Sometimes you hear people comment on how hard they work, almost always emphasising how long they work. But is that really a measure of how difficult work is? Funnily enough the majority of people who claim they work hard and emphasise their long hours, tend to be entrepreneurs or management professionals.
But how hard is their work really ? I am not saying they do not work hard, because long hours are hard. But does that mean they work harder than for example coal miners or nurses ? Maybe not …
I happen to have a quite variable job, and different tasks seem harder than others. For example grinding through some difficult code feels harder than when I am in meetings all afternoon (although to be perfectly honest I would rather be grinding out the code). It seems to me that some tasks are harder than others.
One of the limitations of something like the EU Working Time directive is that it is not flexible enough to cope with the idea that some work is harder than other work. But a relatively fixed limit on the number of hours you can work at least protects against those bosses who believe that everyone needs to work as long as they do to work as hard as they do.
Of course how difficult a particular piece of work is unlikely to have any relation to how much we want to do it (see my earlier comment on coding), or how much is paid for the work.