then getting kudos for it. because if you were no longer rewarded for just simply being a button, a chair or a presence or sending late night emails, and you were really focused on what was most important about work. the work got better. a reminder that afterwards airs every sunday evening at 10 p.m. eastern time. well, thanks for joining us on about books, a program and podcast produced by c-span booktv. booktv will continue to bring you publishing news and author programs and a reminder that you can get this podcast on the c-span. now app and you can also watch online anytime all book tv programs at booktv dot org.

hi, richard. i'm so happy to be here to talk with you today about your new book. it'about all the ways are over working culture harms us and also about the ways a potentially fix it. it's a deeply reported book with a ton of research and talk to a lot of people for it. but i think what struck me about it is that your character in it as well and maybe to kind of kick us off, can you talk about the personal place that you wrote this book from?

what about your life made you want to write it? yeah, sure. well, first of all, it's so to be in conversation with you. i'm really excited to be here. your work has been really great as well. i'm excited to have this conversation. so this book really it's really a book of journalism it's a it's sort of a journey, if you will, of me as a journalist asking. questions and looking for answers. but it did start. my first book was called overwhelm work, love and play when. no one has the time. that was very much a it started out of own experience trying to understand why it so difficult to try to combine work and family. i had a job as a journalist, had two small children. you and everyone that i talked to, it seemed like was so impossible. why? and so i finished that, which was another sort of journey book, really trying to understand a lot time, time, pressure, gender roles, intensive work, intensive parenting, why we make no time for leisure this country.

and i got to the of that process and i have to i'm very driven by equity, you know, as as a as a woman, as someone who has care responsibilities, i want to try to understand why is it so difficult for all to have access to a good life, to have meaningful work, to have the time that they for care and connection for love, for joy? and why? why is it difficult for really all us to find time? you know, to put away that sense that we always have to be productive and busy? why is it so difficult to have time for leisure and joy and. you know, sort of like asking those bigger questions of like, why are we here? what we doing? and i realized that so much of sort of the pain and the misery not just for women, not just for for people with care responsibilities or honestly, workers with disabilities or workers with color of color. you know, where i think that the

the disadvantage is felt acutely but really for all of us i began to see that it really originated in our work culture the way we think about work, the way we organize work, particularly in the united states and, the way we actually do it. and i did look broadly across globe, but i was very focused on the united states where we have not just a hard work culture. i think we all believe as humans in hard work that there's a value in that. but we have it's morphed into an overwork culture where work is starting to squeeze out time for for the other great of life and sort of capturing more and more of our identities and really looking at, at why that is, what drives it, what the costs and consequences are. and then how do we move beyond and why is it so important? we do not just now, but as we think about a future of work. right. right.

you know, speaking of that line you mentioned between work hard, work and overwork and one of the moving chapters you have in your is about workaholism, which i guess it's like a word that a lot of us use colloquially, like, oh, i'm such a workaholic. but in the book you talk about how it's a very serious condition. it's a medical diagnosis. so you go and meet peoe t of work, colleagues, anonymous meeting who are desperately trying to overcome their addiction to work. at what point does your job end up become an addiction that kind of, you know, impairs and potentially ruins your life because it feels like that's a fuzzier line than we we it to be. that's such a good question. and it's really true. you know, i, i put a lot of work hours and i love i do and very passionate about that. it's my job to try to make sure try to ask those questions and, you know, how do we make a good life available to all people? you know and a lot of us,

regardless of what of job you have so many people that i spoke to for this book i with care workers and they have such pride they take such they have such a nsof meaning in what they do. they know just exactly what music their clients like or how to fix their hair or where to take them on walk or what to do when they're upset. i spoke to retail workers, you know, and they take such pride in what they do and how they stock shelves. and, you know, so i think that we have this sort of false that the only people who find meaning in their work are sort of educated kind of more the professional class. and that's that's not true at all. if you go all the way back to studs terkel, that's one of the things that really shines through in all of those all of the interviews that that he did so many years ago is we all find meaning and purpose. you know, many of us do in in in the work that we do. and so so the question is, where is the between?

