Next time your having coffee, or surfing the web and the boss tells you to get back to work just tell him you are working, and you'll be right. Here's why:

Recent studies have said that Australian’s are one of the hardest working people in the world, with some working upwards of 60 hours per week. I found this a little hard to believe, 70 hours would be 10 hours a day 7 days a week, that doesn’t leave much time to do anything else.

So lets do some numbers, the average healthy adult should have at least 8 hours of sleep a night, and if everyone else is at all like me they would take at least 15 minutes to get to sleep, and 5 or 10 to get out of bed so lets say 8hrs 20min in bed. Plus sex, a recent study by durex said Australian's on average have intercourse twice a week, now I’m sure there’s some high flying exec’s who can get that task done in 3 minutes, but lets allocate 30min (perhaps a little foreplay) per time that’s 1hr a week or about 9min a day (8-29).

I guess most people may have to travel to and from a job, lets allocate an hour a day (which is conservative) I know some people that spend more than 2 hours travelling to and from their office each day, (9-29). Then people need to wash, well lets hope they wash, and dress themselves, there’s a good 45min a day at least. (10-14). Then there’s eating, breakfast, lunch and dinner, I have a hour lunch break, but some people eat at their desk, all meals sometimes. Others have lunch meetings at a café and call that work, or work from home and eat while they are doing it, other's prepare food for a living and snack all day, hmmm. So what exactly is work. Is ironing your own clothes work? What about changing your babies nappy, preparing your own meals, doing your shopping, all these things you could pay someone else to do and they would call it work for them, but is it for you?

Is it being paid by someone else, that which constitutes work? What of those that live off investments, they may make the decision of where to invest their money but its actually the capital and those who use it that create the income (do the work?) and then share it with the investor. The investor can even get an advisor to make the decisions for them and the advisor gets a percentage of the income made, is the advisor working? The investor seems to do nothing, but I don’t think they would claim to be unemployed. What about the unemployed, I have known plenty that played in bands, painted, wrote, grew plants (supposedly not for sale just for personal use). Surely this is all work.

And what of farmers are they working for the whole time they are on the farm, day and night always their to help a pregnant sheep, or plug a leaking water tank, or just when they are on the tractor? Is an electrician on the job when he is talking to a mate about new wire insulators or just when he’s on site. What of sales people at a BBQ talking up their product are they still at work. Are we always at work?

I decided to turn to the dictionary perhaps that can clarify the situation a little.

Work:

1. exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something; labour; toil.

Well that pretty much covers everything; even wiping my rear could be considered work its effort, to accomplish the cleaning of my butt.

According to the International Labout Organisation:

"The ILO concept of work for purposes of measuring employment is based on the concept of production as defined by the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). This means that any economic activity, of whatever duration, falling within the SNA production boundary is considered as work for the purpose of measuring employment. For practical reasons, the ILO standards specify that the concept should be interpreted as paid work for at least one hour in a short reference period such as one week or one day. This ‘one hour criterion’ in the definition of employment is also considered fundamental to the ILO definition of unemployment, which refers to a situation of being completely without work..."

But this is for employment not work, and writen by a beauracrat who thought he was working hard. They realise you need to be working to be employed, so our investor may be unemployed! That is all though no real idea of what work is. We are interested in work. Lets try some smart people and see what they thing work is.

“Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.”

Sounds like we should go on a holiday to be working, all good I say.

"Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do”

“Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need”

So if your not bored, not needy, and not smoking a crack pipe your probably working.

And finally one for your boss from Bertrand Russell:      “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.”

So what can we garner from all this; well if you are doing anything that achieves something, and your not bored by it. You are working. I'm just thinking that when I'm at my desk at the bank I may not be working at all, and I may well be when I'm in the dunny.

DJ Campbell