How Google's Marissa Mayer Prevents Burnout

&#62; <i>"Overwork doesn't burn people out per se, but it's doing that without knowing the things that replenish you."</i><p>If you're working 130 hours a week, and sleeping a healthy 56 hours a week, that leaves you with <i>negative</i> 18 hours a week for replenishing yourself. Not even including showering, eating, etc.<p>I'm sorry, but merely having dinner with your family on Tuesday nights is not what it takes to replenish yourself. If that's the only thing I get to ask for, it sounds like a hellish place to work.<p>I need <i>hours</i> of replenishment <i>daily</i>... you know, like an actual work-life <i>balance</i>.

The paragraph<p><i>When Mayer suspects an employee might burn out, she asks them to find their rhythm. They've come back with, "I need to be home for Tuesday night dinners," or "I need to be on time for my daughter's soccer games."</i><p>really bothers me. If employee burnout is a regular thing inside your organization, that's a serious issue that needs solving. But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.<p>If you're working 130 hours a week, something is seriously, seriously wrong.

In case anyone is wondering whether this reflects Google's current working culture, let me comment that in my experience it absolutely does not.<p>In the office I work in, it is virtually empty at 8:00 AM and mostly empty by 7:00 PM. Most people seem to show up around 9:00 AM and leave around 6:00. On Fridays, the office mostly stops working around 5:00 PM.<p>There is a cadre of people, typically those without families, who stay a bit later but it often seems like they stay just long enough to eat the free dinner and then head home. Those people often also show up around or after 10:00 AM.<p>There is variation from project to project and office to office, but the work life balance seems <i>very</i> healthy in the offices I've seen. I have kids and a long commute, so it's important that I don't work late and I've never felt the slightest pressure to work more hours.

&#62;&#62; "You can't have everything you want," Mayer cautions. "But you can have the things that really matter to you. That empowers you to work really hard for a long period of time on something that you're passionate about."<p>If by "everything you want" you mean "all the activities you'd like to schedule outside of business hours," then, um... yes I can. Step 1 is called "clear expectations." Step 2 is quitting when pressured to do too much. It has worked great for me.<p>I'm not passionate enough about <i>any</i> work to pull the kinds of hours she describes. Heck, even if I were -- even if the project were "build software to save your own life" -- I'd be writing some crappy code after 60+ hours.

First of all, I very much doubt that she actually worked 130 hours per week with any regularity. That comes to 18.5 hours per day, including sundays. Even assuming that she could survive with 3 hours of sleep per day (yeah, sure), it leaves almost no time to eat, commute, or god, even going to the bathroom.<p>And why in the world is she giving advice on burnout?

Maybe it's because I'm not at a company like Google, but all articles like this seem to do two things: 1) Make everyone who doesn't put in 130 hours a week at work feel like they're not Working Hard Enough 2) Legitimize unpaid overtime/ worker exploitation<p>It seems that the quantity of "time spent at work" is emphasized over the quality of actual work done. I'd be curious what her work quality was over 130 hours, especially once she was in week 5-6 of working that much.

This reads like a allegory for Hell. <i>How to love working 18 hours a day</i> could almost be the title of a satire novel on the failings of modern office life. The fact that she lived it and looks back on it fondly doesn't, in my mind, reflect positively on her or her employer.

Articles like this remind me of Bertrand Russell's [In praise of idleness](<a href="http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html</a>):<p><i>"I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work."</i>

I don't think burnout directly correlates to working too hard or too much. I think it is more a matter of working hard without a sense of accomplishment. Endless toil without material or psychic rewards for a job well done is what would lead me to burnout.<p>I have worked with people who claimed to work over 100 hours per week. Upon closer investigation it generally turned out that they did a lot of personal business from the office "because they were so busy." Or, they used "I'm too busy" as an excuse to ignore their spouse or children or to escape a painful situation at home.<p>Like the others, I don't buy 130 hours on a sustainable basis. Try to work 60 or 80 hours in a week and see how difficult that is before claiming 100 or 130.

I wonder how many people are on the opposite side of the equation ... I worked 130 hours a week and lost everything.<p>Somehow, I think the fact she is who she is leave people with the perception that working that much is what it takes.

