Death March

Recent research suggests that a trend toward working more hours continues, with men working almost 50 hours a week and women working nearly 44 hours. This causes productivity problems for employees. In a Families and Work Institute survey, 2/3 of the respondents indicated they didn't have enough time with their children, and almost that many felt that they were not able to spend enough time with their spouses. More than half of the respondents felt they needed more time for themselves and were overworked in the last three months. The same employees got less sleep and experienced higher levels of stress. One third of the survey's respondents report they often lack enough energy to do things with their families after work.

The study concludes thusly:

Of particular concern are the negative spillover effects that demanding and hectic jobs can have on the quality of workers' personal lives and well being. This spillover is reflected in high stress, poor coping, bad moods, and insufficient time and energy for people who are personally important, creating problems that, in turn, spill over into work and impair job performance.

It's very common for business professionals to work more than 40 hours per week. Software business experts Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood talk about the implications of this in their Stack Overflow podcast:

The Death March book by Ed Yourdon talks about this idea that yeah, you can make programmers work 80 hour weeks, and they will get twice as much done as they did in their 40 hour weeks, but you're incurring debt. And you're going to pay back that debt in triple in terms of just sort of burnout and that kind of stuff. So, you can definitely, if you want to, spend a week, if there's really a deadline, you want to make everybody work 80 hours and get the thing done, that's fine, but the week after that, you're going to get nothing done.

Teachers, though, have deadlines every day. Every day, we have classrooms full of kids who are expecting us to have a top-notch education prepared for them. Most of us write our lessons and grade assignments on our own time after school. Unlike in business, where deadlines are periodic, we face new deadlines every day.

We end up working overtime to meet this week's deadlines, but we don't get a break the next week like Atwood and Spolsky suggest business professionals should. Next week, we have more papers to grade and more lessons to plan. We do get a ten week break during the summer, but the nine months of constant deadlines can be very stressful.

One thing that leads to burnout among business professionals is the situation where employees are given tasks but not the tools they need (including time) to complete those tasks. This situation seems to be quite common in education. It's not that we don't love our jobs. It's not that we don't like the kids. But we're only human, and we have limitations. Many of us spend our evenings and weekends working, especially first year teachers.

I see a tradeoff here. We need to work hard enough to produce a top quality education for our students, but not too hard to completely burn out. Lazy teachers with poorly prepared lesson plans don't help kids. But, teachers who have meticulous and stellar curricula but who are burnt out don't help kids either. It's a classic design tradeoff.

Source: Galinsky, Kim, & Bond. Feeling overworked: When work becomes too much. Families and Work Institute, 2001.