Is It Worth It?
Eight
Times Five
Times Fifty
Assuming you get two weeks off each year for vacation, that equals 2,000 hours, minimum, of work per year.
According to a Gallup Poll, most people average 6.8 hours of sleep per night.
Taking the same 50 weeks a year of working days, that’s 1,700 hours of sleep each year.
According to the Census Bureau, the average commute time in America is 25.4 Minutes one way, or 50.8 minutes round trip. For those working days that equates to 211 hours each year of commuting.
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics the average time spent eating and drinking per day in America is 1.17 hours. Again using the 50 weeks of 5 working days this amounts to 292 hours per year.
There are 6,000 hours available in those 50 weeks of 5 working days. Subtract everything we’ve been talking about and that leaves 1797 hours of ‘free’ time a year for everything else.
That means that added up over a year you only have 29% of your total time available to you where you are not working, sleeping, eating, or commuting during those weeks.
You’ll spend roughly the same about of time sleeping, 3.5% commuting, and 4.8% eating.
But you will spend more than any of those, 33%, working.
This activity, that we will spend more time on than any other single activity in our lives, we often do with little to no thought, blindly following what was expected of us or simply what we set out to do through our educational path.
Our tastes, over time, as we grow change. Our music tastes, our tastes in food, movies, people, even places change as we ourselves change.
Is it any wonder that perhaps our interests in work might change as well?
Perhaps we’ve been going about this all wrong, both as employers and employees. Maybe it’s not about keeping people as long as possible in their roles. What would happen if we instead tried to match people with their skills, their passions, their abilities, and their interests? Would performance go up leading to more productivity? Would morale improve? Personal sense of achievement?
Downsizing, right sizing, and cutting costs can only take us so far.
We know what will happen if we don’t change.
Perhaps we should focus on how we use our time and companies should focus on how best to use it from us. At some point, doing what we’re currently doing is going to hit a threshold that no longer serves either of us.
Time is money. But for us, our work time is costing us hours of our life. The question really comes down to Is It Worth It?