Ask people privately and most will say they would happily work less if it did not cost them. Yet the same people stay late, answer email at night, and compete, often without admitting it, to be seen as the hardest worker in the room. Everyone would prefer shorter hours, and everyone works long ones anyway. This is not hypocrisy. It is a trap with a precise structure, and seeing the structure is the first step to escaping it.
Why does everyone overwork?
Because of a signalling problem. In much knowledge work, your actual productivity is hard for anyone to observe directly. Your boss cannot easily measure the quality of your thinking, so they reach for a proxy that is easy to see: how many hours you put in. Long hours become a signal of commitment and dedication, and the people who bill or log the most hours are disproportionately the ones who get promoted.1 Economists studying law firms called this a rat race, in which hours serve as a visible stand-in for unobservable effort.1
Once hours function as the signal, a race is inevitable. If staying late marks you as committed, then anyone who leaves on time risks looking less committed than the colleague who stayed, regardless of what either actually produced. So you stay too, to keep pace, and the baseline creeps upward. Each person works longer to avoid falling behind, and the equilibrium settles at hours longer than almost anyone actually wants. It is an arms race: rational for each individual, collectively exhausting, and impossible for any one person to exit alone without appearing to surrender.
Is it only about appearances?
No, and this is the honest complication. It would be comforting to say overwork is pure theatre, but the economist Claudia Goldin showed it is partly real economics. She documented what she calls greedy work: jobs in which pay rises disproportionately, convexly, with longer and less flexible hours, so that someone working sixty hours earns more than one and a half times someone working forty.2 The returns to overwork, in these fields, are genuine and material, not merely a matter of impressing the boss. This matters because it means the person choosing long hours is often responding to a real financial incentive, not just status anxiety, and dismissing their choice as foolish misreads the situation. The trap has real money in it, not only ego.
Why can’t an individual just opt out?
Because the costs of moving first are concentrated on you while the benefits of everyone moving are spread across everyone. If you alone cut your hours in a culture that rewards long ones, you may pay in promotions, pay, and reputation, while the colleagues who keep grinding pull ahead. The preference for shorter hours is shared, but the risk of acting on it is individual, which is the defining shape of a collective-action problem. This is why willpower and good intentions cannot solve it at the level of one person. The incentives are stacked against the first mover.
What actually breaks it?
Coordination. Arms races end not when one party unilaterally disarms but when all parties agree to limit together, removing the penalty for any individual. This is precisely why the four-day-week trials work at the level of a whole company: when everyone reduces hours at once, no one is penalised for being the one who left, and the signalling race resets at a lower baseline. It is also why the deepest fix is structural and collective, policies, norms, and laws that change the rules for everyone, rather than individual heroics. An individual can reclaim meaningful time through the methods in this book, and should. But the arms race itself, the reason sane hours feel risky, is a problem that only coordinated action can fully dissolve. Knowing that is liberating in itself: your inability to simply opt out is not a personal weakness. It is the predictable result of a game whose rules were never yours to set alone.
Frequently asked questions
What is the hours arms race?
It is the dynamic where workers compete to put in longer hours because long hours signal commitment and get rewarded, so each person works more to keep up, even though most would prefer shorter hours if everyone reduced together.
Why does everyone overwork even if they would rather not?
Because it is a collective-action problem. When productivity is hard to observe, long hours serve as a signal of dedication, and those who work the most get promoted, so no one will cut back first for fear of looking uncommitted.
What is greedy work?
Greedy work, a term from economist Claudia Goldin, describes jobs that pay disproportionately more for longer and less flexible hours, so the financial returns to overwork are real, not merely cultural.
About the author
Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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James B. Rebitzer and Lowell J. Taylor, “Rat Race Redux: Adverse Selection in the Determination of Work Hours in Law Firms,” American Economic Review (1996): with productivity hard to observe, long hours serve as a signal, and those who bill the most hours are disproportionately promoted. ↩ ↩2
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Claudia Goldin, Career and Family (Princeton University Press, 2021): “greedy work,” in which pay rises convexly with longer and less flexible hours, so the returns to overwork are real and material rather than merely cultural. ↩