Clearly exaggeration on her part about her hours. No one works 130 hours a week consistently, it is just physically not possible. This article is about everything wrong with corporate work environments.<p>1) Productivity is equivalent to time spent in the office. 2) Pressure your employees to work more than they should - No one should ever have to "ask" to get a weekday night off to have dinner with their family. 3) Managing resentment? If you are spending your time trying to manage your resentment to your job, you probably aren't being productive because you dislike the job. Nothing spells out bad productivity like disliking what you are doing.

<i>Step 3. Grant employees one must-have freedom.</i><p>Silly bullshit. First of all, by definition you have to grant <i>all</i> must-have freedoms. If that's not a deal-breaker than they're not must-haves.. but the idea that family dinner is a gift from your employer is ridiculous.

That's 18h/day everyday. Or 21H/Day if she gave herself a Saturday. I call BS on the numbers. I'm sure she worked really hard but the numbers are BS.<p>Further she thinks that there is causation between her crazy hours and the ultimate success of Google. Correlation is not causation.

Im sure the private residence at the 4 seasons in SF and the tens if not hundreds of millions she is worth had plenty to do with her not burning out as well.<p>Further, as others noted - that is ~18 hours per day "working" - and if by "working" we really mean, thinking about her work.<p>This means that she could just as easily be "working" when being chauffeured from house to work, or on the plane or eating dinner.<p>Its not like she needed to be welded to a screen pumping out code at her desk 18h per day... she has a much different output, mostly her thought and attention, than many others.

I think that its great that it worked for Marissa Mayer. But, the culture of working over 40 hours is troubling. It really puts into perspective what you should value. I value my free time too much to take that choice.

Since folks seem to not recall prior articles about marissa mayer, I believe it's clearly mentioned elsewhere that she's one of those people who via medical accident/ virtue only need a substantially reduced amount of sleep compared with most people. The journalist for this article is clearly an idiot for neglecting that important contextual info.<p>That Is all.

Sad. Sad. Sad. This is macho BS, dressed in a cool start-up suit. No one is productive doing that year around.

I don't buy that she worked 130 hours a week. Perhaps one week ever. But I'm still not sure if I buy that. Anything short of documentary proof wouldn't lead me to believe it.<p>We do have data that people overestimated how much they work. I'm sure she worked long hours. I'm sure she was in the office a lot to. But 130 hours?<p>And 130 hours of actual good work? We also have data on how the quality of work drops off as quantity begins to add up.

I did actually worked for about 100 hours a week and more, for a few months in 1998, and I spent a couple of quiet weeks in hospital as a result. This sort of stupid bullshit about hard work really gets me angry.

Is this article trolling? Sure seems like it.<p>This business week article has some more supporting information about the Google folks asking permission to do family events... <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-avoid-burnout-marissa-mayer" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-avoid...</a>

The worst part about an article like this is someone will take this seriously and believe this is the path towards "success".

Even assuming she was not commuting to work (sleeping at the office), that leaves 5.4 hours a day for eating, sleeping, shitting, showering, brushing your teeth etc. Nobody can do it for more than a week or two.

I love google, but I am calling bs on this.

130 hours = ~18.5 hours a day, 7 days a week

I really hate these types of employees. First of all they raise employer's expectations that all the other workers will be willing to put in free hours for them. Second by working for 130 hours they are basically taking away jobs from 2 other people who could be gainfully employed if these types of employees worked a normal schedule. Obviously the counterpoint is that these guys really loved their work so much that they didn't really mind. But in that case isn't it better that they do some charity work, help more needy people rather than helping fill the coffers of mega corporations.

Wow - I feel heroic when I work late one day a week and my kid's events are automatically non-negotiable. Guess I shoudl be glad I'm not working at Google and still making a good living - can it last?

To each their own. Like many other treatments of the mind/body, the effects of this kind of behavior may be seen down the road.

If a person can work 3x normal (40 x 3 = 120 hours, which is almost the 130 hours she claims to have worked in the past) and generate 10-1000x the value of most people, it might be a worthy tradeoff for some time.<p>In the long run, however, it can be hard to sustain that kind of pace.

These days, she relaxes by diving into a Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool of money.

<i>Hard work, she says, has been the key to Google's success, as well as her own.</i><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_sufficient_condition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_sufficient_condi...</a>

Meditation is the key for me. I think more and more people especially people in the Tech and involved with startups should practice it.<p>I work 12 hrs daily but spend around 1-2 hrs in meditation and it seems to flush out everything.

