Brigid Schulte didn’t set out to become the country’s foremost chronicler of overwork. She was a Washington Post journalist trying to be good at her job and present for her kids, watching her marriage strain under the weight of an unequal division of labor, and eventually getting challenged by a time-use researcher who told her she had 30 hours of leisure per week. She nearly cried — because those “hours” were five minutes here, ten minutes there, fragments of time sandwiched between other responsibilities, including one stretch where her car broke down while her daughter was in it and he counted the wait for a tow truck as leisure time.
That experience led to her first book, Overwhelmed. Her second, Over Work, asked a deeper question: is any of this actually necessary? Her answer, after years of research across multiple countries and industries, is a clear no.
The Trap of Loving Your Work
There’s a version of overwork that’s easy to identify: the boss who emails at midnight, the culture that rewards presence over output. But Schulte points to a subtler trap — the one that catches people who genuinely love what they do.
When you care deeply about your work, the boundaries get blurry. You stay late not because anyone is making you, but because the story matters or the project isn’t done. You skip overtime pay because passion doesn’t punch a clock. And your organization learns, quickly, that you can be relied upon to give more than you’re compensated for.
“It can be a trap. And we have work cultures, particularly for professional class workers, that make it difficult to turn it off.”
The reward structure reinforces it. Schulte describes an editor who sent weekly emails praising the people who stayed late and came in on weekends — the “dedicated ones,” in his framing. What got measured wasn’t quality. It was hours.
Where the Eight-Hour Day Actually Came From
The research on productivity limits is more settled than most people realize. An economist at Stanford named John Pencavel studied the relationship between hours worked and output and found that productivity falls off a cliff at around 50 to 55 hours a week. You can push past that threshold for a short sprint, but sustained long hours don’t produce more — they produce the same output with more depletion.
Henry Ford figured this out a century ago in manufacturing. When workers were pushed past an eight-hour shift, the work got sloppier, mistakes increased, and costs went up. Shorter hours were, counterintuitively, more efficient.
That insight never fully transferred to knowledge work. Instead, white-collar culture defaulted to the factory-era metric it understood: presence. The “ideal worker” — Schulte’s term — is someone who comes in early, stays late, has no care responsibilities, and can travel on short notice. That standard was always more achievable for men than women, and it hasn’t fundamentally changed even as women’s workforce participation has.
Stupid Work Is a Real Category
One of Schulte’s most useful frameworks: she thinks of work as three concentric circles. At the center is the real work — the work that creates genuine value and moves things forward. Around it is the work around the work: emails, meetings, Slack messages, the logistics of coordination that should support the center but often swallow it entirely. And on the outside is the performance of work — looking busy because busyness is what gets rewarded.
Her most vivid example comes from Japan, where overwork culture is so embedded that there’s a word for death by it: karoshi. She interviewed a man still at the office at 11 p.m. When she asked what he was doing, he said he had nothing left to do and didn’t know what to do, but his boss was still there so he couldn’t leave. He was running blank copies at the copy machine.
That image — someone performing productivity rather than doing anything productive — is extreme, but the underlying dynamic isn’t unique to Japan.
What the Four-Day Workweek Research Actually Shows
The four-day workweek is no longer a thought experiment. Countries including Iceland have implemented it at scale — 85 percent of Iceland’s workforce now has access to shorter work hours — and the productivity data is consistent: output doesn’t fall when hours are cut, provided organizations also cut the right things. Meetings that exist out of habit. Processes that have outlived their purpose. The work around the work.
Schulte also notes that the changes from COVID-era work redesigns have stuck more than the headlines suggest. Many organizations quietly maintained hybrid arrangements after the public debate moved on, finding that morale and retention improved without any drop in productivity. Their leaders often don’t talk about it publicly because they don’t want the scrutiny.
What Women Leaders Can Do
Schulte is direct about the particular bind women in leadership face. Research shows that when someone feels like an outsider in a group, they tend to conform more strongly to the in-group’s norms — not less. A woman who reaches a leadership position in an overwork culture may feel more pressure, not less, to model the behavior that got her there.
Her advice: resist that pull. The 21st century needs leaders willing to lead differently. That means getting out of the CEO echo chamber and actually talking to the people at various levels of the organization — understanding their real constraints, not the sanitized version that makes it to the top. And it means being willing to model what a sustainable work culture looks like, even when it feels risky to do so.
“Lean into your own experience. Embrace your own identity if you’ve got care responsibilities.”
A Few Things That Actually Help
For individuals trying to reclaim some ground within overwork cultures, Schulte offers a few concrete moves:
Intentional scheduling. Block time for your most important work the same way you’d block a meeting. If it’s not on the calendar, it will get displaced by everything else, and you’ll reach Friday having advanced nothing.
Run the success sequence on yourself. Ask honestly: what is the work that actually creates value? Where am I on the merry-go-round of email and meetings? What am I doing purely because it looks like work? Starting there — even individually, even quietly — can shift how you spend your hours.
Give yourself more grace. Schulte is candid that she still struggles with the feeling of never being done. Her own practice has shifted toward accepting that the day can be good enough as it is — taking unscheduled walks she calls “toodles,” watching a Marvel movie without guilt, letting the work be what it was rather than what it could theoretically have been.
The Bottom Line
Overwork isn’t a necessary condition for ambition, creativity, or success. It is, however, a deeply embedded cultural practice that disproportionately punishes people with care responsibilities — which means it disproportionately punishes women. The good news in Schulte’s research is that there are real alternatives, they work, and they already exist in more places than the headlines suggest. The harder news is that changing the culture requires someone to go first.
This post is based on an episode of Women Amplified, the podcast from the Conferences for Women, featuring Brigid Schulte, journalist and author of Overwhelmed and Over Work.
