Working Hard or Hardly Working...

So what's my excuse for the sabbatical from blog entry writing - this time I'm going with "working hard." However, in an ironic twist, I'm basing this particular entry on the excuse for my latest layoff from blog writing. There are a few points about working hard that I have to make. First off, I've been very fortunate thus far in my almost 5-year career to essentially set my own hours and I've never been pressured to work more than a standard 40 hour week. As a salaried or exempt employee I don't get compensated for any hours I work overtime anyway on most projects. My general rule of thumb is as long as I am meeting my deadlines and goals and my managers aren't asking me to do so, there was really no need to put in needless extra hours. Doing a quick Google search (http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils09.pdf) the average Male aged 25-54 in the US works for 44.1 hours a week. Counting holidays, appointments, and vacations I'm probably about or slightly below on average throughout my career.

My current project has been a little different, I've been asked to work weekends, holidays and put in long hours to meet some hard deadlines. I've been working more like 50+ hours a week, and although that doesn't sound like much more let me see if I can logically get back to my original excuse. Upcoming deadlines require a series of rather tedious tasks, and it hasn't been my choice to work longer because I've been "asked" to do so. This extra hour+ a day is spent working hard and efficiently on tedious stuff that I didn't want to do on my own. This requires an equivalent amount of "decompression" time when I get home from work (as Sarah likes to call it). Each extra minute past my normal baseline work day (a 9 hour day or less) causes an extra minute of staring at the TV blankly when I get home. Thus I have a least an hour less to devote to blog generating ideas and writing entries, and here we are back to my original excuse. The silver lining in all this is that it shouldn't last forever (deadlines are approaching) and this project will actually pay me for overtime. Otherwise I'd be in the same situation as Alice here:

Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), I appear to be getting somewhat more used to the longer hours (I certainly was able to do this during my college years), so I hope to get more back into the swing of things regarding blogging.

I guess it could be worse, according to the National Science Foundation if I had a PhD and worked at a university, my average work week would be 50.6 hours. This is opposed to 47.6 hours for PhDs in industry/self-employment, and 45.2 hours for those in government. Hope they get paid overtime...