What's a reasonable range of actual work hours as a PM?
July 10, 2023 12:05 AM Subscribe
Anon so I can give details not linked to me - I want to figure out if I'm giving myself a reasonable boundary of productive work hours/week for my current job as a tech PM.
I started as a product owner/analyst rapidly pivoted to project manager, with a colleague focusing on specific issues. The previous person burned out and was working 60-80 hours on good weeks, and every weekend. The project has significant issues. Support from other people in the department is stretched because their projects are also on fire. This division is known to be a lot worse off than other similar divisions due to historical and political reasons.
The pressure from around me to work very long hours like my predecessor is relentless. Like me, my new teammate came from a fairly healthy workplace and is a bit shocked at the expected time and stress - 5% of our small department had serious hospitalisations due to work stress this past year. We can't easily quit, but we also are very difficult to replace so we can push back for reasonable work hours.
The past couple of weeks I've been tracking time actually working (focused, steady work) and stopping when I hit a total of 35 hours. I'm also only answering texts during daytime hours on weekends (our bosses send texts at 1am regularly on weekends) and not logging in. We have a flexible hours policy where it's work output, not hours given and it's mostly WFH. I have family and health commitments and will often work an odd mix of hours outside the regular 9-5, like other colleagues.
I'm seen as very productive so far, and I know that after 35 hours in a week, I'm pretty wiped. Am I under-committing my hours to work? What's a fair number to aim for?
And yes, I like the job itself, the pay is very good and I like most of my colleagues and managers. I've gone through askamanager and reddit, but the advice is so broad and non-specific to actual work vs. clock-in and clock-out hours.
I started as a product owner/analyst rapidly pivoted to project manager, with a colleague focusing on specific issues. The previous person burned out and was working 60-80 hours on good weeks, and every weekend. The project has significant issues. Support from other people in the department is stretched because their projects are also on fire. This division is known to be a lot worse off than other similar divisions due to historical and political reasons.
The pressure from around me to work very long hours like my predecessor is relentless. Like me, my new teammate came from a fairly healthy workplace and is a bit shocked at the expected time and stress - 5% of our small department had serious hospitalisations due to work stress this past year. We can't easily quit, but we also are very difficult to replace so we can push back for reasonable work hours.
The past couple of weeks I've been tracking time actually working (focused, steady work) and stopping when I hit a total of 35 hours. I'm also only answering texts during daytime hours on weekends (our bosses send texts at 1am regularly on weekends) and not logging in. We have a flexible hours policy where it's work output, not hours given and it's mostly WFH. I have family and health commitments and will often work an odd mix of hours outside the regular 9-5, like other colleagues.
I'm seen as very productive so far, and I know that after 35 hours in a week, I'm pretty wiped. Am I under-committing my hours to work? What's a fair number to aim for?
And yes, I like the job itself, the pay is very good and I like most of my colleagues and managers. I've gone through askamanager and reddit, but the advice is so broad and non-specific to actual work vs. clock-in and clock-out hours.
Measure wall clock hours of work, not focused steady hours. Daydreaming through that meeting counts as an hour of work.
The number of wall clock hours for full-time salaried employees varies by jurisdiction. The Americans have a 40 hour workweek as the upper maximum, 35 is the standard everywhere else. Keep doing what you’re doing.
posted by shock muppet at 12:20 AM on July 10, 2023 [17 favorites]
The number of wall clock hours for full-time salaried employees varies by jurisdiction. The Americans have a 40 hour workweek as the upper maximum, 35 is the standard everywhere else. Keep doing what you’re doing.
posted by shock muppet at 12:20 AM on July 10, 2023 [17 favorites]
A good PM knows that projects succeed or fail based on their schedules, and that the data which feeds into those schedules needs to be both honest and accurate. Good PM's also have the maxim "Good, cheap, quick: pick a maximum of 2" or similar tattooed somewhere - and appreciate that those constraints have both logical and legal components. In a healthy organisation people record their time accurately, don't work extra hours without permission and insure they take time off to compensate for the extra hours worked. Good PMs should not only act as a role model for this behaviour in their own time recording - but should also defend it on behalf of others. It sounds like you are doing exactly the right thing.
posted by rongorongo at 1:23 AM on July 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by rongorongo at 1:23 AM on July 10, 2023 [7 favorites]
I'm a tech PM in the UK, and I work 37.5 hours a week with few exceptions. That's clock-time and it includes time making tea, staring at the wall, etc. I'm encouraged by management to stick to healthy working hours and switch off Slack/emails outside 8.30-5.
I am aware of other companies that have a less healthy culture than the place I work. Yours sounds like an outlier, though. Multiple people have been hospitalised for stress? That is very concerning.
posted by dudekiller at 1:26 AM on July 10, 2023 [17 favorites]
I am aware of other companies that have a less healthy culture than the place I work. Yours sounds like an outlier, though. Multiple people have been hospitalised for stress? That is very concerning.
posted by dudekiller at 1:26 AM on July 10, 2023 [17 favorites]
35 hours of willingly focused, productive output is very good going; you don't mention how much "filler" work time you're putting in around this, but this should also count in your assessment of your commitment even if you're on a flexible WFH setup.
An "output not hours" setup pretends to putting trust in workers and respecting the boundaries they set. The second half of that dynamic is massively open to exploitation, through putting the mental labour load of navigating expectations onto the individual employee, making the scope of those expectations vague enough that there's always room for self-doubt, and undermining the solidarity that comes from workers sharing a baseline of what's reasonable and what's not.
If you're in a position to keep demonstrating that trusted workers who feel able to enforce those boundaries are, in fact, the ones who end up being more productive, then the way you're handling things already is clearly better for you and is not something you should compromise on.
I think the classic catchphrase for this sort of situation is "give an inch and they'll take a mile".
posted by protorp at 1:31 AM on July 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
An "output not hours" setup pretends to putting trust in workers and respecting the boundaries they set. The second half of that dynamic is massively open to exploitation, through putting the mental labour load of navigating expectations onto the individual employee, making the scope of those expectations vague enough that there's always room for self-doubt, and undermining the solidarity that comes from workers sharing a baseline of what's reasonable and what's not.
If you're in a position to keep demonstrating that trusted workers who feel able to enforce those boundaries are, in fact, the ones who end up being more productive, then the way you're handling things already is clearly better for you and is not something you should compromise on.
I think the classic catchphrase for this sort of situation is "give an inch and they'll take a mile".
posted by protorp at 1:31 AM on July 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
I'm an IT PM (higher ed, UK), contracted for 37.5 hours. There will be some weeks when I need to exceed that but there will be slower weeks to make up for peaks.
posted by coffee_monster at 4:29 AM on July 10, 2023
posted by coffee_monster at 4:29 AM on July 10, 2023
I am a tech pm myself. I work 35-45 hours a week depending on specific circumstances and context. I have hard stops in the evening - which are reflected on my calendar most of the time - and I never, ever work on weekends unless it’s a pre-arranged launch or on-call scenario.
There is no reason to work longer hours as a routine. It’s not sustainable. It’s also a terrible thing for mental health for most people. And it’s rarely reflected in pay. Hold your ground. Gather data if possible and make recommendations for how to improve things so there are fewer problems. But, yeah, 35+ hours of steady real work are exhausting. It’s a thing. Why should you work more? This is not a rhetorical question. Because there’s more work to be done? There’s always more work. Tech projects are difficult to estimate in advance. Uncertainty runs high. People should be at their freshest to manage these issues and neither you nor your employer are well-served by treating raw hours as a sign of progress.
Hold your ground. Do so as casually and calmly as possible. Their failure to build a sustainable project and business is not your responsibility, regardless of your job title.
posted by Tomorrowful at 4:31 AM on July 10, 2023 [15 favorites]
There is no reason to work longer hours as a routine. It’s not sustainable. It’s also a terrible thing for mental health for most people. And it’s rarely reflected in pay. Hold your ground. Gather data if possible and make recommendations for how to improve things so there are fewer problems. But, yeah, 35+ hours of steady real work are exhausting. It’s a thing. Why should you work more? This is not a rhetorical question. Because there’s more work to be done? There’s always more work. Tech projects are difficult to estimate in advance. Uncertainty runs high. People should be at their freshest to manage these issues and neither you nor your employer are well-served by treating raw hours as a sign of progress.
