Eight hours each for work, leisure and sleep feels a sensible balance – yet with home working, and long-hours culture, it can seem like an unachievable goal

Awoman who grew up in the former Yugoslavia told me how they used to live their days by the three eights: eight hours of work, eight hours of free time and eight hours of sleep. Nice. I assume weekends were free. It’s odd how quaint this 8-8-8 notion sounds, but eight-hour working days add up to 40 hours a week, which was once standard here, wasn’t it?

I suppose there are two reasons you would work for longer than that. It could be that you need to do so to put food on your table, which is fair enough – or most unfair, if you see what I mean. On the other hand, you could be doing punishing hours because your employer, or your industry, demands it, in the interests of making the company as much money as possible and, in some cases, enriching yourself along the way. Either way, it’s no good. You need non-working waking hours for your own sanity, your family’s sanity and the good of the community.

This week, some junior employees of the US bank Goldman Sachs have had a grumble, daring to point out that they are putting in as much as 95 hours a week. If they were squeezing those hours in Monday to Friday – which I appreciate they are not – their numbers on my Former Yugoslavia Work-Life Balance Index (FYWLBI) would be an awful long way from 8-8-8. Ninety-five hours work over five days comes out at a punishing 19 hours a day. That’s some shift. I’ve got their FYWLBI at 19-2-3 – 19 hours’ work, two hours’ free, three hours’ sleep. But if the BBC drama series Industry is anything to go by, the general pattern is nearer 19-4-1, or even 19-5-0. If you spread the 95 hours over seven days, you are still averaging a gruelling daily regime of 14-5-5.

Goldman’s boss, David Solomon, would doubtless point out what a sticky end Yugoslavia came to – to which I would retort that this possibly wasn’t down to issues with work-life balance. Anyway, Solomon seems to have taken notice. He has gone as far as to commit to better enforcing a rule the bank already has, which ringfences junior bankers’ time off from Friday evening to Sunday morning. Slackers.

And lest potential clients think he might be getting soft, in an address to his 34,000-strong global workforce, Solomon said: “Just remember, if we all go an extra mile for our client, even when we feel that we’re reaching our limit, it can really make a difference in our performance.”

This quote is pure gold. How can working to the point that you feel you are “reaching your limit” be anything but negative for your performance? People working those kinds of hours can’t be at the top of their game. You wouldn’t want to get in a cab driven by someone who has been at the wheel for 13 hours and is reaching their limit; why would you pay huge sums for the services of a banker who must be just as knackered? Would you want a surgeon at his or her limit operating on you? Of course not, even though that most likely does happen. But let’s not go there.

Apparently, working from home has made things worse. Not least, I would have thought, because even if you are not working terribly long hours in total, the way work and home life bleed into one another does your head in. What is as important as a balance between hours worked and hours not, is keeping the blocks of time separate.

This has been a challenge for everyone in the past year, but I have long struggled with it. As a freelance writer and broadcaster, there’s always something I could or should be doing. I’m not looking for pity here; in most ways, I love it, but I find it impossible to focus entirely on working or not working. As a loved one says to me, in jest as well as exasperation: “Your life is always half holiday, half work; it’s never one or the other.” I kind of alternate an hour worked and an hour not, all day long. So on the FYWLBI, I’m at 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-7.

Of course, this ends up feeling like 17-0-7; all work and no play. In the end, this drives me and those around me quite mad. I sense homeworking has made more people feel this way.

I would have thought the march of human progress, be it through AI or whatever, should be towards the goal of eight hours’ work, eight hours’ play and eight hours’ sleep. But we seem to be getting further away from it all the time. The management consultants I have come across all seem to put in absurd hours, too. These, as I understand it, are the very people who are paid to tell us how to run things better. Yet they can’t even organise themselves well enough to hire enough people to do the necessary work in a reasonable time. I can only imagine it helps the clients of banks and consultants believe they are getting their money’s worth if they see all hours God sends are being worked.

And who, bar that small band of turbulent Goldman juniors, is really bothered? Perhaps this is the deal: run yourself into the ground until your mid-30s. Never mind the exhaustion; eventually the bonus bulge in your pocket will be so big that everyone will be pleased to see you. Trouser your fortune, then jack it all in before you are 40.

But what do I know? Like most people outside the business of moving money around, I have a very sketchy understanding of what goes on. But what I know for sure is that, whatever it is these people do, I definitely couldn’t do it to any degree of competence if I were doing those hours. I couldn’t do anything for those hours. Good grief, I don’t know which way is up after presenting a three-hour radio programme. Banking? I wouldn’t trust myself to use an ATM.

Instead, I’ll continue to try, and doubtless fail, to get my FYWLBI down to the hallowed 8-8-8. Those have got to be the right numbers to chase.

This article was originally published by Adrian Chiles, theguardian.com.