Article
Long Working Hours and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke
Mika Kivimäki and colleagues
A meta analysis across more than half a million people. It puts a number on something usually discussed as a feeling.
Tool 46 · Develop yourself
What am I paying in health, time and relationships?
This exercise does not assume the cost is too high, does not score your balance, and gives no medical or financial advice.
A guided 18 to 22 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Who else in your house is paying for this job?
They will have a clear answer and it will be more specific than yours.
Most bad arrangements were fair once. Find the drift before you decide the whole thing is wrong.
What you'll explore
- 01The hours
- 02What it takes
- 03What it returns
- 04What has changed
A note from Mark
The thing about a bad exchange is that nobody agrees to it. It arrives an hour at a time and the terms change without anybody proposing a change. Two years later you are working a different job on the same contract.
I would count the hours properly before anything else, and I mean the invisible ones. The commute, the phone at nine, the Saturday morning that is written off because of the week. People are routinely surprised by their own number.
But I would be just as strict about the return. Most people who arrive at this question have come to complain, and if you let them, they will describe a job that gives them nothing, which is almost never true. The security, the money, the thing they are learning, the network they have built. Those are real and they belong on the page.
Read my full view ↓
And I would ask who else is paying, because the cost frequently lands on somebody who is not in the room. Ask them. Their answer is usually more accurate than yours and considerably shorter.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
The real hours
02
Both sides of the exchange
03
The drift
04
One renegotiation
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What you are giving
- 03What you are getting
- 04What the exchange actually is
- 05Who else is paying
- 06What has changed
- 07What is recoverable and what is not
- 08The rival reading
- 09What deserves protecting
- 10The credible alternative
- 11What this exercise cannot decide
- 12What remains unresolved
- 13Where this goes next
What now?
01 · Save it
The real hours, honestly counted.
02 · Test it
Count last week honestly, including the phone and the commute.
Explore this further ↓
What I would do
- 01
Count the real hours before anything else, including recovery time.
- 02
Write the return honestly. It is usually larger than it feels on a bad week.
- 03
Find the drift. Almost every exchange has some.
- 04
Separate what comes back with rest from what does not.
- 05
Pick one term to renegotiate rather than the whole arrangement.
Test it
- 01
How many hours was it when you started, and how many is it now?
- 02
What would you miss within a fortnight if it stopped?
- 03
Who else in your house is paying for this job?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the job costs too much. Two alternatives are frequently stronger. The exchange may have been fair when it was struck and has simply drifted, in which case the problem is a renegotiation rather than a resignation and the same job at the original terms would be entirely acceptable. Or the cost may be genuinely high and genuinely worth it for a defined period, which is a real answer as long as the period is defined and somebody is watching the end date. Occasionally the finding is that the money is doing much more work in this arrangement than the user wants to admit.
Think about this
- The hours you actually work, including the invisible ones.
- What the week takes out of you by Thursday.
- What the job gives you that you would miss immediately.
- What has changed in the last two years without being agreed.
- Who else in your life is paying part of this.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
Should I leave
If the exchange no longer makes sense at any price
Further thinking
Long Working Hours and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke
Mika Kivimäki and colleagues
The Productivity of Working Hours
John Pencavel
The Burnout Challenge
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Explore the thinking ↓
Article
The Productivity of Working Hours
John Pencavel
Output per hour falls sharply after a threshold, so the extra hours are frequently bought at full price and delivered at a discount.
Book
The Burnout Challenge
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Forty years of research arguing that burnout is a mismatch between a person and the conditions they work in, not a deficiency in the person. Worth the time if you are about to redesign your entire life on the strength of feeling depleted, because the two are easy to confuse and the remedies are not remotely the same.
Book
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.