Hold your ground. Do so as casually and calmly as possible. Their failure to build a sustainable project and business is not your responsibility, regardless of your job title.
posted by Tomorrowful at 4:31 AM on July 10, 2023 [15 favorites]
Your division and company sound like a dumpster fire. Hustle culture / grind culture in tech is a concoction of US corporate overlords that don't want to spend money to staff up to needed capacity. Good for you for setting boundaries. 80 hours/week is two FTEs and your company knows it. If this were me, I would let it be known that I don't work more than x hours/week unless there's an extraordinary set of circumstances--and that better be like 1-2 times per year max, if at all. Make it known to the more junior folks too, because they need to have this modeled for them. Since you WFH and don't spend time commuting, I think ~50 hours of work per week is enough of a balance to achieve a good work-life balance and still be seen to be doing more than just the minimum. If that's what you're going for. I've been in tech since the 1990s, I have directed and managed large teams of PMs/devs/designers, and I'm currently in a principal non-supervisory by choice--because of bullshit like this.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 4:54 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 4:54 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
A reasonable range of work for full-time employment is 35-40 total hours, including internal cruft. It doesn't matter what the work is.
I would suggest you keep track of what, if anything, isn't getting done because you're holding a firm cutoff. See if you can figure out the nature of what your predecessor was doing with all those hours. I've had PMs that spent a lot of time wheel-spinning, just stressing out over what's not getting done. I've had PMs that thought they might make more things happen if they're sitting on me/us, or at least felt they needed to be online and available as much as the delivery team (which is a separate problem). Those things don't accomplish much, but you can certainly easily let them eat your life.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:39 AM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I would suggest you keep track of what, if anything, isn't getting done because you're holding a firm cutoff. See if you can figure out the nature of what your predecessor was doing with all those hours. I've had PMs that spent a lot of time wheel-spinning, just stressing out over what's not getting done. I've had PMs that thought they might make more things happen if they're sitting on me/us, or at least felt they needed to be online and available as much as the delivery team (which is a separate problem). Those things don't accomplish much, but you can certainly easily let them eat your life.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:39 AM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
There's plenty of research that makes it really clear that you can do one or two 60-80 hour weeks in a row, but you a few weeks fully off to recover from doing that if you don't want to burn out. 35-40 hour weeks are sustainable, more than that it is guaranteed that you are spending most of your time doing negative work, creating problems for future you because of the shortsightedness and high error rates of doing work while exhausted, and physically and mentally destroying yourself in the process.
Death march work cycles like the one you're describing kill teams, projects, and sometimes literally people. You need to hold the line at 35 hours per week for you, and for your whole team for real.
posted by mhoye at 6:03 AM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Death march work cycles like the one you're describing kill teams, projects, and sometimes literally people. You need to hold the line at 35 hours per week for you, and for your whole team for real.
posted by mhoye at 6:03 AM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Tech engineering manager here. If you are truly putting in 35 hours of focused, productive/value-added work consistently every week you are already doing well, and if you are not also counting "filler"/admin work in your hours you really should be. 40ish hours of total work per week is a reasonable target, recognizing that some weeks may be a little lighter or heavier than others due to project needs. I encourage you not to habitually work on weekends or outside of your regular core hours.
Regular 60-80 hour weeks are not sustainable and harm both the individual and the team/project over time, I've seen it happen. If multiple people in your group have been hospitalized (!) due to stress that indicates a serious cultural and management problem.
posted by 4rtemis at 6:21 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
Regular 60-80 hour weeks are not sustainable and harm both the individual and the team/project over time, I've seen it happen. If multiple people in your group have been hospitalized (!) due to stress that indicates a serious cultural and management problem.
posted by 4rtemis at 6:21 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
What you're doing is called "logging your best 40" (or in your case, 35) and I am absolutely not a fan of that. I don't think you're going far enough--in your shoes I would stop responding to work messages when you're not logged in, and I would be setting working hours and keeping to them. You have to take care of yourself first and foremost.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:47 AM on July 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by rhymedirective at 6:47 AM on July 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Everyone here has good advice. I’d add that if you think things won’t get done because you’re putting boundaries around your time, you should communicate those up the management ladder—eg “I want to flag that I won’t be able to finish this by end of month unless you hire someone else as there aren’t enough hours left to take care of this by then,” “I can either attend these daily stand ups or do these reports but I won’t have time for both—can you help me prioritize? Maybe we can reduce the reporting requirements to weekly?” etc. They may not do anything about it but at least you’ll have done your due diligence in alerting them to a problem. You might assume they know but if things go off the rails, they’ll absolutely claim nobody warned them.
posted by music for skeletons at 7:03 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by music for skeletons at 7:03 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
What do you mean by "actively working" and "focused, steady work?"
As a PM I spent a lot of time pinging different people what does X mean, and who's doing X, and who's the counterpart on the customer side who knows about X so I can set up a meeting on X. And only after that do I have enough information to update all of my project artifacts (schedule, scope, budget) about X.
