Mr. Narayana Murthy, the celebrated founder of Indian IT behemoth Infosys has stirred a hornet’s nest with his exhortation to the youth of India to work for 70 hours a week for building the nation.
The question is, can a person work for 70 hours in a week. 70 hours is 14 hours X 5 days or about 12 hours X 6 days. This comes from the factory mindset where workers are performing repetitive tasks in long daily shifts and management style is to drive workers to maximize output. But the reason why such long working hours are humanely impossible can be attributed to a variety of reasons.
There is this implicit and incomprehensible corporate expectation that employees should switch off their personal lives the moment they step into their office premises. People’s personal and professional lives are not mutually exclusive but intricately interconnected.
The majority of people have professional lives because they need the monetary benefits from work to sustain their personal lives. I have told my mom that if I disconnect or don’t take her call when I am in the office and if it is something urgent, she should call me again. That’s my flag to toggle my priority immediately from my professional to my personal life.
When we are working from the office, we are distracted by 1000 things happening around us. A quick dash to the office pantry for a coffee can turn into a 15-minute conversation with a colleague about something completely unrelated to work, which distracts our mind from work. When we return to our desks, it could take another 15 minutes to get our focus back to work. That is a good 30 minutes gone.
I have put in the yards and gone through the grind, and what I know is my productivity curve rises for 5 hours and then slowly starts coming down. What needs to be understood here is the difference between working hours and productive working hours.
I have come across colleagues who used to work after office hours to avoid distractions and be more productive.
So what happens when we work for 12-14 hours in a day? We are genetically wired for 8-10 hours of daily physical work. Work from office became mainstream in the 2nd half of the last century.
Our ancestors used to get physically tired and go off to sleep, but now we are getting mentally tired. Our body repairs lost and damaged cells through cell regeneration throughout the day, except that of our brain. Brain cells are regenerated at night during our sleep. Mental tiredness, largely caused by stress, has altered our sleeping patterns, and we no longer sleep like our ancestors used to after getting physically tired. Working for long hours on a day and getting stressed out can adversely impact our productivity on the following day.
Exhorting the masses to slog for long hours in the name of nation-building is capitalistic exploitation, where the majority is expected to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the few. When a country grows through such exploitation, few get to reap all the benefits, and the majority becomes expendables.
Narayana Murthy’s photo from Flickr/Image for representational purposes only.