How much time should a happy person spend at work?

Do you spend too much time at work?  Is overtime a way of life or, even worse, do you take work home for the weekends?  If so, you are not alone.   Approximately 60% of employees are estimated to work on the weekends.  All the while a little voice in the back of our heads is whispering, just think what you could be doing if all your time wasn't consumed with work.

All work and no play...

This is not a new sentiment.  Nor is it confined to the average citizen. Even Gaius Octavius, aka Augustus, emperor of Rome, was worn down by the work-a-day grind.  In the book On the Shortness of Life, Seneca says:

The divine Augustus, to whom the gods gave more than to any man, never ceased to pray for rest for himself and to seek release from the affairs of state.

Augustus never arrived at his eagerly anticipated retirement and as far as I can tell, he never even took a vacation.  Laying the foundations for an enduring Pax Romana is a full time job, it might even require a little overtime now and then.

Work can become all-consuming for non-emperors, too. Meeting the seemingly never-ending demands of bosses, customers, clients, and co-workers leaves many of us with precious little time to care for ourselves and satisfy our own needs, hopes, and desires.

Seneca's explanation is that we simply don't place enough value on our time.

People trifle with the most precious commodity of all; and it escapes their notice because it's an immaterial thing that doesn't appear to the eyes, and for that reason it's valued very cheaply - or rather, it has practically no value at all.

Most likely, neither Augustus nor Seneca ever heard the phrase "work-life balance," but I'm sure they would understand the concept.  Assign the proper priorities to "work" and "life," then allocate your time accordingly.  Right.  Like that ever happens. My "work" is never balanced with my "life."

Part of the reason is the nature of my work.  The patent office will only give an inventor a patent on a new idea.  If there is any evidence that the idea was already known at the time the patent application is filed, no patent for the inventor.  That includes the inventor talking about, writing about, or offering to sell their invention.  So deadlines are baked into the process.

This creates serious time pressure. For example, one of my clients is a member of many standards bodies that define how my client's products (and all of their competitors and fellow members' products) must operate.  Holding a patent on a standardized technology is therefore very valuable because everyone has to use it.

The members meet several times a year to present ideas and haggle over what to include in the final standards.  Most of the time between meetings is spent working on new ideas and so the inventors don't finalize the inventions until a few days before the meeting.  In order to protect the inventions that might get included in a standard, a patent application has to be filed before the invention is discussed at the meeting, which leaves me with precious little time to do my part.

The work is intense and sometimes nerve-wracking.  I have to learn the technology, interview the inventors, prepare and revise the application (with a 20-plus page specification, claims, and drawings), and file the application.   There are some early mornings, long days, and late nights, particularly if the inventors are located in Europe, India, China, or Japan, as they often are.  Yikes!  Just explaining the process gets my heart pumping and my palms sweaty.

Most of the anxiety that comes with a short-fuse application is anticipatory.  I always worry that this will be the application that doesn't make it to the patent office by the deadline.  That all vanishes once the work starts.  Almost a soon as I begin reading the disclosure that describes the invention, I lock into the flow state, where I (mostly) stay until I click SUBMIT on the United States Patent & Trademark Office application filing page.  And in the end, the applications always get filed on time.  It's kind of a specialty of mine and I take great pride in being able to deliver a high quality application on short notice.

Nonetheless, once the rush application is done and filed, I start hoping for a break and thinking that life would be so much better if I didn't have to spend my time grinding out patent applications.

... makes Jack a dull boy?

The impulse to avoid work, even though it provides some of the most stimulating challenges in our lives, is pervasive.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that subjects in his studies of flow consistently report that they have some of their most positive experiences while working.  Nevertheless, these same people report that they would prefer not to be working and their motivation on the job is low.

The belief that leisure is the best way to spend time is also nearly universal, even though people tend to be less happy at leisure.  Csikszentmihalyi's subjects reported surprisingly low moods during their leisure time while also claiming that they would prefer more leisure time.  Csikszentmihalyi calls this the paradox of work.

What does this contradictory pattern mean?  There are several possible explanations, but one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses.

Or maybe we just aren't paying attention.  The thought that work could be as enjoyable, if not more so, than leisure never occurred to me until I read Flow, and even then I spent many years viewing work as a necessary evil (or at least an unwelcome imposition). Only recently did I put the idea to the test by committing to more challenges at work and consciously noticing whether I enjoyed it or not.

The result?  For the most part, challenging work is enjoyable, as predicted.  I find I am generally willing to make the trade-off between work and leisure to tackle a tough project.  However, there is a limit.  Skipping walks or meditation is tolerable if I'm deeply immersed in drafting an application, but if work squeezes them out for too long, I get resentful and unhappy.  Reading and writing about new inventions is fine, but not to the exclusion of reading and writing about life.  Or simply living life.

So does working hard feel like happiness on the good days?  Not really.  When I am happy, I feel a sense of lightness, freedom, and joy.  Crunching through a patent application, particularly if I am on a tight deadline, is more like a weighty challenge. Satisfying but not joyous.

Flow may be an important clue to the mystery of happiness, but it is not the same as happiness.  Csikszentmihalyi may be correct that we are not heeding the evidence of our senses when we are working, but it also seems plausible that measures of flow are missing some ingredients of happiness. One possibility suggested by Csikszentmihalyi is that happy flow results from an internal motivation, whereas the less happy state of flow reported at work is produced by external motivators, like bosses, customers, clients, and co-workers.

This agrees with my experience.  Flow at work is not as sure to produce enjoyment as flow on my own time.  And too much work, even in flow, produces diminishing returns of happiness.  Perhaps flow and work are overlapping states.  Work without flow is less likely to be happy work.  And work with flow is more likely to be happy work, But not all flow at work is guaranteed to produce happy work.