What I'm saying is, make sure you count all of the other work before you're able to update your project artifacts as actual work, because that's what's necessary for you to even tackle X as a topic.
If you're not counting those ad-hoc meetings and research, you're still underreporting your work time.
posted by tinydancer at 8:50 AM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
As a PM I spent a lot of time pinging different people what does X mean, and who's doing X, and who's the counterpart on the customer side who knows about X so I can set up a meeting on X. And only after that do I have enough information to update all of my project artifacts (schedule, scope, budget) about X.
What I'm saying is, make sure you count all of the other work before you're able to update your project artifacts as actual work, because that's what's necessary for you to even tackle X as a topic.
If you're not counting those ad-hoc meetings and research, you're still underreporting your work time.
posted by tinydancer at 8:50 AM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
I have been a PM in tech, where I clocked a 40-45 hour work week most weeks and actually generated work output for about 30-35 hours most weeks.
I’m now a PM in not-tech and I clock a 37.5 hour week and generate about 25-30 hours of work output most weeks.
Echoing others to say hold your ground on your hours. 35 hours of work output is great per week.
Another familiar trap for PMs is scope creep of your own role. It’s easy as a PM to get too involved in the technical or operational aspects of the job and creeping from “Project Manager” to “Project Deliver-er”. For example if your devs are not great at documentation and you go ahead and complete their documentation for a release because you’ve been hounding them to do it and it’s easier to just do it yourself. Don’t do that! Get really clear on what the scope of your job is as a PM and stick to that.
I also turn off notifications for Slack during my off-work hours. My team can text me on my personal cell if there’s a true emergency but I’ve basically never in my career encountered a project management emergency that only I can handle.
posted by rodneyaug at 8:55 AM on July 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
I’m now a PM in not-tech and I clock a 37.5 hour week and generate about 25-30 hours of work output most weeks.
Echoing others to say hold your ground on your hours. 35 hours of work output is great per week.
Another familiar trap for PMs is scope creep of your own role. It’s easy as a PM to get too involved in the technical or operational aspects of the job and creeping from “Project Manager” to “Project Deliver-er”. For example if your devs are not great at documentation and you go ahead and complete their documentation for a release because you’ve been hounding them to do it and it’s easier to just do it yourself. Don’t do that! Get really clear on what the scope of your job is as a PM and stick to that.
I also turn off notifications for Slack during my off-work hours. My team can text me on my personal cell if there’s a true emergency but I’ve basically never in my career encountered a project management emergency that only I can handle.
posted by rodneyaug at 8:55 AM on July 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
I'm not a PM, but a product owner and work closely with a couple of PMs in the tech end of logistics. As far as I know, they both work a pretty steady 40 hours per week. Our management actively discourages working over 40 hours unless planned or necessary.
posted by lhauser at 6:10 PM on July 10, 2023
posted by lhauser at 6:10 PM on July 10, 2023
This is a weird question since you don't specify what your goals are.
Do you just want to keep your job and not get fired? If so, it seems like you're doing enough for that given that you're hard to replace.
Do you want to get a promotion? It's often hard to get a promotion if you're perceived as not putting in enough hours even if you're getting results. That doesn't mean you need to work more hours, but if you don't, it's going to take some complicated social work with your boss and their boss to pitch your approach, and you're probably going to have to show you're going above and beyond in other ways. (And it's possible you might lose out in the future to someone less skilled who puts in more hours.)
Do you want to stay long term at this job? Even if you're enjoying the job now, it seems like if there's relentless pressure to work more hours you're probably going to burn out on it eventually.
posted by inkyz at 9:25 AM on July 11, 2023
Do you just want to keep your job and not get fired? If so, it seems like you're doing enough for that given that you're hard to replace.
Do you want to get a promotion? It's often hard to get a promotion if you're perceived as not putting in enough hours even if you're getting results. That doesn't mean you need to work more hours, but if you don't, it's going to take some complicated social work with your boss and their boss to pitch your approach, and you're probably going to have to show you're going above and beyond in other ways. (And it's possible you might lose out in the future to someone less skilled who puts in more hours.)
Do you want to stay long term at this job? Even if you're enjoying the job now, it seems like if there's relentless pressure to work more hours you're probably going to burn out on it eventually.
posted by inkyz at 9:25 AM on July 11, 2023
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posted by lulu68 at 12:17 AM on July 10, 2023 [21 favorites]