Forget employees - this is important reading for the self-employed or work-from-homers... how do you prevent burnout when you're grinding on your own projects, or freelance work?<p>It might be pretty standard advice, but important to remind oneself - I'm very rarely strict with myself about taking time off or finding my 'rhythm' activities as she calls them.

If you have to ask permission to attend your daughter's soccer game or have dinner with your kids then that is a fucked up place to work; regardless of how much salary or stock options they throw at you.<p>If your boss brags about working insane hours then brace yourself for a shitty environment.

Burnout shouldn't even be an issue in the American economy. We should actually all work a bit less, earn a bit less, and hire more people. What are we creating? a lot of hard work to make our lives hell?

People seek respect &#38; admiration. <a href="http://www.greatandhra.com/viewnews.php?id=38662&#38;cat=10&#38;scat=25" rel="nofollow">http://www.greatandhra.com/viewnews.php?id=38662&#38;cat=10&...</a>

i think this article lost a lot of merit because 130hrs/week were mentioned. i am guessing this was some kind of record and happened once, but because of the way it was mentioned (proudly, to illustrate that she's a badass) the article seems to insinuate this amount of hours could be sustainable, and worked around with a few anti-burnout tricks.<p>if this advice was given for ~60hr weeks, it would actually be a lot more credible.

<i>130 hours a week</i>!<p>Workaholics are bad for the long term health of any large company.<p>Workaholics can be wonderful, incredibly productive people. Most of the time they are not. But let's just concentrate on the ideal workaholic.<p>Workaholics enable last minute heroics disaster management. But if you're doing that, even if you do it successfully, just the fact that you are doing it, means you messed something up. You shouldn't need last minute heroics on your projects. <i>Well</i> managed projects don't do that.<p>And even more importantly the more long term your project is the more important it is to manage it well and avoid last minute heroics.<p>The long term quality and maintainability of large projects really suffers with such emergency heroics. In fact, each and every one of your death marches over the years could have been a great success. But together they've made all future progress far, far, far slower that it could have been had you not had the need for death marches in the first place.<p><i>Exceptions apply to small projects who only care about reaching a milestone NOW, not about long term TOC.</i><p>On any large and complex project there will be huge pressure to engage in last minute heroics. If you literally do not have that option THAT forces you to manage your project better.<p>But combine that huge ever present pressure with workaholics and you're almost guaranteed to take advantage of a death march.<p>Imagine it is a death march for only one person, the company workaholic. A wonderful person, who is also a technical genius. That person takes on a complex feature, and implements it over a weekend, pulling at least one all-nighter. Normally that person is 10x more productive than average so in that weekend they make HUGE progress.<p>Now remember the old adage about any developer who is indispensable should be fired immediately? Sounds harsh, but think about it.<p>I pride myself on working hard to never make myself indispensable. Produce maintainable code, far less complex than I am capable of, document, train colleagues, etc. That's the <i>minimum</i> needed for long term health of any large and complex projects.<p>What happens if the ideal workaholic gets hit by a buss right after that weekend death march? Now everyone else will have to come up to speed on their code, and that <i>will take longer</i> than if they had been allowed to write it themselves, over a week or two, with that workaholic's help and guidance.<p>What happens if the workaholic does NOT get hit bu a buss? Great, but again overall development is slowed down. it went a lot faster for that one weekend, but everyone now still has to come up to speed to keep the project going.<p>You rob from the future to save the present and you drop a lot of the money on the floor while doing that.<p>Really, really well managed projects explicitly forbid last minute heroics. That's how you know management knows what it's doing.

Satire?

"Grant your employees one must-have freedom"<p>I'm the CTO at a startup and I have employees that are my responsibility. The mere idea that it's appropriate for me to <i>grant</i> one of my people a personal freedom that was theirs to begin with is offensive.<p>A company that requires overwork from its people, especially salaried people, in order to sustain itself doesn't deserve to exist. Paid overtime is another story and is a common aspect of the how the manufacturing sector works.<p>I'm sure Mayer is a good manager, people have attested to as much in this thread. The article appears to be designed to hack together a particular attitude towards work/overwork piecemeal from an interview with Mayer that I don't think she adheres to.<p>This article makes me want to defenestrate myself and join the Socialist Party.<p>I'll be avoiding entrepreneur.com in future.

Pay developers more than 60K/70K year and you'll prevent burnout. How about paying for equipment you cheap bastards.