Has someone ever come up to you and said that you work too much?
In turn, do you know anyone who could be called a “workaholic?”
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It’s hard to believe that someone could love work so much that it borders on an addiction, but the term “workaholic” is thrown around so much, it actually has its own day.
Wednesday marks National Workhaholics Day, which brings about some questions.
Do Americans work more than ever?
Is it true that America is home to more “workaholics” than any other country?
Does working more actually lead to added production?
Thanks to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental entity based in Paris with 38 countries as members, let’s shed some light on how much people work, around the U.S. and across the world.
The U.S. is NOT No. 1 in terms of hours worked.
According to the OECD, the United States ranks No. 12 in the world in terms of yearly hours worked by the average worker at 1,811 hours.
No. 1 is Colombia at 2,405 hours, followed by Mexico at 2,226 hours. The rest of the top 10 is Costa Rica (2,149), Chile (1,963), Korea (1,901), Israel (1,892), Greece (1,886), Malta (1,882), Russia (1,874) and Cyprus (1,837).
Germany has the fewest average hours worked, at 1,341 hours per employee.
The average work hours have actually decreased over time.
The 1,811 average work hours per year by the average worker in the U.S. actually represents a slight decrease in what it was more than 40 years ago, according to Clockify.
Back in 1979, U.S. workers had a yearly average of 1,829 hours worked in a year.
It’s a slight drop, although not nearly the decrease other countries have experienced.
Germany went from 2,186 hours worked in a year to 1,341 last year; Spain went from 1,954 to 1,644, while Japan went from 2,126 to 1,607.
Added work hours don’t lead to increased productivity.
Back in 2014, Stanford University did a study that essentially destroyed the belief that working more hours leads to added production.
The study found that productivity per hour decreased greatly when a person worked more than 50 hours in a week, so much so that people who put in 70 hours of work had the same amount of production as those who worked 55 hours.
In essence, there were 15 extra hours of pointless work, according to the study.
Do Americans work too much? Or do we work the perfect amount of hours now? Let us know in the comments below.