How does one work 50+ hours a week?

Originally Posted by edmorel

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Yeah, Qdoba's got the girls, no doubt, but they are not the ones delivering the food. Never had Blockheads, I hate the name and I hate buying food in places where they are giving discounts. Chipotle adds juniper berries to it's pork. They also identify which employee had a hand in the day's rice or guag or barbacoa, by having them wear t-shirts that say as much, and I find that productive.

I liked Chipotle more than Qdoba up until the recent bought of food poisoning mentioned earlier in this thread.

How many hours per week do you think the average worker at Chipotle puts in?

Originally Posted by edmorel

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Yeah, Qdoba's got the girls, no doubt, but they are not the ones delivering the food. Never had Blockheads, I hate the name and I hate buying food in places where they are giving discounts. Chipotle adds juniper berries to it's pork. They also identify which employee had a hand in the day's rice or guag or barbacoa, by having them wear t-shirts that say as much, and I find that productive.
There are crayon drawings of a sockpuppet all over one of the blockheads I've actually sat at. Sometimes they do weird things like put rice inside quesadillas. The more I think about that, the more I get angry. But I don't want anyone's berries touching my food so Chipotle, no way, too gay, as they say, in the month of may. Yay.

Originally Posted by Piobaire

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How many hours per week do you think the average worker at Chipotle puts in?

Probably at least 60+ if they want to be successful.

Arnach, what do you do that you enjoy so much? I'm curious.

Originally Posted by haganah

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and it's a horribly inefficient system where you may sit at your desk and do nothing all day and not leave early for the fear that other people will realize you've been doing nothing all day. or sometimes you stay late because why not get a nice seamlessweb delivery out of it. or sometimes it's a friday at 6 and someone drops something ridiculous on your desk and needs it ASAP instead of asking for it at 9am. some people become great at gaming the system like the analyst in my class years ago that did yoga during the day or went shopping only to come back at night and show how hard working she was. good times. of course i'm just talking about the down times and not the brutal weeks where it seems like it just won't stop.

I can't believe that working consecutive 80+ hour weeks in a knowledge or skill-based job would be effective. That is, if one is actually working those 80 hours.

From talking to people who have worked their asses off (without being wasteful of their time), I gather that the 80+ hour weeks that do happen have a lot of waiting for work involved.

Does anyone, with the possible exception of small business owners, actually work 80+ hour weeks in which they are consistently busy with regularity?

Originally Posted by CTGuy

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Probably at least 60+ if they want to be successful.

112 minimum. The only hours of the day that should be wasted not being successful are those spent sleeping, 8 hours at the most a day.

Originally Posted by Amory

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I can't believe that working consecutive 80+ hour weeks in a knowledge or skill-based job would be effective. That is, if one is actually working those 80 hours.

From talking to people who have worked their asses off (without being wasteful of their time), I gather that the 80+ hour weeks that do happen have a lot of waiting for work involved.

Does anyone, with the possible exception of small business owners, actually work 80+ hour weeks in which they are consistently busy with regularity?

Ditto. I think alot of I-banking and law guys are quick to say that to be a bad ass success like themselves you need to work 100 hours and then in the next breath they admit they spend a lot of that time waiting around because that is the culture of the business they are in.

Originally Posted by MCsommerreid

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112 minimum. The only hours of the day that should be wasted not being successful are those spent sleeping, 8 hours at the most a day.

A lot of that time is probably spent waiting for salsa to be made though.

Originally Posted by CTGuy

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Ditto. I think alot of I-banking and law guys are quick to say that to be a bad ass success like themselves you need to work 100 hours and then in the next breath they admit they spend a lot of that time waiting around because that is the culture of the business they are in.

I agree, much of the hours thing, in many fields, is a business culture thing. Even on the other side of the grind, I am still amazed at the number of calls I get between 5-5:30 on Friday from work, or Saturday morning. People seem to figure I am always on the clock...and I'm the boss. My favorite thing is coming into work Monday and having a v-mail from someone over the weekend where they sound all pissed off because I wasn't there Sunday at 6a to answer the phone for their pissy little problem.

Such is life. There's a reason certain jobs come with big paychecks.

Originally Posted by CTGuy

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Ditto. I think alot of I-banking and law guys are quick to say that to be a bad ass success like themselves you need to work 100 hours and then in the next breath they admit they spend a lot of that time waiting around because that is the culture of the business they are in.

Guys, I'm not sure what your career/work experience is, but I've never been in a corporate environment that is not plagued by such inefficiencies. Unless you are not working in a team or hierarchical structure (e.g. free-lance or independent worker?), there is always some down time, miscommunication issues, misaligned expectations, etc... This is by no means limited to the industries you're highlighting.

Believe me, everyone would prefer they did not exist and I think we're all constantly trying to make the workflow more efficient, but people have meetings, they travel, they're on conference calls so you cannot always accurately coordinate a team's schedule to create a perfectly efficient stream of tasks. That is the necessary evil that comes with working in teams - and the larger the team, the more complex and inefficient it can be.

Originally Posted by gdl203

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Guys, I'm not sure what your career/work experience is, but I've never been in a corporate environment that is not plagued by such inefficiencies. Unless you are not working in a team or hierarchical structure (e.g. free-lance or independent worker?), there is always some down time, miscommunication issues, misaligned expectations, etc... This is by no means limited to the industries you're highlighting.

Believe me, everyone would prefer they did not exist and I think we're all constantly trying to make the workflow more efficient, but people have meetings, they travel, they're on conference calls so you cannot always accurately coordinate a team's schedule to create a perfectly efficient stream of tasks. That is the necessary evil that comes with working in teams - and the larger the team, the more complex and inefficient it can be.

Hey-- I am not making any kind of judgement here. I am very much in the same situation-- it was just an observation.

Originally Posted by CTGuy

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A lot of that time is probably spent waiting for salsa to be made though.

Then they really should synergize their salsa paradigm to increase production efficiency.

Originally Posted by MCsommerreid

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Then they really should synergize their salsa paradigm to increase production efficiency.

... and be more proactive.

Often in working longer hours you do find yourself waiting for person x, y, and z to get back to you on things otherwise you cannot procede with your work, and thus the downtime, and styleforum