How much of your time is yours?
I’m very lucky. One of the luckiest people on the planet, in fact. I’m an able-bodied, white, heterosexual, cis-gendered man. I was born to middle class parents in one of the more prestigious neighborhoods in the capital of one of the wealthiest welfare states in the world. I’m telling you this so that I wouldn’t appear unaware of my myriad privileges as it might seem like I’m complaining about having to go to work. Which I kind of am, I guess.
I’m also professionally lucky, which is more what this article is really about. I have a good job doing something I’ve wanted to do professionally since I was about 13 years old. I get a decent salary, I have a certain amount of freedom and the workplace is close by even when I’m not working remotely. Everything seems to be working for me. Yet, I feel like my work is taking up too much of my life. And it’s not just me. Recently, it seems there’s a new movement of people figuring out that their jobs might not be worth all that work. That we might be working too much for the benefit of no-one but a handful of rich folk. In fact, that’s what I wanted to talk about. But let’s get back to me for a moment.
Look at me, please
Since the thing that happened in 2020 happened, I’ve worked almost exclusively from home. That’s cut down the length of my workday by more than an hour. When I say workday, of course, I also mean preparing for work and commuting. Because let’s be honest, those eight hours at the office weren’t the only hours I spent on work. I realize my workday is pretty much the best case scenario in today’s world, save for a few liars on Instagram who pretend like they only work a couple of hours a week. So, let’s go through this best case scenario.
I wake up and go out for a run. My work is sedentary so I have to exercise regularly on my own time so that my body doesn’t completely break down by the time I’m forty. I come back home, take a shower and get dressed. I make a quick breakfast and sit down at my desk. I usually have a few minutes to eat before I start working, but sometimes I eat while I work.
I work at home, so I’m pretty comfortable, but I’m still at work. I take a lunch break in the middle of the day, but I can usually be reached during that time, too. I stop working in the afternoon when my day ends, but sometimes I leave Slack on, since there might be questions or something near the evening. Sometimes people send me messages about work stuff pretty late and I usually answer. I try not to exhaust myself in the evenings, or drink a lot, or stay up late. I need to do it all over again the next day after all, and it’s unprofessional to be really tired at work.
Let’s break that down
My workday is officially seven and a half hours. Pretty standard here in Finland. Eight hours, minus the half-hour lunch break that’s not paid for. But since I have to sleep a certain amount, I have to eat at certain times and I have to exercise with certain time constraints to stay in working condition, there’s a bit more to my commitment to my employer than those seven and a half hours I get paid for. Like I said before, I’m very lucky. And yet.
So seven and a half hours is what I get paid for. The half hour lunch break in the middle isn’t really free time, since it’s not enough to do anything other than quickly feed myself to remain in working condition. So the day is eight hours. Except that I can’t not shower before work, at least if I’m going to the office. So that’s more like eight and a half. But I need to have some breakfast before work or I’ll be unable to concentrate, and I need to get dressed since cameras are on during meetings, so we’re really pushing nine here.
I might go for a long walk rather than a quick run in the morning, but since my time is limited and I have to get some exercise to stay healthy so I wouldn’t be out of work all the time, even that time is at least partly affected by the needs of my employer. So is my bedtime. My parents aren’t here to tell me to go to bed, but I need to sleep at a specific time and for a sufficient amount of time or I can’t perform my duties at work properly.
My job, to some extent, dictates when I eat, when I sleep, when I exercise, how I start my day, how I end my day and for the most part, how I spend my day. Even in my luckiest-of-the-lucky, best case scenario, working-from-home, creative professional job, my job takes up, even by a charitable estimate, about ten hours a day, five days a week. There are 168 hours in a week. 56 of those I should spend sleeping. That leaves 62 hours for me, including the weekends.
That doesn’t factor in thinking about work and talking about work stuff with my colleagues in the evenings or weekends. It also assumes I don’t have to commute and that I don’t work overtime. So really about half of my waking life is controlled by the needs of my employer, one way or another. Now that’s me and my fortunate ass. Most people aren’t as lucky.
What about someone even slightly less fortunate?
Let’s create a fictional character. I’ll call her Sam. I named her after Samantha Carter from Stargate SG-1 because this is my article and I do what I want.
Sam lives in the global north, central Europe maybe. Sam has a pretty average job, average home, average commute, average family and so on. Let’s say it’s a customer service job, thirty minute commute, a partner, one kid, no pets. Sam does yoga when she can.
Sam spends eight hours at work. Eight fifteen, actually, since her parking spot is a bit far from her office and she has to sign in on her floor and sign out before she gets her stuff from the employee lockers downstairs. She doesn’t think of that as work, though, so it’s fine. Neither does she consider it work when she sits in her car for half an hour before and after work, but it’s not like she’d be doing that if she wouldn’t have to go to work.
