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To call Dr. Maurice Ramirez a workaholic would be an understatement. For starters, Ramirez is an attending emergency room physician with the Florida Hospital Memorial System in Kissimmie, Florida. He's also the founder and president of Disaster Life Support of North America, managing partner of High Alert, and founding chair of the American Board of Disaster Medicine.
"I'm always doing something," he says of his schedule. "Some days I don't even know how I find time to eat."
Outside of these everyday responsibilities, Ramirez is an author (his new book, You Can Survive Anything, Any Where, Every Time, will be published later this year), a pundit on the issues of disaster readiness and recovery, and a consultant.
All told, Ramirez estimates he usually works 60 to 70 hours in a given week. And according to recent studies from the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Washington, D.C., he's not alone.
The Center for Work-Life study is a 2006 project of a private-sector initiative called the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force. The survey, which included responses from 1,564 full-time employees, indicated that 62 percent of all respondents work more than 50 hours a week, 35 percent work more than 60 hours a week, and 10 percent work more than 80 hours a week.
The NBER study, which also came out in 2006, indicated that among college-educated men working full-time in the U.S., those putting in 50-hour weeks rose from 22.2 percent to 30.5 percent between 1980 and 2001.
The bottom line: even when excluding typical 40-minute average daily commute times, the 40-hour work-week is a thing of the past.
"Even among those of us who seem to 'have it easy,' the average working week seems to get longer and longer," says Ellen Kossek, professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "With so many of us working so much of the time, finding a balance is that much more important."
The new extreme
Workaholism certainly is nothing new. Older generations are famous for a tough work ethic, and overtime pay came into fashion in the 1940s and 1950s. Heck, even Willy Loman, the main character from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, surely put in his share of 60-hour weeks.
Nowadays, however, overachieving professionals have been recast as "road warriors" who work longer and harder than ever. Many of them add work to their regular jobs in the form of consulting. Perhaps most disturbingly, they're taking less time off.
This was the impetus for the Center for Work-Life Policy. As part of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, Carolyn Buck-Luce, a consultant, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Center, came up with 10 attributes that characterize this new breed of worker. They considered anyone who has at least five of these characteristics as "extreme." The characteristics include: - Unpredictable flow of work
- Fast-paced work under tight deadlines
- Inordinate scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job
- Work-related events outside regular work hours
- Availability to clients 24/7
- Responsibility for profit and loss
- Responsibility for mentoring and recruiting
- Large amount of travel
- Large number of direct reports
- Physical presence at workplace at least ten hours a day
Another notable trait: these workers are losing sight of the need to balance their professional and personal lives, taking less and less time for themselves.
The Center for Work-Life study indicated that 42 percent of respondents take 10 or fewer vacation days per year, and 55 percent claimed they have had to cancel vacation plans regularly. Not only are these workers taking less time off, but work-related issues frequently bleed into personal time.
"We are more connected and productive than ever, but there is no automatic 'off' switch," says Buck-Luce, who doubles as global pharmaceutical sector leader at Ernst & Young, a professional services firm in New York. "The expectations of 'always on' have altered the reality of the work day [to the point where it now] has no natural end."
Driving forces
What's prompting people to work so hard? Satisfaction, for starters. Kossek, the professor, describes work as "seductive" because "we get immediate feedback," unlike an institution such as marriage, where constant work is necessary.
Survey statistics support this claim. According to Buck-Luce, many respondents said they love the intellectual challenges and thrill of achieving something big. Other motivating factors included working with brilliant colleagues, appreciation of receiving recognition and respect, and, perhaps most importantly, passion for the business (whatever it is).
Naturally, compensation is a big incentive, too--it doesn't take a genius to deduce that many people are driven by the mighty dollar. Ramirez, the doctor, says this is an impetus for him, not so much because he wants to be rich, but because he amassed more than $400,000 in debt by attending medical school.
"My student loans amount to a 30-year mortgage," he jokes. "Nobody told me how expensive it is to go to medical school until I already committed to the student loans."
Other drivers are less constructive--for instance, competition is skyrocketing. Mergers and acquisitions like Microsoft Corp.'s proposed takeover of Yahoo! create layoffs, which pit a bigger pool of workers against one another for promotions, meaning job security at big companies is tenuous at best.
For some people, the number of available jobs is declining, too. Outsourcing is one cause, but some of these jobs are simply disappearing. Catalyst, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding opportunities for women in business, reported that in 2005 there were 368 fewer corporate officer positions in the Fortune 500 than there had been 10 years earlier.
Interestingly, research indicates that technology may be at least partly to blame for our longer hours. According to the Center for Work-Life survey, 72 percent of respondents said that technology helped them do their job well, 59 percent said it lengthens their work day, and 64 percent talked about how technology encroaches on family time.
Perhaps nobody exemplifies this better than John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Halamka, who also serves as chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston and chief executive of MA-Share, Massachusetts's data sharing organization, recently e-mailed a photo of himself on the top of a 13,000-foot mountain--the very same peak where he used his Blackberry to handle a major controversy about personal health records standards.
"The way I describe my work is like changing the wings on a 747 airplane while it's flying," says Halamka, who blogs about his busy life at least once a week. "People expect total reliability, and it's my job to deliver."
Finding balance
Sometimes, however, the constant expectation to reliably deliver can cause overachieving professionals to sacrifice too much of themselves. The best way to counteract extreme work is to find the balance of personal and professional that works best.
One strategy that seems to work is periodically to unplug completely. Halamka says he takes brief periods of what he calls "deep focus" throughout the day to catch up with his wife or help his daughter with her homework.
Ramirez has a similar strategy, making a habit of spending uninterrupted quality time with his two sons. When he signs on for work at a hospital, he tells the chief that this family time is not negotiable. Over the years, he adds, some emergency rooms have penalized him for taking this approach.
"I live with the consequences," he says. "To me, preserving that family time is the least I can do."
Mark Sullivan, chief executive of Chicago-based WhittmanHart Consulting, takes this philosophy one step further, suggesting that those workers who are prone to workaholism should consider family time like another client, and always treat this client as Number One.
To do this, Sullivan suggests instituting daily routines, time management, and, most importantly, self-reflection.
"Perfect balance isn't attainable and 'balance' is different for all families," he says. "If you let your family know you are out of balance, and seek their help to get back in a productive routine, you'll get back to your routines faster than if you try to work through it alone." Matt Villano, a freelance writer and editor based in Healdsburg, California, works an average of 55 to 65 hours a week, depending on how many assignments he has and how much time he procrastinates by watching reruns of "Law & Order." He writes because he loves tinkering with parts of speech.
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