Work hours

The other day I was about to leave the office at 11:30pm when I ran into a colleague. He looked at me enviously and said, "You're going home already? This is a decent hour to go home." He sighed, and moved on to finish the day's work.

How much work is reasonable? What time is a decent hour to go home? At a deeper level, what role should work play in our lives?

These days our identity is increasingly sutured to our work. A piece of career advice that has become so commonplace as to be a cliche is, "be passionate about your work." Certainly, you'd be much better at work if you feel this way. You'd probably be happier as well because, after all, we spend so much of our life at work.

But the danger I see in this advice is that we've come to live to work. Work, in other words, has so consumed our lives that we no longer have a coherent identity as anything else. A good worker is one who sacrifices personal time to push a project forward. If you don't, well, maybe you should do something else because you don't seem to be passionate about it! The bar is constantly reset higher, and personal time disappears.