People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

The ATUS data has a couple of advantages over simpler survey data where you just ask people how many hours a week they typically spend working for pay, or taking care of the house, or attending church. One is that people are bad at estimating: When you give people a long list of activity categories and ask them how many hours a week they spend on each, they tend to give an answer that sums to more than 168 hours. The largest overestimates came from the people providing the highest estimates: People who said they typically worked 75 or more hours per week tended to provide diaries reflecting 25 hours’ less work per week than they estimated.

Source: nymag.com