Let's examine a pair of seemingly inconsistent stereotypes: Americans are lazy, versus Americans work too hard. I suppose if we wanted to put a political frame on this discussion, we could associate the first with the (stern father) conservatives and the second with the (nurturing parent) liberals. There's no question that Americans waste time at work; rather a lot of time, as it turns out. But there's also no question that Americans put in long hours and that they generate enormous wealth. What's going on?

A recent survey found that:

The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch and scheduled break time, according to the report. That's far more time than the roughly one hour per day employers expect the average employee to waste, the report said. The extra unproductive time adds up to $759 billion annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit, the report said.

That's a lot of lost money and makes you wonder just how the US is doing in producing wealth relative to the rest of the world. Turns out, we're doing rather well: we're third on the list of countries in GDP per capita (the list is PPP, ie corrected for purchasing power, but the nominal rankings are similar: the US is eight on that list). For comparison the French rank 20th on that list. If we're generating all that wealth, how lazy can Americans be? The missing piece of information we need here is hours worked.

Americans work long hours . In fact, "Workers in the United States are putting in more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world." People are actually sleeping less as they work more: "most Americans are getting less sleep, less fun and less sex than they were five years ago. [...] The more people worked, the less sleep they got." That hard work does pay off in terms of dollars generated per person:

"Since the mid-1990s, U.S. labor productivity has grown considerably faster than most other developed (industrialized) economies," says Johnson. "Between 1995 and 2000, the average annual labor productivity growth rate in the United States was 2.6 percent, up from 0.8 percent between 1990 and 1995. Within the European Union, the labor productivity growth rate was 2.4 percent from 1990 to 1995. It decelerated to 1.2 percent from 1995 to 2000."

However, when we look at the wealth generated per hour we see something interesting: on the list of GDP per capita per hour , France is suddenly third, while the US is now fourth. Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys are more efficient workers!

Now, this is not new information, and I don't want to overstate the case here. Americans are reasonably efficient workers, even with the 2 hours of internet surfing. But why is it that we waste more time at work even as we work longer hours? From the survey quoted above:

They've got to answer the cell phone.
Coleman: Exactly, and then we have cell phones and BlackBerries and pagers and e-mail where people are expected to check their e-mail on weekends in many jobs. So work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time. Somehow technology is ahead of the corporate vision of what an appropriate workday is.

In other words, it's giving people tools or letting them do what they want to do?
Coleman: The workday is changing and the workday is not strictly a 9-to-5 window of opportunity where the employer has access to you and whatever it is you do. The employer is expecting access outside those hours for work purposes. And as a result of that, the things that you would be doing outside those work hours, things like paying your bills, sometimes find their way into the 9-to-5 window. So technology makes it possible for you to easily pay your bills at the office. And that Saturday afternoon emergency phone call gives you the rationalization or justification to do it--to say, "Well I'm working now, so I have a little bit of fuzzy time, a little bit of spare time on Monday so I can pay my bills."

In other words, it's just kind of quid pro quo almost in the mind.
Coleman: Right. And one of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited.

The answer to the question "Are Americans lazy, or do they work too hard?" would appear to be "Yes." As work hours increase, efficiency declines -- hardly a startling conclusion. This doesn't mean it is in the short-term interests of companies to have workers work shorter weeks, since given their costs per employee they still make more money as people work more hours (particularly salaried employees), even if those extra hours aren't as efficient. At some point it becomes counter-productive to pay inefficient workers to keep working, but the GDP rankings suggest we haven't reached that point. Yet. So from an economic standpoint, there's no big problem here. From a social standpoint, there might be; as work invades our personal lives, the structure of our society changes and everything from family dinners to vacations to holidays are impacted. And long-term, that comes back to hurt businesses, as employees burn out, switch fields, even develop health problems from working long hours. Some companies have come up with creative solutions, such as shifting the evaluation of work from a "put in the time" to a "get tasks accomplished" basis. For example, consider Best Buy's experiment :

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical — if risky —experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

Is flexible scheduling the key to minimizing inefficiency and maximizing productivity? Or is a rigid 9-5 schedule better for separating work and personal time?