The study, commissioned by Welch’s, consisted of 2,000 American mothers of children ages five to 12. The moms shared the tools, resources, and techniques they use to manage and take care of their families. Moms everywhere know what it takes to keep everything running relatively smoothly and keep everyone happy and healthy is nothing short of a miracle

Juggling schedules, grocery shopping, various organization tactics, delegating tasks, cooking, cleaning, and managing a household is a full-time job in itself. Add all of that in with working full time, and the Welch’s study concluded that the average working mother works 98 hours per week. The average working mom’s day typically begins at 6:23 a.m., and the average working mom doesn’t stop until 8:31 p.m. (Raise your hand if you just scoffed and said “8:30? Psshh, I wish!”)

98 HOURS. That’s almost triple digits, y’all. In one week. Of course, if you’re a working mom, none of this surprises you. But when you think about your family responsibilities in terms of hourly contribution, it’s hard to ignore such an exhausting number. Sure, many of us have partners who share in these duties, but let’s get real about The Mom Burden. As in, we shoulder all of it whether people are helping us or not.

Additionally, the study found the average mom says she only gets about an hour and seven minutes to herself each day. If you want to crunch some more numbers, that’s seven hours and 49 minutes of time “off.”

Mmm yep, sounds about right.

“The results of the survey highlight just how demanding the role of mom can be and the non-stop barrage of tasks it consists of,” Casey Lewis, MS, RD and Health & Nutrition Lead at Welch’s, told Yahoo! News. “Busy moms may identify with the list of ‘lifesavers’, which highlights not just a rigorous workload but a constant requirement to feed and fuel the family, week in and week out.”

Since we’ve got to make the most of those precious, paltry seven hours, we gotta cram in as much self-care as we can. The moms in the study ranked Netflix, wine, grandparents, reliable babysitters, and (duh) wine as must-haves to help keep them sane throughout the week.

If you’re a mom, you know you’re clocking in for every single minute of those 98 hours per week. None of this information is a surprise, per se, but it’s sure as hell useful. Because the next time someone comments on how “tired” we look, we can say we’ve got 98 reasons why.

Scientists confirm we should only work 4 days a week

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a three day weekend every week? Well, that’s what some people are calling for in the aims of productivity and worker happiness and health. There is a real cap on our productivity and after we hit it, we lose the ability to do our job at our best.

Unfortunately, people feel that by living at their desks they can get more done. By constantly buying into this cycle, we run the risk of running ourselves ragged and not performing how we should. That’s why more and more companies are adopting shorter work weeks, to make their employees happiness a priority and to create better more well-adjusted people who come to work ready to be productive.

Four or five hours per day

There have been many experiments on productivity by psychologists who focus on work, and generally, they have determined that people can only do four or five hours of productive work per day. After their performance reaches its peak, it tends to stall, and then people start to suffer. According to K. Anders Ericsson, an expert on the psychology of work, if you push people beyond the time they can really concentrate maximally, you’re going to get them to acquire some bad habits. Even worse, those bad habits will make their way into the time when they are normally productive

32 hour work week

working

Ryan Carson, CEO of Treehouse, instituted a 32 hour work week back in 2006, and ever since his employees have been happy and more productive, all the while his company makes millions of dollars in revenue. In a similar case, Reusser Design switched to a four-day work week in 2013 and the company founder, Nate Reusser, says his employees’ performance >is much higher

Giving up just one day of work

In a survey published in the monthly labor review, twenty-eight percent of respondents stated that they would give up one day worth of pay for one extra day off from work. But not only do people prefer having an extra day off but productivity actually suffers the longer you work (4). In a 2014 paper from Stanford University, they found that results start to slide around the 50-hour per week mark, in that people were producing less (5). In another study, by the Families and Work Institute, people who feel overworked said they make more mistakes at work (6). So not only does productivity fall at a certain point but mistakes are made, further compounding productivity.

Making mistakes at work

upset at work

In a study done on nurses who worked long hours, the relationship between work duration and adverse events and errors was calculated. Researchers determined that adverse events and error variables were significantly related to working more than 40 hours in the average week. Small tasks relating to medication and needlestick injuries had the strongest and most consistent relationship with the work hour and voluntary overtime variables

Overworking and depression

Not only does productivity fall when we are overworked but our health begins to suffer as well. In a study done in Japan of small and medium sized businesses, It was found that participants who worked ten hours per day and slept only six hours per night reported up to ninety-seven percent more chance of depression when compared to those who worked only six to eight hours a day

Theorists have often contemplated that our work week would become shorter and shorter the more we became technologically capable. But that appears not to be the case, the standard forty hour work week is the norm in many companies, but is it really contributing to overall productivity? It seems we have a limit to how productive we can be, our attention to detail starts to fail us and mistakes are made. A four-day work week can benefit both our state of minds and our health.