Does working fewer hours make you more intelligent?
Jenny Colgan is one of Britain’s most prolific writers, with an output that would impress even Barbara Cartland. Writing under a variety of different pseudonyms, last year she wrote five books and this year eight are scheduled to come out.
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To produce this volume of work you might think Colgan, 44, writes into the small hours every night. She doesn’t. She works for no more than three hours every day, from 11a.m. to 1p.m.
“Every time I had another child (I have three, at one point they were all under 4) obviously my time used to get a bit more compressed. Then a family member got ill; my husband works overseas and, well, if you're over 40, it's just life.
“So like a marathon runner building up resistance, I started to push how much I could get into every day. If I could 1,000 words, could I do 1,500? 2,000? And every time I stretched it a hundred or so here and there, I found that I could, even though the time I have for working stayed about the same.”
Three thousand words – and sometimes more – in three hours does prompt the question whether the quality has taken a hit. She insists not. “Weirdly, the work started getting better. I'm now finishing my novels more quickly, immersing myself more, focusing better. The arcs of the books, the reviews and the sales all improved massively.”
This will come as no surprise to Colin McKenzie and his team at Keio University in Japan, who has just published a paper suggesting that part-time workers over the age of 40 – especially those who work about 25 hours a week – have the sharpest brains.
Over 6,000 Australians were studied. Participants were asked to do a number of cognitive tests; read words aloud, recite lists of numbers running backwards and link letters and numbers in a particular pattern under time pressure.
They found that people who worked about 25 hours a week (which works out roughly as three days a week) tended to get the best scores. Those who did not work at all scored about 18 per cent lower on the reading test. Working 40 hours a week was linked to a slightly smaller cognitive deficit, but working 55 hours or more seemed to be worse than being retired or unemployed.
Part-time work, the report has concluded, is the perfect balance between brain stimulation and stress.
The findings echo those of a celebrated study that has followed 10,000 middle-aged civil servants in Whitehall since 1985. One analysis of this data found that those who worked up to 55 hours a week also did worse in a series of cognitive tests than those who generally kept to 40 hours at most.
In short, working too hard is bad for you. The report’s title is “Use it too much and lose it?” Governments around the world are pushing for people to retire later and later. Some argue postponing retirement is not just good economics, but it is also good for pensioners’ health and brains. But could this be a false assumption?
“It’s common sense that you don’t have your best ideas when you are exhausted. We all tend to think better in the first few hours.”
A couple of experts have questioned the study, not least that Keio University did not analyse a control group of people under the age of 40. Geraint Johnes, professor of Economics at Lancaster University, points out that the conclusion that 25-hours-a-week is optimum is not borne out by the data, though he agrees workers’ cognitive results definitely drop off if they work more than 40 hours a week.
But it has been welcomed by a host of people who have called for Britain to end its culture of hamster-wheel offices, where the number of hours worked is all that is measured rather than the quality of work produced in those hours.
Anna Thomas helps run the Shorter Working Week campaign. “It’s common sense that you don’t have your best ideas when you are exhausted. We all tend to think better in the first few hours.”
She, herself a part-time worker, adds that countries that work shorter hours also tend to have higher productivity. It is hard to prove that one causes the other. But the figures are stark.
“If you speak to high-performing part-timers, in general they say they have a sharpness of focus and clarity of purpose.”
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the average full-time worker in the UK racks up 42.2 hours a week, more than France, USA, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands. Even Germans work less than 40 hours a week. And more than six million of us work more than 45 hours a week.
Many of us might accept these long hours if, as a result, Britain was an economic powerhouse of the world. But it isn’t. Low productivity – despite increasing working hours - has proved a tough nut to crack.
The OECD measures all the western nations’ GDP per hours worked against America (who for the purposes of this exercise is given a score of 100). The UK manages just 75.7. This is lower than Spain, France, Netherlands and Germany.
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The French, despite working fewer hours, are more productive than the Brits.
The French have a proverb: “If working hard made you rich, donkeys would be covered in gold.” Well, maybe they have a point. Over the Channel, they work shorter hours and are more productive. And they get to enjoy more time in the evening for a glass of rosé.
Karen Mattison, the joint chief executive of Timewise, a consultancy which helps high-flyers find part-time jobs, says: “There is a huge amount of focus in the working world on input, not output. If you speak to high-performing part-timers, in general they say they have a sharpness of focus and clarity of purpose.”
But Mattison adds that this needs to be an issue that is as much about flexible hiring as it is about flexible working. Timewise analysed over a million job adverts and just 6.2 per cent of UK jobs mention part-time in the description.
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She names the likes of Patrick Foley, chief economist at Lloyds Banking Group, who works three days a week and who uses his spare time to compete in Ironman triathlon races. And Belinda Earl, the 3-days-a-week Style Director of Marks & Spencer as good examples of how part-time working is no longer for those who need to juggle jobs with childcare, but for people who are “at the moment of their greatest professional self-confidence.”
This has certainly been the case for Sarah Clay, 50, a part-time marketing manager for the north London estate agency Hotblack Desiato, who works 25 hours a week. She used to work “full-on” as a production manager for a film company, but says today her reduced hours ‘keep her sharper’.
‘The beauty of part-time work is how varied your time becomes’, she says: ‘You are not doing the same thing day in, day out. Sitting in front of a computer of a desk every day could get very boring, and I think your brain switches off.”