Number of words: 166

We might look to the Netherlands for inspiration. Dutch employees spend the fewest hours less at work in Northern Europe – nearly four hours a week less than we do. One reason is that their idea of what’s industrially cool and clever is markedly different from ours. A pan-European study found that British managers reckon that putting in a lifetime of extra hours proves that you are a dedicated and thus highly effective employee. The Dutch, meanwhile, tend to think that if you can’t get all your work done in the normal hours allotted, then there must be something wrong with either you or your job. If we were all to go Dutch, it might enable us to experience non-work life more. But to anyone who has been steadily nudged and levered into life as a British long-hours drone, that possibility can sound wasteful and self-indulgent, even perverse.

Excerpted from pages 122 to 123 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish