Why 80,000 Hours?
You have about 80,000 working hours in your career: 40 years x 50 weeks x 40 hours.
If you want to have a positive impact with your life, your choice of career is probably your best opportunity to do that.
That means it’s worth thinking hard about how to use this time most effectively. If you can make your career 1% higher impact (whatever that means to you), it would in theory be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how.
We aim to help you work out how you can best use your 80,000 hours to help others, and to take action on that basis.
We believe you can increase your impact by much more than 1%, and it’ll take a lot less than 800 hours.
What do we do?
80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and recent graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.
Our current view is that the very most pressing problems are those that threaten human extinction or could make the long-run future worse. These areas are where we focus most of our time and efforts. But we’re not sure we’re right about this, and there are many other very important issues that only affect the near future. So we support work to prioritise global problems and help build the community of effective altruism, which aims to find the best ways to do good and comes to a variety of conclusions about what those are.
We’re a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, and everything we provide is free.
