Ask someone how their week was and they will tell you they are slammed, flat out, working all hours. Some are. But when researchers actually measure it, the confidently claimed sixty-hour week is, on average, considerably shorter than that. And the people claiming it are not lying. They genuinely believe it.
How big is the overestimate?
Large and consistent. A 2025 study found people overstated their time spent working most of the time, reporting roughly an hour and twenty-seven minutes for every single hour they had genuinely spent, an inflation of about forty-five percent.1 Researchers who study time diaries find the same pattern whenever they check: when you measure a week block by block, the heroic totals shrink.2
Why does the padding happen?
Partly because the “full day” you remember is stuffed with things you did not register at the time. The quick inbox check. The tab you opened and closed. The ten minutes spent climbing back into a task after a colleague interrupted you. Each feels like nothing, and together they inflate your sense of effort while producing very little. You remember the sensation of being busy and file it as hours of work.
Is some of it about looking good?
Yes, and this is the detail that should make you both smile and wince. When people are asked to make time estimates anonymously, the optimism and inflation largely vanish.3 In other words, part of the reason we claim our weeks are packed with important work is that we are managing other people’s impression of us. The unsettling part is that we do it even when the only audience is ourselves. The performance of busyness has become so automatic that we stage it in an empty theatre.
Why does this matter?
Because you cannot fix a week you have misread. If you believe you are working sixty genuine hours, you will conclude there is nothing left to cut and that your exhaustion is simply the price of the job. The measured week tells a different story: not that you are lazy, but that a large share of your time dissolves into communication, switching, and admin rather than the work you are proud of.4 That is good news. It means the problem is structural and addressable, not a personal limit you have already hit.
What should you do about it?
Measure, do not remember. Track your time as you spend it for one representative week and let the data overrule your instinct. You will almost certainly find two things: that you worked fewer genuine hours than you thought, and that fewer of them went to high-value work than you hoped. Both are useful. The first frees you from the false belief that your plate is already as light as it can get. The second points straight at the work to shed and the work to delegate. The inflated number is comforting in a grim way, because it lets you off the hook of changing anything. The real number is the start of getting your time back.
Frequently asked questions
Do people overestimate how much they work?
Yes, consistently. A 2025 study found people overstated their working time most of the time, reporting about an hour and twenty-seven minutes for every genuine hour, an inflation near 45 percent. Time-diary research finds claimed 60-hour weeks are usually far shorter once measured.
Why do we overestimate our working hours?
Partly because memory pads the day with quick inbox checks and recovery time after interruptions, and partly impression management: people inflate hours even to themselves. Anonymous estimates show much less inflation.
How do you find out how much you really work?
Measure it as you go, in short blocks, rather than reconstructing it from memory. A time audit replaces the inflated remembered week with an accurate one, which is the basis for reclaiming any time.
About the author
Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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A 2025 time-perception study found people overstated working time by about 45 percent on average, reporting roughly one hour and 27 minutes for every genuine hour worked. ↩
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Time-diary researchers consistently find that confidently claimed long weeks shrink substantially when measured block by block. ↩
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The same research finds that anonymous time estimates show much less inflation, implicating impression management as a driver. ↩
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Workplace telemetry (Microsoft and Asana indices, 2021 to 2025): a majority of the week goes to communication and coordination rather than focused output. Vendor data, read as directional. ↩