good, good enough work? you know, what's difficult is if you're not working in a factory or you're not working in sort of set hours, which even retail workers and hourly workers aren't anymore with so much unpredictability, it's hard to know, you know, if your is to write great journalism or try to change the world at a nonprofit. it's to know when to call it a day. so work hours can stretch longer. and so i really looked a lot at the research between the difference between work engaged meant when you were really passionate, interested in your work, and then you're able to unplug from it, you're able to still say, yeah, maybe i wanted to accomplish today, but it's over. and i'm going to do i'm going to spend time with family and friends. i'm going to do something. i enjoy doing. you have you have you have the ability to unplug work. but for workaholism, it's often driven by it's driven by a

feeling of sort of not enough ness. and there's this sense that when you've stopped working, it is like an addiction. you it's very difficult to unplug from if you if you aren't working, thinking about it, you're worrying. you're like, you should be working. and so it's very difficult to. enjoy time for other areas of your life. it's talked many, many workaholics and they said vacation is the hardest time for, you know, having having time off and away from work. so i think that's what's important to remember is there is a line and it tends to be you know, there are internal drivers to workaholism or overwork, you know, where you can feel they can be positive. you know, you're excited, you're curious. i would say curiosity. a lot of my work, devotion, work, so to speak, you know, want to learn things, you know, they can also be very negative drivers. you know, that feeling of inadequacy or fear. but we live in a culture and

this is what so many workaholics told me. we live in a culture that so values and rewards long work hours that they were rewarded for the very things that were causing them pain that were them, from having a healthy relationship or being able to do anything outside of work. and so that's where the problem comes is, you know, when you're not able to unplug and then you, you live in a culture and you work an organization where people think that's amazing. right, right, right. yeah. when you drink too much or, you know, you have a gambling addiction, it's so clear that that's a bad thing. but it's not immediately clear that, you know, being addicted to work is a bad thing. i mean i mean, i think you know, it's one of those cliches in job interviews, like when somebody asked you when the interviewer asked you like, what's what's your one flaw? and i feel like a lot of people say, like, oh, i'm a workaholic right. and, you know, that should be a bad thing. because the other thing is looking into the research long

work hours, you know, we tend to think that it makes you a better worker, you know, and you're right, we reward that. oh, my goodness. if you come in early and you stay late and you work through lunch and, you never take a vacation. i mean, i've worked in newsrooms where you would get emails. oh so-and-so never take it. you know, they work for the last five or six weekends. aren't they amazing? you know, so you get these messages. that's the best way to work. but if you look over time, the research is really clear that the longer you work, it becomes counterproductive to both productivity. you get tired you kind of make fuzzy. you know, you're becomes fuzzier. it takes you longer to make decisions. you're not always clearheaded about them, you know. so it's it's not only counterproductive to productivity but you certainly cannot creative and innovative when you burned out and crispy around the edges. you know, the research is really clear that if you look at neuroscience. if you look at sort of the

science behind innovations or the aha moment that happens when we are well-rested, when we are feeling relaxed, i mean, there's a physiological reason we have our best ideas in shower, you know, where we're rested and the water feels great and we're sort of in this daydreaming mode. and so i think that's what's really important for, you know, the larger culture recognize that we need to stop rewarding the behaviors that are not only hurting people and they're individual lives, but are also really antithetical to if you to run an efficient, effective business, you know, if you want to have employees who don't work themselves into the ground, that those long work hours and work holism, they're not good for anyone. yeah, i mean, you talk, you know, the importance of culture here. i think in the book you make a funny observation that was it italy of all places that's done the best research workaholism. yeah. isn't that amazing.

