Howard Levitt has declared work-life balance dead, and he’s wrong — but not for the reasons you might think.
In his recent Financial Post column, the respected employment lawyer argues that “the modern workplace has no room for romantic notions of work-life symmetry.” He points to tech companies like Rilla advertising 60- to 80-hour workweeks and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang working seven days a week as proof that balance is a relic of a softer era.
I’ve met Levitt. He once appeared on a roundtable I ran when I was the managing editor of Canadian HR Reporter. He’s sharp, hardworking, and built a successful practice by grinding out long work weeks early in his career. But his argument stumbles on a fundamental confusion between presence and productivity — a mistake that’s costing Canadian businesses more than they realize.
Levitt himself inadvertently makes the case against his own position when he writes: “Employers are less interested in when your yoga class ends than whether you can solve the problem bleeding its bottom line.” Exactly. So why are we still measuring success by how long someone sits at their desk?
Walk through any office at 6 p.m. and you’ll find the usual suspects — the early arrivers who’ve mastered the art of looking busy while scrolling social media, the chronic meeting schedulers who confuse motion with progress, and the martyr managers who wear exhaustion like a badge of honour. These aren’t the people solving problems or driving innovation. They’re just there.
Meanwhile, the woman who redesigned your customer service workflow during her Tuesday morning coffee break before picking up her kids? She’s gone home. The developer who debugged the system that was costing you thousands in downtime? He’s at his daughter’s soccer game. They’ve solved the problems bleeding your bottom line, but they won’t win any face-time awards.
Diminishing returns
The confusion between hours and output isn’t just inefficient — it’s counterproductive. Research consistently shows that productivity drops dramatically after 50 hours per week. By hour 60, you’re getting diminishing returns. By hour 80, you’re likely creating more problems than you’re solving, just with excellent attendance records.
This matters more in today’s knowledge economy than ever before. When your competitive advantage depends on creativity, problem-solving, and innovation, burning out your best people is strategic suicide. The breakthrough idea doesn’t arrive because you stayed late; it comes when your brain has had time to make connections that exhaustion prevents.
Levitt celebrates Nvidia’s Huang and his seven-day work schedule, crediting it with the company’s $4.2-trillion valuation. But correlation isn’t causation. Huang’s value isn’t in his hours — it’s in his vision, decision-making, and ability to position Nvidia at the centre of the AI revolution. Those insights didn’t require 80-hour weeks; they required the right perspective at the right moment.
The companies Levitt admires in his column — Shopify, Google, Amazon — aren’t successful because they demand presence. They’re successful because they attract talent, create cultures of excellence, and solve real problems. The long hours are often a byproduct of ambition and engagement, not a prerequisite for success.
Not a blank cheque for mediocrity
Here’s what Levitt gets right: mediocrity won’t cut it anymore. The global marketplace is too competitive, and technology has raised the bar too high. But excellence doesn’t require martyrdom. It requires clarity about what matters, focus on results, and the wisdom to recognize that a tired, stressed workforce isn’t an asset — it’s a liability.
The best managers I know don’t count hours; they count outcomes. They don’t care if you work from your kitchen table or the corner office, at 6 a.m. or 10 p.m., as long as you deliver results that move the business forward. They understand that work-life balance isn’t about fairness or feel-good policies — it’s about sustainable performance.
No phoning it in
This doesn’t mean everyone gets to phone it in. Some roles require specific hours. Some projects demand intense focus and long days. Some people thrive on high-pressure environments and choose to work more because they love what they do. (I’m writing this on a Sunday morning of a long weekend, after all.)
But making presence the default measure of commitment is lazy management dressed up as high standards. It’s the industrial-age mindset trying to solve knowledge-economy problems.
The irony in Levitt’s argument is that he’s advocating for exactly what he says employers should avoid: managing by inputs instead of outputs. Whether someone is in the office for 40 hours or 80 hours matters less than whether they can solve the problems bleeding your bottom line.
Work-life balance isn’t dead. It’s just been redefined. It’s not about rigid schedules or equal time allocation. It’s about giving people the autonomy to do their best work in ways that don’t destroy their capacity to keep doing it.
The companies that figure this out won’t just attract better talent — they’ll get better results. Because excellence isn’t about how long you stay; it’s about what you accomplish while you’re there.
