I started watching Suits (this post is not about my cinematic choices!!!) and it seems that a lot of American productions portray that is very common to start work 7AM and finish 8-10PM. If that’s the case – how can you have a life? When do you find time to do simple stuff – even grocery shopping takes me over an hour each week. When do you cook? Do you see your family more often than just for holidays? I am a bit baffled, as Facebook and Instagram shows loads of pictures of happy weddings with like a 30 people in your entourage. If you work that much – how do you manage to keep in touch with anyone else, except perhaps your janitor?
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Well with a typical 9-5 you have the time after on weekdays and the entire weekend to do everything you described
Well, 7AM to 10PM is 75 hours per week, not 40.
Most people do work something close to 40 hours per week. I usually work between 40-50 hours, but since I work from home I still feel like I have a good amount of free time each day.
I work a 9/80 shift: 9 hours each day, with one 8 hour day and one day off every other week
>it seems that a lot of American productions portray that is very common to start work 7AM and finish 8-10PM
i haven’t noticed this at all. Aside from Suits, what else do you watch where this is the case?
most people work about 40 hours which is around 8-5 or some sort of 9 hours with an hour for lunch
It’s not like that for every profession no. Before the pandemic I was working 60 to 65 hours a week.
I didn’t have time to do much other than shower and sleep. Shop on off days which were Saturday and Sunday.
Facebook and Instagram appear to be an altered space of reality. Most weddings are paid for by families I think. And the entourages could be people they barely know.
Your average marriage is probably closer to a courthouse person who’s real sweet and has some plastic flowers to hand out after you sign the certificate.
Facebook I suppose keeps people somewhat connected however. And maybe people are meeting on there. It’s not like that for everyone though.
Reality will never correlate to Facebook and hours in a day. People will always make themselves look way happy and rich on there, regardless of working hours.
[Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.10 hours per weekday](https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/emp-by-ftpt-job-edu-h.htm), which is a hair over 40 hours. While there are people that work more than that (I knew someone who worked 4AM to 5PM between his two jobs), it definitely isn’t the norm.
I work 10.5 hour days, 5 and 6 days a week. Groceries are ordered online and we pick them up. I have family time in the evening when I’m on days, not so much family time on evenings. I never work on Sundays though
[In any given week, I probably only do 15 mins of real, actual work](https://youtu.be/rNIPKcFU548)
But honestly yeah 40-45 hours is about normal for me. 9 hours Monday through Thursday and 4 hours on Friday
Those hours are the exception to the rule. As others have mentioned, 40 hours/week is more standard.
People who work the hours you described fall into two main categories, in my experience: high-income professionals who outsource a lot of those tasks to household help or have a spouse willing to take on everything, and lower-income folks working a couple of jobs to make ends meet. They would probably be leaning on family, friends, and lots of caffeine to get things done.
But to answer your question, these hours are not that common.
I work in finance and do not work more than 40 hours. However, since you’re speaking of Suits, It is extremely common for lawyers to work much more than 40 hrs/week
Now watch the TV shows Friends and Seinfeld.
I work 11 hour overnight shifts 7 nights on then 7 off. So i work 77 hours every other week and have every other week off. It averages out to almost 40 hours a week, though.
Sometimes more sometimes less. I work until the work is done. I’m done with my job job by early afternoon and work on my land/animals the rest of the time
> Do you really work 40+ hours each week? it seems that a lot of American productions portray that is very common to start work 7AM and finish 8-10PM.
Which is it? Do we work 40 hours or do we work 75?
In my last job I was pretty much 8-5 , M-F. If I had to work longer hours on a day, I’d come in later or leave early on another day to balance it out.
> When do you find time to do simple stuff – even grocery shopping takes me over an hour each week
Typically, I would stop on the way home from work and be done in 30 minutes or so.
> When do you cook?
3-4x per week. Usually on the weekends doing some “meal prep” so there’s plenty of leftovers. Almost every cooked meal ends up with leftovers for lunches or dinners in the upcoming days.
> Do you see your family more often than just for holidays?
I never really had a problem fitting things in, no.
> except perhaps your janitor?
Surely you jest.
Hell no.
I work *up to* 40 hours a week.
I get paid for 40, so I stop at 40. If my pay was tied to time, I would work more though.
I mean this with all due respect, but you must put down the social media. It poisons the brain and it’s not at all an accurate example of the average person.
I usually top out at 36 hours/week
Suits is a show about extremely high earning professionals.
I can assure you that there are workaholics in all countries. I can also assure you that we’re not all workaholics.
Only people I’ve seen work those kind of hours are people with farms in addition to regular jobs, first responders and emergency personnel, medical residents, and military personnel.
Avg week for me is close to 60 hours and I still make below the poverty line. I’m lucky to get maybe one morning off a week to get caught up on chores but one learns to maximize efficiency overall. I can get dishes washed while meal prepping, laundry done while doing grocery shopping, etc. i have it down to a science but the issue comes to be when something unexpected happens and my entire chore time suddenly disappears. I haven’t seen my family since pre-covid. That’s life though, its either keep working 60 hours a week till i get my degree or live out on the streets again.
I usually pull 39-42 hours a week working nights and afternoons. I usually just stay up all night.
So I’ve known a couple people with the crazy 7am to 8 or 10pm schedule. They were both 20 somethings in New York City working in finance, which is infamous for this.
They made boatloads of money. They never cooked, their office provided lunch and dinner or they ate out. The most they’d have at home would be like peanut butter and bread, and the bread might be stale because they hadn’t touched it in a month. They sent out their laundry. One had a cleaning lady, the other found cleaning relaxing so she did it on weekends. Since her home was just a place to crash at night, it didn’t get very dirty. They both dated in their industry, people with equally insane schedules and just saw each other as their insane schedules permitted. No kids, a dog walker for the one with a dog.
They both quit that industry before age 30 because it simply wasn’t sustainable and the only thing they liked about it was the money. It’s not a typical American lifestyle. It’s not even a typical New York City lifestyle. It’s very specific to a very few industries, and most people in those industries don’t sustain that kind of hours throughout their career unless they adopt a lifestyle that absolutely forces them.
40 hours a week is 8 hours a day
That means like 8 AM to 5PM, provided you take an hour of breaks throughout the day
That leaves you another 7 or so hours of the day to do whatever (including commuting) and 8 hours for sleep.
I work more like 30-40 hours a week. I associate crazy hours with law enforcement, nursing, and start up culture.
Most people work about 40 hours a week.
I honestly think we need to collaborate with /r/movies or /r/screenwriting or something, because the rest of the world seriously struggles with understanding how fiction works or that storytelling contrivances need to exist for a script to function.
A show about work is *only* going to show work. Nobody tunes into Mad Men to watch Don Draper wake up, take a shower, scratch his balls, and sit in traffic for 45 minutes.
Likewise, nobody watches Friends to see Ross grading papers for 8 hours on a Saturday.
Hardly anybody takes a shit on TV. That doesn’t mean Americans don’t poop.
People working really really long hours are usually not grocery shopping or cooking. They’re getting takeout or delivery. If they are high earning enough, they might even have a personal assistant to do other tasks and errands for them.
For those of us working only 40ish hours per week, there’s plenty of time for domestic tasks and a social life (although some people might fill that time with other stuff and still be too busy to do everything).
I am scheduled to work 37.5 hours a week. We are usually very busy so OT is plentiful. Working from home makes it easy to pop on for an hour or two to help out. During our busiest times, I might pop on for an extra day to help out.
For lawyers in NYC big law, that is common.
For doctors, that is also very common. Residents are assigned to 30 hour shifts. After residency, the hours are long too. You can’t just leave patients because your shift is done. You have to see them all and do the work up.
I work 8:30 to 4:30 with a 1 hour break M-F. So a 40 hour week with 5 hours of breaks. I also don’t make NYC corporate law money, but I am by no means poor.
Suits takes place in a high powered New York law firm. Lawyers are notorious workaholics and high powered NYC firms are probably the worst offenders.
I have no idea of how people handle jobs that are that demanding. Of course, people in those jobs get paid **serious (at least 6 figures)** amounts of money, but there is a real lack of balance.
But also, it is a show about people in a law firm, so the storylines revolve around work probably even more than most NY lawyer’s lives actually do.
