If you don’t enjoy your working life then you need to take a serious look at your choice of job, in the first few years of working, I spent around 60% of my waking hours at work. Being a qualified engineer, I love a bit of maths, but for those who don’t love maths (or math for our American cousins) bear with me because what follows might just show you something.

My first working contract was for 42.5 hours a week, but the expectation was to put in far more than that, and eager to impress in my first year, let’s say I did 55 hours per week on average (my old manager may well laugh whilst reading this but rest assured it was about that as a minimum). Add to that my commute time which was an hour each way in the beat up Silver Fox, so now we are at 65 hours a week purely devoted to working.

There are 168 hours in a week; if we minus 8 hours sleep per night (8 x 7 = 56) then we are down to 112 hours of actually being awake each week. 65 as a percentage of 112 is close to 60%, but that isn’t the whole story as the graph below will try to explain.

As you can see, most people sleep for around 56 hours per week, leaving 112 to play with, if you remove the working time then you’re left with 47 hours per week, which might sound a lot of free time, but let’s have a look at the last column where I’ve put in the “Existing vs Living” title. If you were to add up the amount of time in a week where you cook, clean, eat, shower, shop, iron, sit on the loo (although some see this as a past-time) then I bet that would come close to 20 hours a week. So in reality we are down to 27 hours per week to go and enjoy ourselves, most of that will be at a weekend so if we say that 16 hours of that is weekend life then we are down to 11 hours in the week or if you go a step further then you have 2.2 hours every week day to go enjoy yourself and live. Of course this was based on my working life as a graduate and luckily I loved every minute of my first role, but I bet you can apply this sort of thinking to your own circumstances and come up with a fairly similar picture…then it allows you to question what should you do with your time…watch TV, play video games, right a blog, go to the gym, go for a drink…the world is yours!

This was just an attempt to demonstrate that if you don’t enjoy the work that you do then you had better look forward to and make bloody good use of the 11 hours a week, or if that seems too bleak a future, find a job that you enjoy, that 11 suddenly inflates to 76 hours of enjoyment.

I always tell people that when it comes to choosing jobs you can never make the wrong decision, if you end up hating a new job then at least you tried, you are safe in the knowledge that you don’t like that kind of role, don’t be so proud to either go back to an old role or keep searching for that great job…I promise you it’s out there somewhere.

‘N-T-G’