You Dont Work as Hard as You Say You Do

70 hours grinding it out last week? Coulda been 80, but you lost count? Yeah, tell us all about it.

People tend to brag about how much time they put in at the office. But recent research suggests they also tend to overestimate how much they work. A lot.

And the people who overestimate the most tend to be those who actually put in the longest hours. People who claim they worked 75 hours are probably overestimating by as much as 50%.

The tendency is not confined to one country or culture. Chinese, Japanese and even Belgians share the inclination.

The human propensity to exaggerate is based on the need to distinguish oneself from the pack. The need to overestimate hours worked has become more acute as the economy has remained stagnant and the fear of losing one's pay or job has increased. What is especially interesting is the consistency with which they do it. That said, the amount of overestimation has evolved over time. The peak period for overestimation was the mid-1980s. We can not think of any cultural impetus for that. Perhaps the Death of Disco left people with too much time on their hands?

It turns out people are pretty bad at estimating lots of other tasks as well. Housework being the worst. So it may be that people tend to overestimate tasks they find boring or unpleasant because that compensates for the guilt they feel in rushing through them, doing a poor job or wasting time. Which raises interesting questions about the productivity of those putting in such prodigious hours...JL

Catherine Rampell reports in the Economix blog:

Americans tend to overestimate how many hours they work in a typical week by about 5 to 10 percent, according to a Labor Department study, with the biggest exaggerators being people who work longer weeks. The study compared people’s estimates for how much time they spent working against a time diary they were asked to keep of all their activities. Whether because of faulty memories or a desire to sound more industrious (or some combination of the two), most respondents systematically overestimated how much time they spent at work.

The typical person who reported having worked 40 hours, for example, actually worked closer to 37. The report found that “The greater the estimate, the greater the overestimate”; people who said they worked 75 hours actually worked closer to 50 hours. (That’s an overestimate of 25 hours, or 50 percent!) At the other end of the spectrum, people who worked relatively few hours (under around 25) actually ended to underestimate their hours.

The study notes that overestimates of working hours have been found in other countries as well, including Belgium, Russia, China and Japan.

Americans are also bad at properly estimating their time spent on other activities, including housework. A 1998–2001 national diary study found that people grossly exaggerated how much time they spent on housework. Men estimated spending a total of 23 hours on housework per week, versus the 10 hours they actually spent when forced to keep a time diary. Women estimated 32 hours versus 17 hours in the diary.

The margin of exaggeration for work hours has changed over time. It spiked in 1985, when the average person overstated his or her time spent working by 6.2 hours.