Sam doesn’t wear a lot of makeup and isn’t super particular about her hair at work, but she gets weird looks and concerned questions when she’s not wearing any makeup, so she puts in just a little effort into her appearance before leaving for work. She tells herself it’s for her, even though she definitely wouldn’t do that if she was going out for a walk or staying home. She also got some comments about her sweatpants at work that one time, even though customers don’t actually see her. So, she tries to dress a bit more professionally.
It only takes her half an hour to get ready in the morning, not including a quick breakfast which takes about fifteen minutes. That, and the fifteen minute workout she does. She drives to work and sits for most of the day, so she has to at least stretch in the morning.
Her commute takes half an hour. Well, she has to drop the kid off to daycare on her way, which takes ten extra minutes, but she doesn’t factor it in, even though she wouldn’t do that if she didn’t have to go to work. She picks the kid up again after work, so it’s really more like forty minutes each way. She’s not crazy about the daycare, but it’s what they can afford in the area, so it is what it is. It’s fine.
After work, it’s grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, looking after the kid. Her partner shares these duties, of course, so a couple of times a week she has time to go to a yoga class. She wants to go to a different yoga class, but this one is closer to the office, so she can actually go there after work and make it home before it’s super late. Sometimes she allows herself a glass of wine on a weeknight after putting the kid to bed, but not every day and no more than a glass. She has to be alert at work in the morning of course, which also means she goes to bed at ten. She’d love to stay up and watch old movies or read a book, but she knows how hard the next day is if she doesn’t get enough sleep. Before going to bed, she preps her lunch for work and makes sure she has some decent, clean clothes for tomorrow.
She’s never thought of it as work-related activity, but her evening routine is entirely dictated by the needs of her employer. It only takes about fifteen minutes a night, but it’s something. She spends about one hour a week in total washing her work clothes, which she otherwise wouldn’t wear. Let’s divide that up to ten minutes a day to be on the safe side.
Just her work and the things she has to do because of work take up about eleven hours a day, five days a week. Twelve, if her partner needs the car, since public transport is a bit of a hassle. But let’s be charitable and go with eleven.
That’s 55 hours a week. She gets paid for 37 and a half. That’s not factoring in her agonizing in bed about that mistake she made at work that doesn’t really matter at all except to her nitpicky boss. Or her replaying that customer interaction from three days before in her head for the fourth time. It doesn’t factor in those days when the commute takes longer, or when she has to work late. Nor does it factor in the annual three-day training seminar where she spends every waking minute with colleagues, trying to become better employees.
It doesn’t take into account her not spending enough time with her child, not getting the exercise she wants, not getting to relax and read a book or watch those old movies she likes. It doesn’t consider her having to sit in that fucking car every day, or her taking home all the emotional baggage from being nice to thirty different assholes complaining to her about some product or service she has no control over. It doesn’t count in the fact that she has to take her holidays in two chunks instead of one so the company wouldn’t get short staffed, meaning that she probably can’t go on that three-week holiday in the countryside she’s been dreaming about before she’s 65. She’s 35 now, so it’s only going to be about as long as her entire life so far.
And she’s still one of the lucky ones, not working 12 hour days in a sweatshop or an Amazon warehouse. Not getting physically threatened by customers for minimum wage. Not starving despite working two jobs. Not developing lung cancer at the mines by the time she’s forty. It’s fine. She’s fine. It’s just half of her waking life. No big deal.
And we’re still assuming that all the time she spends taking care of her child or doing chores at home or going to the doctor or the bank or parent-teacher conferences or fucking Ikea is her time. But I guess that’s not what this article is about, so let’s just say it’s not her job.
Even so, it seems even the lucky ones are spending at least half of their lives working. Usually for someone else.
Degrees of lost time
If you consider working for someone else “first degree lost time”, commuting and preparing for work could be considered “second degree lost time”. I think it’s necessary to introduce one more degree, however. The time you make compromises on because of your work should be considered “third degree lost time”. This, in practice, means something like Sam taking her kid to a daycare she doesn’t particularly like or going to a yoga class she doesn’t particularly like because those are the ones she has time for considering her work schedule and commute.
The worst thing about second and third degree lost time is that even if you loved your job and got paid well for it, those two other degrees of time lost to your job would remain largely the same. No matter what you do, if you have to work for a living, you’re losing a ton of time to it.
Imagine not living under capitalism
Since productivity and automation have gone up at an insane rate for decades, there’s only so much actually necessary work left to be done by people. So ask yourself, why are we still spending all this time at work and who benefits from it? What could our lives be like if we didn’t have to dedicate most of it to working? Who would you spend your time with? Where would you go? If it was up to you and you’d make the same amount of money anyway, how many hours a week would you work? Would you even do what you do now?
Go ahead, do the math. How much of your time actually belongs to your employer? How many hours do you have left in a day after all that and sleep? How much of that time do you still spend just to maintain your life by cooking, cleaning, shopping and so on?
How much of your time is yours?
