If you work an office job, your life is likely run by eight-hour intervals set by a corporation: 9 to 5, 8 to 4, 10 to 6. Working from home, those hours tend to expand—scrolling emails at 7, sitting at a monitor in between snippets of childcare and chores, more emails before bed. These hours dictate our sleep schedules. They determine when we have free time and how often we see our family. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are slotted around time spent at work.
But while it’s true you’re at work during those eight hours, you probably aren’t sitting at your computer doing work the entire time, even if you’re in the office. You might grab a coffee with coworkers, or take a personal phone call. And probably you spend at least some of the time doing nothing but checking TikTok or browsing Zara.
That’s not only reasonable, it’s innate. For humans, concentrating on work for every minute of an eight hour day is “impossible,” says Malissa Clark, a psychologist at the University of Georgia whose research focuses on employee well-being and workaholism.
But how many hours should we actually work? What are other people doing?
In a 2016 U.K. survey, 1,989 full-time office workers reported working an average of 2 hours and 53 minutes per day. That’s just one survey. But there’s a lot of evidence that office work just isn’t as productive as we think. In 2006, Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, gathered data from phones and computers and found that the average time people spent working on a device at a time was 2 minutes and 11 seconds, shorter than some TikTok videos. And in a survey of 1,000 American office workers in 2018, 36% of millennial and Gen-Z employees estimated that they spend two hours a day distracted by their smartphones.
No matter your intention, whether you’re working from a home office or next to your coworkers, it really is hard to work consistently at work. We’re being set up to fail, and to feel bad about it. There has to be a better way.
Why do we work eight hours a day?
If we know people can’t focus for that long, why insist that workers put in at least eight hours? “The length of the working day is not based on science; it’s based on struggle,” says Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back. Eight hours is not a figure that reflects how long a human can focus, or the amount needed to keep the economy running. It’s based, says Jaffe, “on the fact that factory workers used to work 14 hours, and then they struck and fought until they got it down to 10, and then they struck and fought until they got it down to eight.”