you know, it's like the place that you would think, oh, you know, you have lunches with cappuccino or whatever. but i think what's interesting, too, when you talk to the handful of workaholic workaholism research in the united researchers in the united states, you know, they all say that they've struggled trying to get attention and rewards for their work because it's not seen as a problem in the united states. it's again, it's something that's seen as almost a price of entry. you know, it's almost expected in many professions. yeah. i mean, the book you go to a lot of different countries in europe. you go to iceland, you go to scotland. you just about italy. in this example was it. i mean, i'm sure you've been to europe before you started writing this book, too. was it kind of wild to go there and just experience how differently people think about work? there compared to how we think about work here in the u.s.?

well, and to be and to be fair, i also went to japan, which has a very very different view of work, more akin to the us. and so i wanted to experience different cultures who had different of work, and i wanted to really look closely at gender equality, at health and well-being you know, and also at class mobility. what was this doing to workers across class and gender and? you know, some of the things really astounding. and i think in japan that the whole idea that long work hours really don't was so clear because i would talk to people would be like 11:00 at night and they'd still at the office and they would be doing sort nothing. they'd be sitting around and you'd ask, well, you know, why are you there? and they said, well, my boss expects me be here. i can't leave, you know. and this is a country where know young people are not having children.

they're talking about having an aging. they are not very productive. when you look at the number of hours they put in and you talk to researchers there and they call that waste, you know, it's you're wasting a lot of time just physically either being at work or, you know, kind of hanging around your computer and spending late night emails. and it's sort of what we have here in sort of long work hours and busyness cultures in the united states as well. the researchers there it waste i ended up calling it you know the performance of work or stupid work so you know and what i what i realized and and to get back to your point of like why i went to different countries i realized that i began to think about work in three ways. they're sort of the core work that we talk about where we get a of meaning. we're doing things that we're interested in, we're developing skills that you're really connected to the value of what you're doing, the meaning and fulfillment part. and then there's then the next concentric ring is what i call

the work around the work. it's the emails and the meetings and the logistics and the planning that should go to help support that meaningful work. but oftentimes becomes the work. that's what you spend whole day doing, running to meetings and you're not quite sure why you're there. and you know plowing through and an inbox that never, ever seems to to be under control or answering messages. and then i began to think about work, that sort of final concentric concentric circle. i it the performance of work. so when are in a culture that rewards busyness that that cares more if look productive than if you really are or that values the long work hours the input of what you're doing rather than the output the output you know what are you creating? what are you actually doing what's the performance? what's the what's the impact in the world that you're if that doesn't matter, you know, then you have a whole lot of people

running around trying to look important and busy and sort of performing work that isn't work at all. and that's what i saw in a lot of us. that's what i saw a lot of in. and the reason i went to iceland is because they have a short work movement there. it's not a four day workweek, but they from 40 to 32 hours and they made that available to 85% of the population. so it wasn't just for elite, professional desk workers. you people who sit behind computers. i went there and i spoke to childcare workers, to nurses, to police officers, you know, as well as to travel agents and, you know, factory, you know, people work in factories and things like that. and what was so interesting is for them to be able to get 32 hours at the same rate of pay, they had to completely rethink what work was and. the first thing that they did is got really on that first circle. what the meaningful work, what

creates most value, how do prioritize that and they work on that second circle you know all of the meetings and logistics and planning like what are the processes that we can make to streamline it, to make sure that we're that most important work. and then they completely got rid of the stupid work. there was no more performing, you know, there was no more pretending to be busy and then getting kudos for because if you were no longer rewarded for just simply being a button, a chair or a presence or sending late night emails, and you were really focused on what was important about work. the work got better and it was interesting to the architects of the other shorter work hours movements. they wanted. do it for wellbeing, to bring people's stress levels down and increase health. and that's happened. and they also wanted to do it for gender equality and that has also happened because as men's paid work hours come down, they they're spending time sharing unpaid work of care and home,

which we all know that around the world women are still spending anywhere from 2 to 10 times more more time doing the unpaid work of care and home. and they're not able to put in those long work hours, long work hours cultures. so those long work hours cultures, they up creating more of a monoculture over time because, you know, people with care responsibilities that you simply can't put those kinds of hours. and so that was one of the things that actually became really enraging after a while that were rewarding wrong things and then were really disadvantaging so many people, you know, and we live in an era where you need to work to survive. it just felt so unfair. and then what we're doing is because leaders tend to believe that that's what you've got to do. that's the best to work. they end up rewarding who work like them. so you end up just sort of reconfirming a kind of a corporate monoculture over and over and over again, you know,

making sure that men and people with no care responsibilities are the ones that will always be in charge. and, and it just doesn't have to be that way. right. i mean, when go to iceland, i think you go in with quite a bit of skepticism. yes. you know, experiment in this, you know, tiny little country would have any lessons for us here in united states. you know, the world's largest after. you went there. did you feel differently about the skepticism you had going into. yeah, that is such a great question because. i really did. because, again, i struggle with my own, you know, with my own work, overwork. you know, when i was writing book, i also had a full time job. you know, i silly were to do two jobs and all of my unpaid care work with my kids and my mom and, you know, so it was it was too much. and sometimes i was thinking i would to work a shorter work out workweek, would i do that? and so i began looking in the

us, the uk, where some pilots were starting. but i have to be really honest, i, i saw a lot of them the time i think they've changed now. but when i was reporting the book, many of them were smaller, kind of techie, you know, kind of male dominated. and i began to really worry. it's like, well, if, if that's the only, you know, if those are the only workers who are going to benefit from shorter work hours, that just felt, you know, kind of more gender inequality, you know, you'd have like, you know, high, high, highly paid men surfing on fridays, as you know. and then all of the women doing so much of the care work and the, you know, childcare and home care and nursing work, so many of them work days a week that just felt like that's not that didn't feel like an answer that didn't feel like something i wanted to try to explore that we could learn from. and then a friend of mine said, well, you should go to iceland because. they have made it available these short work hours available across, all sorts of industries,

you know, to 5% of the workforce. so i was skeptical because i struggle with my own work hours. i was like yeah, just kind of show me, show me how you really do this. but i was also because you're right, you know, i even say that in the book. i know we're not iceland, you know, because is it's very small, it's homogenous it's, you know, it's a very unique of place. and the united states is so vastly different. we were enormous and we're enormously diverse, you know, and there's a lot dynamism here. there's a lot of economic inequality here that, you know, we have all sorts of issues that we need to work on. but i think what i up coming away with was it's not like we're iceland. we shouldn't be iceland. we'll never be iceland. you know, we are united states, you know, but what we can learn is the process we could in that sort of a universal, whether it's through public policy or through, you know, organizational change, the process that they went through, get to those shorter, more

effective hours and then the culture change they went through to reward what really important and to things like equity and human well-being rather than endless growth and gdp and, you know, kind of outsized profits for ceos as well. frontline workers, wages have stagnated really since 1971. you know, there are processes that we can learn from that i thought were really valuable. and that's what i really focus on in that chapter in you able to convince your employer to implement a four day workweek. well, so so i run a nonprofit, you know, and so as program director, i have a lot of autonomy within within my organization work at new america. and so really, ever since i got there i mean, that is one thing that i will say is that even though i have struggled with long work hours over my, you know, over my career, i have always thought to work very

flexibly. so i have always had more of a sense of choice and control over my time. and so that's what i give to my team and flex disability is our default. so i try to do is make our objective lives and our goals very clear. the deadlines, the standards very clear. we have a lot of transparency, regular on ones. and so then where do you do that work when do that work or how you do work becomes far less important. are you doing excellent work? you know, in the time that we need it and in taking of your own health and and responsibilities at the same time. so i have always a measure of flexibility not only to my own work habits and work life, but to my teams as well. and you know one of your chapters is about reading mining work where you talk about some very promising experiments that

generated great results, but they still didn't end up they just kind of fizzled out after a few years. it's something i've been thinking about a lot as a workplace reporter these days because companies are trying so hard to their employees to come back to the office even though there's so much research showing that it's great for employers and employees and you know i've just been about like it's almost like there's this force of gravity separates us back to the status quo every single time. and i think you kind of show that in the book, too, like, what do you make of that? like, why why is it so hard for companies to. so i want to say two things about that, because you're absolutely right. i write about what would have been it wasn't creative innovative work redesign intel and i go through the process of how you know they really talk to the people found what their pain points were designed a really creative way to address it and

it worked well for people their wellbeing for equality it worked well for the company. they didn't have to like lay people off and and rehire them the next month you know, it sort of one of those a win win win situation. and what i'll say about that is what i found with so many work redesigns and you're seeing that with the return to office fight with you know all of the covid and the experiments and how some people embraced it and others others didn't. it really comes down to the power of what leaders and i think that was of the things that most struck me. all of the reporting that i did in this book. and it's why it's not surprising that we have these return to office fights, because if you have leaders who who grew up a certain way of working and that's the way they were successful, many them that's the only way they know how to work and so they believe the best way to work and and so i think

that's what you see over and over again is that you would see these wonderful work, work redesigns and there would be evidence data to show that they were better on a whole of measures, better for the company, you know, far less turnover higher profitability, more productive. and when there was a leadership, a new leader would come in and say i don't get this. it's not the way i like to work. i'm uncomfortable, we're not doing it anymore. and so they would it. but the second thing that i want to say, and this is what i think is most important right now, is that covid was like a grand experiment on a grand scale. i mean it was a horrific pandemic. we lost a lot of lives. we were forced to so many things about the way we work the way we live, the way we care, the way we go to school. but forced us to do things that we didn't think were possible. and we did. and people showed that they could be incredibly productive in very trying circumstances. all of a sudden, the hourly, the

the service workers who have been sewing visible for decades became essential. and we saw their plight and like, oh my, why? why do people you know, why are we putting up with the fact that so many people are in such poverty wages? you know, why are we putting up with the fact that we've got companies, we allow to give their workers such unpredictable schedules? so there were things that we saw. there were things that we tried. there were things that we did and the pandemic lasted long enough that many have started to stick. you and you've written about this people to you know as you saw death all around you and in real struggle people to think about their own lives and did work mean or what do i want out of my own life we sort of broke some cycles that we had been where we just took for granted that you know yes hard work is good to overwork must be better. and so i'm just going to go, go, go, go, go. and busyness be good. and we started to kind of begin

to question. of those status quo realities. we started to question some of that inertia. and so what i will is that even though, you know, amazon is the most recent return to office back five days a week, and there's others that that have come out, but there are a host of other smaller companies, other companies who have made the commitment to doing something differently. they may not be getting the headlines. they may be getting the all of the attention, as you're right, the the research is so clear that if you want the most productivity, if you want the most sense of satisfaction out of workers, but also middle managers and managers is some kind of hybrid is so much more it gives people so much more of a sense choice and control and flexibility in both the time manner and place of their work and that i think that there is

more lasting power. and i think that's what's to remember is that before these work redesigns, we're sort of trying to push against a very powerful inertia and status quo. and now, you know, there are there sort of cracks in the concrete. and i and i and while there are some want to snap back to 2019, i think that's to be very difficult to do. and it sounds like you might be much more of an optimist than i. i mean, as you're you're talking about this, what i'm thinking is like, is a new wild that it takes you know the largest global pandemic in a century to actually make these changes happen like it's just so sad that like you evidence isn't enough to change the way that we work. you know, i. i couldn't agree more. it's it's astounding, especially when you, you know, i think it you you listen to business leaders and all sound so

rational, like, oh, we want to make the business case and we these goals and objectives and on and on and and then the way people act or is sometimes so divorced from reality and it is astounding. but to me it comes back the power of, well, first of all, who's power and what they believe. and so when you look at some of the most effective either it's short work short work movements or work redesigns. it's like, you know, the process is you know, you kind of stop and you figure out, okay, what's that core work? that's most important? but then, you know, you get out of that c-suite bubble and you and you start asking people, what are your pain points? what are you struggling with in your life? you know, what would make your work and life and play better? how how could we co-create together what was so interesting is like going to iceland or some of these other work redesigns, you know, it's like they had