Working More Doesn’t Make You More Productive

Historically, the worker who logged the most hours at work was an organization’s most valuable employee. But that isn’t necessarily the case anymore.  Now, as AI promises to transform how we work, and the four-day workweek movement gains steam, it is time to admit once and for all that working more does not make you more productive. For those who work on an assembly line, repeating the same task over and over, working more hours may have meant more work got done. But there are a lot of ways to fill an hour at work these days, and not all of them contribute equally to the bottom line. In fact, many workers could dutifully keep themselves busy for an entire day without doing anything of real value, like answering pointless emails and attending unnecessary meetings. Today many are struggling under the unsustainable repercussions of applying an industrial-era measure of productivity, namely dividing output by hours, to our modern knowledge economy. As a result of our emphasis on hours over outcomes, workers are under constant pressure to forgo their rightfully earned time off to prove their dedication and commitment. Those who finish their tasks more quickly are typically rewarded with more work to fill the hours they’ve saved, in what is sometimes referred to as “performance punishment” or “quiet promotion.” A colleague who works through their evenings, weekends, or lunch breaks to complete the same workload, meanwhile, is often more likely to be praised or even promoted for their perceived dedication. This dynamic ultimately creates more pressure to look busy than to deliver value. According to Atlassian’s 2024 State of Teams report, 65% of knowledge workers believe it is more important to quickly respond to messages than to make progress on key priorities. Asana’s 2025 Anatomy of Work Index, meanwhile, found that knowledge workers spend on average 103 hours in unnecessary meetings, 209 hours on duplicative work, and 352 hours talking about work each year. As a result, 88% complain they’re falling behind on time-sensitive projects and major initiatives. Ironically, the pressure to look busy at work is getting in the way of actually getting work done, and this “performative busyness” holds back organizational productivity while wearing down workers’ wellbeing. Evolving beyond our emphasis on hours, however, is much easier said than done, as hours have the undeniable benefit of being universal. Whether you’re a banker on Wall Street or a cocoa farmer in Nigeria, focusing on if someone is present for a given 60-minute-long increment allows us to measure workers in the exact same way. But it is time for us to think smarter about work. That is ultimately what the four-day workweek movement seeks to inspire. It’s not about giving everyone an extra vacation day each week. When positioned as a performance-contingent incentive, the four-day workweek becomes a rallying cry to refocus our time and energy at work on the things that really matter to the business. In fact, the nations that log the most hours at work also tend to have the weakest economies, while workers in many of the world’s most successful economies—not to mention happiest countries—tend to work the fewest. That is, with one notable exception. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), workers in its 38 member countries average 1,736 hours on the job each year, or about 32 hours per week. That includes full-time, part-time, and seasonal workers, and accounts for absenteeism resulting from sick leave, parental leave, vacation time, statutory holidays, illness, injury, and even bad weather and labour disputes. The data demonstrates how work schedules differ around the world, and sometimes drastically. Workers in Peru log the most hours at 2,263 per year, or about 43.5 per week, followed closely by Mexico at over 42 hours a week, with Costa Rica placing third with an average of about 41. At the other end of the spectrum, German workers—long-renowned for their efficiency—average about 25.5 per week, followed by Denmark with 26.5 and Norway at 27. When you look at data from the International Institute for Management Development, it’s clear that the countries with the longest working hours tend to feature less wealthy economies, while the countries with the shortest schedules tend to rank higher in global competitiveness. In fact, most above average economies log below average work hours, and vice-versa. Comparing a handful of European countries of similar sizes and populations with drastically different work schedules demonstrates this pattern well. At one end of the spectrum, Croatia, Greece, and Poland feature the most working hours in the European Union, and some of the bloc’s worst performing economies. Denmark, Germany, and Norway, meanwhile, work the fewest hours and feature its strongest economies. There is, however, one major outlier: the United States of America. Despite boasting the OECD’s strongest economy, America is the only G7 nation with a work schedule more demanding than the OECD average.   According to the study, Americans work about 1,800 hours per year, equivalent to about 34.5 hours per week. While the United States has the highest GDP per capita in the G20, second place goes to the Germans, who work 35% less, or more than 450 fewer hours per year.  In fact, the United States’ economic competitiveness—not to mention the happiness of its citizenry—ranks below many countries that work much fewer hours, including Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands, and Norway.  There are many reasons why America bucks this global trend, but much of it comes down to an historic reliance on unions to fight for time off and their waning influence today, coupled with a demanding work culture that hasn’t evolved much since the industrial revolution.    America is, after all, the only developed nation that does not guarantee maternity leave. More than half of Americans also don’t take any of their allotted vacation time; not because they don’t need the time off, but because they fear punishment for doing so.  A study published last year found that managers believe staff return from time off more energized and productive. However, those same managers deemed workers who took basic steps to detach from work—like not answering emails on weekends or using an out of office message during vacations—less committed and less worthy of promotion, in what the researchers label “the detachment paradox.”  If you want to increase individual, organizational, or even national productivity, increasing hours probably won’t move the needle. In fact, it could do more harm than good. In today’s knowledge economy and tomorrow’s AI reality, the most successful individuals, organizations, and nations won’t be those that work the most hours, but those who are most effective at making their working hours count. Redefining productivity for the 21st century, however, requires making big, often difficult changes to longstanding workplace norms, and likely won’t succeed without enthusiastic employee buy-in. By leveraging a four-day workweek as an incentive, thousands of organizations around the world—including hundreds in the United States—have been able to find sufficient gains to more than make up for the loss in hours. Through that process, staff often discover how to best prioritize their time and energy, reduce approval layers, make meetings shorter and more efficient and leverage new technologies to do more in less time.   If you measure productivity with a traditional, hours-based mindset, the four-day workweek represents a massive loss. If you measure productivity in outcomes, it can represent a massive gain.