Obsession with Man Hours

If you’ve ever been watched by several pairs of eyes as you left the office on the dot of the official closing time, you will know exactly how I feel on most days at work. Admittedly, I only have to go in to the office for two days of the week, and after meeting several of these stares with a ‘Yes? Is there something you’d like to say to me?’ look, things have been marginally less confrontational.  But after spending almost two years at a company where ‘official’ hours were a joke and you were expected to work on weekends, national holidays, and pretty much any other time the client needed you, my patience with those who obsess over man-hours runs thin.

Here’s my rationale. I’m paid to do a job, and as long as I do the work, do it well, and don’t get any complaints from my boss, I have little or no interest in sticking to a clock just to please anyone else.  And really, let’s be honest –there is absolutely no guarantee that someone who is pinned to his/her seat for 12 hours of the day is actually spending all that time doing actual work instead of looking up movie timings for the late show.

‘Work to live, not live to work’ is the theory I’ve been subscribing to for some time now. Not as a cop out for doing a shoddy job, but for having some balance between what’s important, and how you can afford to have it. And while I’m not sure if this is more an Indian trait or if clock-watchers are spread far and wide across the globe, I really, really hope that this obsession with how many hours each person spends at work will stop. Right about now would be a good time actually.