If you watch Seinfeld, you would think people in New York hardly ever work.
I’m working primarily from home so my work hours are kind of weird and don’t really reflect the actual hours I work.
I have my computer on and am “working” from about 6am to 6pm each day. But between 6am and 8am and 5pm to 6pm I’m not really doing much other than being available to answer emails if I get them. I also take random breaks throughout the day to go to appointments, do chores, play with the dog, deal with stuff with my kids, etc. I would say I actually do about 25-30 hours of work in a given week. Some weeks that number is *much* higher though, but those weeks are rare.
I do. Including unpaid driving times I probably work 50hrs a week on average and more during busy jobs. I grocery shop on weekend and go maybe every other or every third weekend since it’s just me and the cat and I have a lot of pantry space and a decent size fridge/freezer to put stuff in.
I cook when I get home from work and sometimes if it’s real late or I’m real tired I’ll order/pick something up. I’ll eat on leftovers for a few days or freeze stuff to eat later, I’ll also do leftovers for lunch sometimes or get something from a drive thru or grocery store so that’s easier.
My family is pretty much all a 7hr drive away or farther so I don’t visit them too often. I don’t know a lot of people where I live since I moved literally a week before covid lockdowns started so I don’t have some crazy travel routine with friends or family like some people do.
I have a lot of weekends free so I can get most stuff done then, if I need to say bring my truck to the shop during the week I can usually work something out with my job for that.
I work from about 8-7 so about 55 five or take a few. I work with a few idiots and apparently it’s too much to ask a multi billion dollar company to have their system function correctly lmao
As a salaried employee in creative, corporate America, yes I often work around 45 hours a week during the slow periods and upwards of ~60ish hours during the busy periods. Factor in commuting time (pre-pandemic) and I’d be home for maybe 2 hours, if that, before I needed to go to bed. On the weekends I’d be so exhausted I’d just want to chill but I’d force myself to cook/clean/run errands so I wouldn’t have to during the week. So yeah, I didn’t have much of a social life outside of work. And yes, I only saw my family a few times a year at the holidays because I was living in a different state.
Regarding what you see on FB/IG the only people I know who hang out in groups that big are generally people who grew up in the same area they’re currently living in and hang out with a lot of childhood friends (plus maybe some college/adulthood addons). But when you move away it’s much harder to make lasting relationships on that scale so quickly, hence why most people don’t roll with crews 30 deep.
I think a lot of people are missing a very important detail from OP’s explanation:
>**I started watching Suits…**
Suits appears to be a show about lawyers. Lawyers have a reputation for working particularly long hours, so depending on the specific roles of the characters, it’s plausible that they work something like 60 hours per week.
The profession I’ve heard most associated with long hours is investment banking, where some accounts of describe an 80 hour week as normal for some jobs and that those employees basically do nothing but work and sleep.
The other industry associated with long hours is tech, where companies like Google and Facebook have lots of amenities in the office buildings themselves so employees don’t have to leave the building to get food, exercise, take breaks, etc.
That being said, for the vast majority of full time jobs, the norm is to work about 40 hours per week, perhaps a little more if there’s more work to do than usual or if someone wants extra pay for overtime. For most people, that’s a typical work week, and that’s why so many people are quick to dismiss longer hours as an unrealistic depiction of American life.
I work on Wall Street in a non-finance related role, so I don’t put in the same hours as the people who do, but I see the lives they live. You’re not cooking if you’re working the types of hours that they do. Most investment banks provide money for dinner if you work past 7PM, which is a very regular occurrence. You can basically order most things that you’d do simple errands for to your office or apartment. In more senior roles, you might have assistants that take care of stuff like that.
Pretty much for your entire life everything is very scheduled. You might leave at 6PM one night and go out for drinks and another night work until midnight.
That being said, those kinds of hours are not common, especially outside of the east coast.
Suits is about lawyers. Law is a profession that is notorious for overwork where 60-90hrs is expected for some reason. It’s profession that glorifies & demand a toxic work/life balance.
There are other fields that are also notorious for working crazy hours like nursing. But I would say if you are only working a single job, 40-45 hours is common.