How much work are you really supposed to do at work?

Most offices have eight-hour workdays - how many of those hours are we really supposed to be working? We asked a productivity expert, a psychologist, a labour journalist and a boss.

- By Jenny Singer

If you work an office job, your life is probably run by eight-hour intervals set by a corporation: nine to five, eight to four, 10 to six. Those hours tend to expand when working from home - scrolling emails at 7pm, sitting at a monitor between snippets of childcare and chores, more emails before bed. These hours dictate our sleep schedules. They determine when we have free time and how often we see our family. We slot breakfast, lunch and dinner around time spent at work.

But while it's true you're at work during those eight hours, you probably aren't sitting at your computer doing work the entire time, even if you're in the office. You might grab a coffee with coworkers or take a personal phone call. And you probably spend at least some of the time doing nothing but checking TikTok or browsing Zara.

That's not only reasonable; it's innate. For humans, concentrating on work for every minute of an eight-hour day is "impossible", says Malissa Clark, a Psychologist at the University of Georgia in the US whose research focuses on employee wellbeing and workaholism.

But how many hours should we actually work? What are other people doing? In a 2016 UK survey, 1989 full-time office workers reported working an average of two hours and 53 minutes per day. That's just one survey. But there's a lot of evidence that office work isn't as productive as we think. In 2006, Gloria Mark, a Researcher at the University of California, gathered data from phones and computers and found that the average time people spent working on a device at a time was two minutes and 11 seconds, shorter than some TikTok videos. And in a survey of 1 000 American office workers in 2018, 36% of millennial and Gen-Z employees estimated that they spend two hours a day distracted by their smartphones.