An anonymous reader quotes a report from New York Magazine: I want to thank Kevin Drum from Mother Jones for surfacing a 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics study that confirms something I’ve long suspected: Virtually anyone you know who claims to be working more than 60 hours a week is not telling the truth. Bureau of Labor Statistics researchers reached this conclusion by comparing regular survey data to diary data from the American Time Use Survey, a Census project that asks Americans to track, diary style, how their weekly time is divided among 163 different activity categories, from sleeping to shopping to pet care.
The BLS study found respondents in the ATUS tend to give an estimate of typical working time that is 5 to 10 percent higher than what shows up in their diaries. But the divergence was not uniform across the population. 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. People claiming to typically work between 65 and 74 hours weekly tended to be overestimating by 18 hours. Again, this sort of misreporting is not limited to work hours. People overestimate how often they do all sorts of things they “ought” to be doing, often by even larger margins than with work for pay.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot