Saturday, March 8, 2025

May 24, 2016

Imagine Your Boss Was Banned From Emailing You After Hours? This Country Has The Shortest Work Week

Working is a great way to earn money, no doubt, but there really is more to life than sitting behind a desk. Emails be gone.
Businessman in office putting on jacket

This one time, I had a boss who would email me continuously every night until three in the morning. The emails included how not to reply to people, endless tasks, and elaborate plans for the future.

It did my head in, receiving one notification after another while I had company or having an evening of down time – for being in the office from 8am until 7pm was hell on earth.

If only I had been in Paris at the time.

According to The Telegraph, Parisians worked the least hours last year, clocking up 1 604 hours each in 2015. That means those who lived in Paris worked an average of 30 hours and 50 minutes a week.

Now, the whole country is on a mission to ban those dreaded after-hour emails. Celebrations.

The idea is to provide staff with a set of guidelines that include evening and weekend hours when they should not read or send work-related emails.

If you think about it, it does take up a lot of personal time. A recent report from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) found that the majority of UK managers spend 29 extra days a year working on handheld devices outside of office hours.

The average city index is around 36 hours and 23 minutes.

Screen Shot 2016-05-24 at 9.09.02 AMI wonder where Capetonians fall on the graph, leaving at 14:30 on a Friday and stuff.

[source: telegraph]