- Sergey Brin suggested Google’s AI-focused employees work about 60 hours weekly for increased productivity.
- Workplace experts argue longer hours can reduce productivity due to errors and decreased motivation.
- One founder instead looks for “burstable bandwidth” where workers can ramp up when needed.
For Googlers working on AI, 60 could be the new 40.
Sergey Brin sees working about 60 hours a week as “the sweet spot of productivity.”
In addition to recommending that workers focusing on Gemini, the company’s AI model, go well beyond the 40 hours typical of many workplaces, the Google cofounder advised in a recent memo that they consider being in the office “at least” every weekday, according to The New York Times.
“In my experience, about 60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity,” Brin wrote in the memo published in full by The Verge. “Some folks put in a lot more but can burn out or lose creativity. A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by. This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else.”
Yet, for many employees, more time at their desks doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be more productive — and the extra hours could even hurt output if workers rev their engines for too long, workplace observers told Business Insider.
When people work more hours, there’s often a diminishing return, said John P. Trougakos, a professor of management at the University of Toronto. Too much time on the job can lead to an increase in errors and a drop in motivation.
“We see people taking longer to do the same amount of work than they would do when they were fresher,” he told BI.
Instead, stronger performance tends to come in shorter, focused bursts, Trougakos said.
It’s understandable, he said, given the pressure leaders face, why some might want workers around more, though the prescription isn’t necessarily going to yield better results.
Brin seems to be after better outcomes. In the memo, he referenced the fight for AI dominance.
“Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot,” he wrote, according to the Times, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.”
Google requires workers to be in the office at least three days a week.
The company didn’t respond to a request for comment from BI.
Like professional athletes
Longer hours can, in some cases, be an issue of “optics,” Trougakos said — a display of how dedicated people are to an organization rather than what they get done.
He said it’s hard to put a number on the ideal number of hours for so-called knowledge work because it tends to be different from something like manufacturing, where more time spent assembling widgets would yield more widgets.
By contrast, with desk jobs, “You can spend 60 hours on the clock and be very unproductive,” Trougakos said.
Heidi Golledge, the founder and CEO of Jobot, a consulting and recruiting firm that uses artificial intelligence, likens her employees to professional athletes who need to rest between games.
Without time to recover, she told BI, “you can’t play at the same level.”
As a tech exec, Golledge said, she believes in “burstable bandwidth” for her workers. That means if there’s a key deadline, they can expect to put in more time.
“You work a bit harder on those days, but you have to be able to rest and recharge, and then you can come at the problem anew,” Golledge said.
A recipe for burnout
Laura Vanderkam, author of “Tranquility by Tuesday” and other books about time management, has studied the time logs of various types of workers.
She told BI that few people consistently work more than 60 hours, partly because doing so can lead to burnout.
Vanderkam also said it’s unlikely that a round number like 60 would be the ideal amount of time to work. It’s similar to how 10,000 steps is a round number, though not one tied to scientific benchmarks for good health.
She said it can be hard to quantify how much time people need to be working because, for example, a major innovation could come at any time.
“That minute where they got that breakthrough is worth 50 hours of sitting around doing nothing else,” Vanderkam said.
She said that in a place like Google, which for years was famous for on-site perks like ping-pong tables, some employees likely would have to be in the office for even more hours to account for times when they weren’t working.
“I found very few people working consistently that many hours without some sort of downtime in there,” Vanderkam said of workplaces she’s studied.
40 to 50 hours is reasonable
Devoting too many hours to the office can cut into workers’ ability to do things that can help them succeed in the long run — activities like exercising, spending time with friends and family, and getting enough sleep.
Working too few hours, of course, also reduces productivity.
Vanderkam said many people who have full-time, “intense” jobs end up working between 40 and 50 hours a week. She sees that as reasonable, adding that “45 to 50 hours of work is different from 60.”
Trougakos, who has researched employee well-being, productivity, and work trends, said that rather than a specific number of hours, employers should focus on how people use their time, how they can use technology to boost productivity, and how to minimize interruptions during work hours.
Grinding for 60 hours, he said, isn’t likely to achieve a big payoff.
“It’s contrary to almost all data on high performance and productivity that we have,” Trougakos said.
