13-Hour-A-Week Overachievers May Be Guilty Of False Hustle

Once again, a horrible statistic jumps off a page of The New York Times:

``Among 88 million people with full-time jobs last year, nearly 24 per cent -largely executives, professionals, self-employed people, journalists, bureaucrats and the secretaries and clerks who toil alongside them - spent 49 or more hours a week on the job.'' This according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

One quarter of the working population works 49 hours a week? Zounds!

The story is laced with hard-running, upwardly mobile, desperate, catch-up examples of recidivist workaholics. One example will suffice to curl your hair:

``Sheila Griffin, the corporate advertising director for Motorola Inc., clicks on her cellular phone at 5:30 a.m. as she sets off from home in St. Charles, Ill., for the hour drive to work.

``First she checks her `voice mail,' the recorded messages people leave on her phone. `Then I make calls to Europe,' she said. `I get to the office and check the faxes. I get Europe out of the way and then work on things in our own time zone.'

``Ms. Griffin gets home to her husband, a civil engineer, and two young children 13 hours after she left and spends three hours with them. `Then at about 9:30 the phone rings,' she said, `and it's Japan.' ''

Now that, you must admit, is one terrifying female. Get Europe out of the way, indeed.

The author of this story, Peter Kilborn, is careful to note that all is not peaches, cream and Cadillacs among frenetic achievers. He quotes a psychiatrist who says the go-go, long-hour kids have ``got more bellyaches and more headaches'' than the rest of us sloths. He also says they have more diarrhea.

Now let's see: with a work force of 88 million and 24 per cent of them behaving like hyperactive lunatics, that gives us more than 21 million we must keep an eye on.

It is well known, at least by me, that people with glandular work ethics cause more damage to society than sluggards. Michael Milken was an achiever who worked virtually around the clock, and I assume that goes for Donald Trump as well. Look where it's getting them.

And among those 21 million whirling dervishes I suspect we would find most of our savings-and-loan culprits. Overachievement can do all kinds of damage to the bottom line; ask anybody who remembers the Edsel.

If Americans are working harder and longer than ever before, why is United States productivity behind Japan, Europe, and no doubt a couple of Third World nations? Maybe we are trying too hard - or flaunting our energy in wasteful ways.

Among baseball filberts there is a term known as ``false hustle,'' meaning a player who charges around every which way trying to impress the manager and the fans. ``He wears his hustle on his sleeve,'' is one way of describing the false hustlers.

They play the game (or appear to) like hyperactive maniacs but rarely do much to help their teams.

The best players - in baseball or business - are the ones who play relaxed. Kilborn includes this moving passage about why America is lagging behind Japan and Europe.

``One explanation might be that many people are just spinning their wheels. Executives hustle from meeting to meeting and make calls to disembodied voices on answering machines because those people, too, are in meetings.

``Michael V. Fortino, a management consultant in Pittsburgh, says the average professional worker will spend three years of his life in meetings and two playing telephone tag.''

Another expert says, ``Working longer and harder is not the same as working smarter.''

Most work, of course, is repetitious, boring, spirit-deflating, mechanical, stultifying and often depressing. I think America would be a lot better off if we adopted a national provision for longer and more frequent vacations. I never knew anyone who schemed himself into trouble while holding a fishing rod.

The sanctification of hard work, the founding of the Protestant work ethic, can be laid at the door of a couple of clerics, John Calvin and Martin Luther, who did their mischief about four centuries ago.

Somehow they got God mixed up in it. They persuaded the yeomanry, or whatever passed for middle management in those days, that long, hard, insufferable hours of work added up to God's will. The gates of Heaven were always open to those who didn't put in for time and a half.

Slothfulness, laziness, or just plain laid-backness, have never enjoyed divine endorsement. It's high time we changed that.

Today is a good day to knock off and play golf. For lack of a better explanation, I feel a supernatural urge coming on.

mett Watson's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.