The New York Times op-ed section (online) has an interesting piece today comparing US work hours with Western European. It says that the average employed American takes two weeks of paid vacation a year, working a total of 1978 hours a year. Do the math: that's just under 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks a year.
By contrast, the average Western European takes five or six weeks of paid vacation a year, working a total of 1628 hours a year (350 hours a year less than Americans.) At six weeks of paid vacation a year, the European is working about 35 hours a week - but for only 46 weeks.
The article concludes that Western Europeans chose to use technological advances and improvements in productivity, to give themselves more time. And that Americans, as a society, chose to give ourselves more money and possessions.
I knew all this before, but reading it today is special timing for me. What does it mean for me personally, in my artmaking? For one thing, it means that I could stop thinking of myself as needing to work 50 weeks a year, at least - at 40 hours a week. A standard workweek for artist-blacksmiths is 6 production hours a day, plus 2 for ordering, cleanup and business - for a total of 30 production hours a week. Of course, sometimes sales efforts add to the total per week or decrease the production hours to around 24. I've kept this rough standard in mind, basically telling myself "if you can produce bowls for 30 hours a week, you can make a living."
Of course, this is just something I made up in my mind. I could make up something else to believe, that serves me better - and serves the bowls better. So maybe I'll make up a new rule of thumb: that I can make a fine living taking five or six weeks of vacation a year. It's interesting to consider how I might use that much vacation time.
3:26:58 PM 
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