The Myth of Owning Your Time
You've probably heard it all before. Be your own boss. Control your schedule. Own your time.
As attractive as it sounds, it's a lie. Many people believe that working for yourself means unlimited flexibility. You can work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want for the rest of your life. What's not to like?
Unfortunately, things are rarely so simple. Going out on your own seldom creates the time freedom that you expect. Why? Because, as a business owner, you will still have huge demands on your schedule. Those demands will just come from customers and vendors, instead of a boss.
Don't get me wrong, calling the shots is far better than having no autonomy in a job you hate. But "owning your time" isn't always the fantasy it's made out to be either. All of your problems in life don't magically go away when you run the show—they just change.
While you may not have a boss expecting you at a meeting at a particular hour, you'll have other things that are just as urgent. You'll get client requests at an inopportune time. You'll have to fit part of your schedule to someone else's. You'll have employees quit on you (sometimes en masse). And when they do, guess who has to find their replacement? Hint: It's you.
In my experience, the more successful someone is, the busier they tend to be. While they have control over their calendar in theory, it rarely turns out that way in practice. When you rise that high, everyone wants a piece of you, and it can become incredibly difficult to say "No."
Unless you are actually retired (i.e., you don't work anymore), your time freedom will be more limited than you think. After all, do you think Kim Kardashian has a lot of time freedom? What about Mark Zuckerberg? How about Jamie Dimon? I doubt it.
They have to answer to sponsors, regulators, or shareholders when called upon. While they have some control over their time, the demand for it is also enormous.
It wasn't always this way, though. Historically, those with the highest incomes worked fewer hours than those with the lowest. But this has changed in recent decades. As researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found:
In 1983, the most poorly paid 20 percent of workers were more likely to put in long work hours than the top paid 20 percent. By 2002, the best-paid 20 percent were twice as likely to work long hours as the bottom 20 percent.The "leisure class" of the past has been replaced by an industrious one. Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, reaffirmed this trend in 2019:
The rich today work harder than they used to and they increasingly work harder than the rest, including the middle class ... The bottom 60 percent of the United States today work about 10 or 11 hours less per week on average ... and the top 1 percent today works 4 or 5 hours a week harder than it did at midcentury.And who works harder than the top 1 percent? The top 0.1 percent. A 2018 study in Harvard Business Review (full text here) tracked the time of 27 CEOs for an entire quarter and discovered that they:
- Worked, on average, 62.5 hours per week.
- Worked on 79% of weekend days.
- Worked on 70% of vacation days.