hour days. If you are only using five out of those twenty-one, you are clearly just lazy.
Although the 40-hour workweek would be a dream come true for many (unless you happen to live in Luxembourg) , there are few among us who could ever envision working the 168 hours suggested by this guy. The average full time US worker puts in 41.5 hours, making us a nation of slackers by my old boss’s standards. The hardest workers are found in Colombia, where the average work week is nearly 50 hours, still less than a 30% utilization of available time.
