Working hours in academia

I recently ran a poll on Twitter on how many hours academics work per week. As I’ve gone from 30(ish) hours per week for a year back to 40 hours – after always having worked 6 days a week for 8+ hours daily, I sometimes feel that I am not working enough, but I also realize that I don’t have more hour that I can be in the office because of childcare constraints. I can try to put in some extra hours at night (or work on my blog at night, as I am doing now at 9pm on a Friday night), but I feel that I have to be super-efficient at work and then still fall behind. I also feel guilty at times, because of the persistent myth that we all should be working 80 hours per week.

Long story short, I did a poll about working hours and very few of the respondents work more than 50 hours per week.

Here’s the poll and its wake: