Never Work Overtime Again
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How much money do you make per hour?
It’s a simple calculation: just divide your monthly salary by your working hours.
But we often forget that many of us work more than just the regular hours. It’s easy to stay half an hour or an hour late per day. Not to mention the crunch times at the end of projects.
We work overtime.
And for most of us that time is not compensated in money.
Taking that into account, recalculate your hourly pay. Did you notice a drop in your salary? That’s because you’re giving your employer some work for free.
You should stop doing that. Now.
Or maybe you are one of the lucky ones who get extra money for staying late at work. But even then overtime isn’t good for you. Life isn’t all about work, you know.
Why overtime is evil
My advice (I’m trying to follow it myself as well) is simple: just refuse to do overtime. Here’s why:
- When working overtime, you are giving your work away for free.
- If the deadline set for your project is set too tight but you manage to finish on time by doing overtime work, you can be sure that the next deadline will be as tight as this one. If not tighter.
- Working overtime makes you lazy during the regular hours. You fool around because you think that you can always catch up by working a few extra hours. If you don’t count overtime as part of your daily routine, you’ll work on your tasks more efficiently.
- Working overtime makes you tired. And when you’re tired, you are much more likely to make errors that you’ll spend the next morning fixing up.
- Being constantly tired and working non-stop will just burn you out.
- Your family and friends would like to have you around every now and then as well.
- In most cases your boss exaggerates the importance of the deadlines set for your projects. If most of the software projects miss their deadlines and the industry is still rather successful, I would say that missing deadlines can’t be that crucial.
- In fact, most of the deadlines you see in software projects aren’t deadlines at all - they are just goals or worse yet, dreams. Some managers even try to make your deadlines as tight as possible to pressure the poor developer. If you need to work overtime to reach your deadline, it’s not your fault, it’s just poor project management.
- If you work overtime, you put pressure on the rest of your team to do the same.
- Working overtime doesn’t really make you a hero - although your superiors like to make it look like that.
How to avoid overtime
Just say no.
You need to make a conscious decision not to do overtime ever again. As long as you still think somewhere deep in your mind that hard work makes you a hero, you won’t stop doing it. The first step is to learn the mantra: “Overtime is evil” by heart.
When you agree completely, you can move on to the following tips:
- Set an alarm to go off when your hours are full. When the alarm rings, go home.
- Don’t do other people’s work. Trust others to do it for themselves.
- Delegate.
- When at work, work. Don’t spend too much time chatting with your co-workers.
- Avoid meetings.
- Do the important tasks first. This way if your day ends before you have had the chance to finish all of your work, it doesn’t matter that much.
- Come in early. In the morning the office is quiet and you can concentrate better. If you have a door, close it occasionally to get some efficient working time.
- Let everyone know that you are not doing overtime anymore. This way they won’t expect you to be available at all times.
- Try to get your work mates to quit doing overtime as well (tip: send them a link to this article)
- Plan appointments after work. This way if you are asked to do overtime, you can just say that you cannot stay any longer because your friends are waiting for you.
If you have other proven tricks for avoiding overtime, please share them in the comments!
Remember that the real hero isn’t the one who sacrifices his life for the company’s sake, but the one who takes care of her life as a whole and stays stays fresh and productive by not working too hard.
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38 Responses to “Never Work Overtime Again”
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July 27th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Lots of good points in this article.
It’s always a challenge not to work overtime, but I’ve found that if you make it known that you won’t accept it willingly, you are asked less to do it.
July 27th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
I know lots of people who consistently work until 6 or 7 and on weekends to get all of their work done; and they announce it proudly like they’re a hero or something. With rare exceptions (like emergency cases), I come in at 8 and leave at 5.
If my company needs more work done then they should staff for it. I’m not their fallback chump for bad planning, bad prioritization and bad management.
July 27th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Working overtime has it’s benefits. It can set you ahead of the competition for that promotion, or for a raise. However, if you are given a raise or promotion due to overtime you will only be expected to continue to work it.
July 27th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Nice.
But how about including on-call time in your list? Is this overtime or overwork? Oor both.
What do you call 4 x month on a 24hr on-call rotation.
But then there’s a big plus (guess who is getting the plus).
They don’t pay for those night hours and even if you spent the whole night on the phone (or on site) due to a glitch in the system that has nothing to do with your line of work (and you can’t hang up, the boss probably is on he line too) AND next day you have to be in the workplace and work your 8+hours, multitasking.
July 27th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Back in the late 80s, I was a member of the IT/Engineering staff of a company that shall remain nameless. The decision was made that too many people were working overtime and busting the project budgets, so the decree came down that 40.1-44.0 hours per week (i.e., up to 4.0 hours extra work) was “casual overtime” and would not be paid. This had the marvelous unintended consequence of people showing up on Saturday morning to read the paper in their cubicles, so they could bump their weekly total to 45.0 hours. Yeah, management! Way to justify those MBAs.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
@mur:
how about, Yeah, works! Way to get yourself fired for intentionally trying to screw the system.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Thanks for your comments!
Paul, Bob: You have good points there. Maybe the biggest factor making us work overtime is ourselves and the thought that if we work more we are better employees, appreciated by our co-workers and bosses. Like Bob said these guys and girls do it proudly thinking that that’s how things should be.
I have done the same. The feeling of importance that you get when you stay late while your team mates can be like a drug… I guess we all want to feel important and irreplaceable. But it’s just a feeling: working late doesn’t really make us any more important for the company.
Stucco puts it well saying that if you earn a promotion or a good position in the company by working long hours, your hours won’t get any shorter… I used to think that promotions are always a good thing, but maybe they aren’t. And surely in most cases they aren’t worth working all the long hours. Just to be able to work even more =)
Beaten to Death: That sounds bad… Even worse than working overtime.
Mur: That’s funny! I wonder why that doesn’t sound that strange though…
July 27th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Number 3 is key, I think: “Working overtime makes you lazy during the regular hours. You fool around because you think that you can always catch up by working a few extra hours.”
Unpaid overtime doesn’t necessarily mean you’re *working* more hours… sometimes it just means you’re burning away your leisure time sitting in a cubicle, procrastinating. Tip: there are better ways to spend your non-working hours.
I have surprisingly similar problems with “overtime”, even though I work independently, and I’m paid by the hour. I’ve had days (not often nowadays, fortunately) where I’ll be sitting at the computer much of the day, but it’ll get to be dinner time and I haven’t yet done *any* billable work. So I work “overtime”, basically — after dinner, into the night….
Bottom line — your life suffers dearly when you manage your time poorly. Your in a much better situation when you *know* you’re shutting down your computer and heading home at 5pm today… but you have a ton of stuff to get done, so you’d better get cracking.
There will still be times when management asks you for more — but you’ll be in a strong position to say no. You’ll *know* exactly how long tasks take, because you didn’t stop to read slashdot for an indeterminate period of time in the middle. You can promise to really focus during your working hours during this crunch, but that’s the best you can offer (and really, the best they can get out of one employee: you can still “burn out” if you’re highly stressed for 8 hours a day over a long period of time).
Separate thoughts on system glitches and on-call time — these cost you time. Sleep debt (and “personal life” debt) must be repaid. If you were on the phone all night, normally you’d sleep late the next day, and possibly not work at all. It’s the same line, “I don’t work overtime”, and they’ve basically just eaten up part of the following day.
Nighttime hours logically should burn *more* than regular hours, and on-call hours should burn less, based on how much they disrupt your life and how much energy they require. I’m not sure how to set those ratios… anyone have any standards on that?
July 28th, 2007 at 12:54 am
I guess I’m lucky to get paid extra for overtime.
2-3 hours after 5 is when I get most productive since everybody else leaves the building and I can better concentrate on something
July 28th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Number two is the big one here. In my experience, huge amounts of that overtime don’t actually show up in any budgets or project management reports. Way to go guys; you’re skewing all the project management estimates by working undocumented hours!
Which means you’ll just need to work *more* overtime the next time around, when it’s assumed the group can be just a tad more “efficient” than it was last time around.
July 28th, 2007 at 3:01 am
The consequence of people saying “no” to overtime is that management will be more convinced to outsource more work offshore. They would probably think that if you will only work from 8-5pm, they have people offshore to do the rest of the work.
July 28th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Working overtime only benefit your immediate boss not every body in the team. And Believe me those who are favoring the working late are incompetent for that job. I am the victim of this overtime work s**t, I gave my every thing for the company with other employees and at the end of day only my boss gets away with the benefits.
If you keep working for your incompetent managers like this then you are probably helping your incompetent managers remain your boss and at the end of day you will switch job and your manager will remain there.
July 28th, 2007 at 11:17 am
brickhead: You are saying that as if it was only a bad thing. If you have too much work to do, to me it sounds like a rather good thing to get someone else to do a part of it. Hopefully the more boring and repetitive part of it… In that case offshoring might actually be a good thing for you.
July 28th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
I don’t know what or where you work, but it seems like you’re not having a job that satisfies you. Working overtime doesn’t always mean you’re giving away personal time, but rather also feed your personal interest and qualification, if you have a job that meets the requirements of personal satisfaction, too.
I’m working as a software developer in a rather small company and it’s actually a really nice feeling to help keeping the flow up by working overtime when it is needed. Not only the company benefits from that, but also you, personally. It’s not a matter of money, it’s rather a matter of how much time you’re willing to give to develop proper software. I’d rather work overtime to get a piece of code done properly, than poorly. I’d also rather take a day off to do something with my family and/or friends after a week of working overtime, than rushing home everyday and not think about work anymore.
It’s all a matter of dedication to your life and has only partly to do with work alone.
..oh and.. I wouldn’t want to have a job where I keep looking at the clock every ten minutes whether to see when I can go home. ’nuff said.
July 28th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Yeah, I did 2 years of 24h/day 365d/year on call… Never again! It’s like an invisible jail.
And, from experience, it’s not only that people feel proud of staying late… it’s also that people accuses you of being lazy/unmotivated/etc for leaving on time.
How many times did I get those unrealistic deadlines, made by incompetent or greedy managers. It’s sadly a battle. They will try to squeeze you as much as possible. You have to fight back. Pretty sad.
But of course, with the wonders of globalisation, they will pit you against “slave” (no insurance, no safety, no regulation, etc…) labour market from third world countries… Of course, you can’t beat that unless becoming a “slave” yourself.
That’s their miracle plan; pit workers from all over the world against each other, purposefully ignoring the originating countries economies.
I guess we deserve it; we did the same with business competitivity… I am against it since, in the end, the worker (you) will pay the price.
So, who wins??? The CEO, the rich people, the bosses…
But, as I’ve been told by many people: “You think too much! Stop worrying and go back to work, be happy, be a good citizen/consumer, help the economy and let our leaders do their job”
July 29th, 2007 at 9:31 am
But it’s fun [working overtime].
I get the best result after everyone’s gone, the entire network is silent and waiting for my needs, no one interrupts me with stupid questions and even more stupid requests.
Besides, during that [over]time, I feel more comfortable working on semi-private projects - refactoring something that I was told “we don’t have time to”, creating better debugging options, writing better comments, experimenting with new ways of doing things (no, not THAT, you sick you).
Also - working overtime gives me a feeling of moral superiority :)
I’m all for overtime, as long as almost no one else does it.
July 30th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
This reminds me of a team project that I was involved in a few years ago. The first deadline was set, and I worked my a*s off, including overtime, to complete my part of it. What happened? Well, some other members of the team couldn’t complete their assigned tasks (unrealistic deadlines, mainly), so management set ANOTHER deadline. And another. Then, they started using “drop dead” dates.
At the end of it, not only was I exhausted, I felt like a fool, because all of the work I completed in (unpaid) overtime could easily have been done during regular working hours.
This “method” of setting dates also had another terrible effect. When the deadlines loomed, people couldn’t find the “best” way of solving issues — they tended to just slap something together and move on to the next “crisis”. So, at the end of this “process”, none of the functions were done using anything close to the optimal methods, and more work was necessary later to “optimize” some of the slower processes.
July 31st, 2007 at 5:11 am
Take a train to and from work, so that you can’t work overtime, unless you have the company pay for the taxi trip.
July 31st, 2007 at 6:17 am
Stan: I know the feeling… I had a similar project, not so long ago, and it pretty much made me lose all my trust in deadlines. If deadlines are set randomly like this, it just doesn’t make sense to rush.
And actually just as you point it out, the side effect for the company is really bad as well (the same happened in our project as well). So, it’s not just something we as employees are whining about, it’s a real problem for the whole organization as well.
This is why I think working overtime is usually not good for neither the company nor the software developer.
Al: Thanks for the tip!
July 31st, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I a have to admit that time form time I do work overtime and I am not ashame of it.
I am just amazed how close is the argumentation against overtime to the original communistic rhetoric. Oh those evil capitalists are pressing you - members of a poor working class - to work overtime because you know, all they want is to make you slaves. If you see society as a fight involving groups of people with separate interests then you are pure communist.
Dear colleagues trust me - here in Czech Republic we had 40 years based on the ideas you are advocating and it ended up in - everybody being poor and the economy being crippled.
July 31st, 2007 at 6:25 pm
If you would all quit reading all these comments and get back to work, you wouldn’t have to be so concerned about overtime!!
PS: ;)
July 31st, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Occasional unpaid overtime comes with a salaried position, just like occasionally getting paid while you sit at home waiting for the cable guy, but I don’t make a habit of it and I always charge ALL hours worked to project.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Vitek: thanks for your insight. I think you have a good point and I need to clarify my original points a bit to make sure that you know I agree with you. :)
So, I’m not in any way against companies and business in general. I think for many people working as a free entrepreneur might be a more interesting choice than working for someone else, but there is nothing wrong in having a nice job either. Currently I am too working for someone else myself, and more or less happy with it (although in the long term I plan to be on the employing side).
What I am saying however is that in most (if not all) cases doing overtime work is bad for both the employer and the employee: An employee whose time is managed properly so that he doesn’t need to do unnecessary overtime hours is much more productive for the company than one who is burned out by too much work and unrealistic schedules.
So I think in the long run employees are doing a favor to the company they work for by working efficiently during normal hours and then going home to relax and have a life of their own too.
Actually if you haven’t read it yet, my latest post, What is a rewarding career and how you can get one - the new definition is somewhat related to this idea that work and business are important but that you need to think of your life as a whole instead of just looking at it in terms of work.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I do work overtime when I think it’s necessary. As a salaried employee, it’s part of the job. I’m talking a few hours here or there, never a constant overtime. I think on call hours used need to be accounted for in the form of earnings or time off.
I agree with all the comments that life should be more than work. Certainly, good management recognizes that overworking employees makes them less effective. Just like running your car and never doing maintenance, something will pop, flatten, slow down, rattle, etc. We can do our part to let management know where we stand on productivity but if they can’t understand that, you’re better off going somewhere else.
I worked overtime 10 hrs a week without pay for a year, all the while being told that I would get compensated and rewarded well for going above and beyond. Then the manager got transferred and I got nothing. Won’t do that again!
My last company was full of managers who BS’ed for hours a day and then stayed late to get the job done. Those of us who worked productively enough to accomplish everything during office hours were criticized. It’s like beating your head on the wall when your forced to take demerits from managers who took three 30-minute soda breaks, an hour and a half lunch break and two hours a day complaining how much work they had to do instead of just doing it. In the end, I had to leave because I wasn’t going to waste my family and private time with them to fit in their dysfunctional pattern. Now I’m extremely happy at a job where some work overtime, including my boss, but they do it because they like to and they don’t expect it from everyone else. It’s like night and day.
August 1st, 2007 at 9:21 am
I used to work overtime for past few years in my previous organisation. I had the feeling that I am the best guy there. Later I understood that it’s just a feeling and practically it’s just worthless. Managers labelled me as overtime working guy and can do anything staying in office day-night. They got all the carrots while I worked. The only poistive thing about that was I learnt a lot new stuff during that period. Now, I changed the company and am setting a proper trend of 8 hours proper work per day. This really is working out and my social life has improved a lot. Now I have plenty of time for family, friends and myself :)
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Great post. Seriously, if you arent getting paid for it… dont do overtime. Your time is valuable and plenty of people will pay you for every hour.
In my case, every place I work demanded overtime so I was forced to switch to contract work (per hour). Now, its rare that they ask me to work extra hours since they have to pay for every hour worked.
Also avoid the absolute worst case scenario of being a salaried employee at a contract agency. I’ve seen so many people working overtime for a company, where the agency bills the client for the extra hours worked, and the developer sees none of it. Talk about craziness…
August 4th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Thanks for the tips, jc!
August 8th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Like they always say…work smart and not hard!
;)
August 8th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Good point, Ronski!
Where it goes bad is if people try to combine those two things. I think it’s usually not possible to do both - you have to choose one.
When you work hard (I mean really hard), you don’t have time to stop to think about how you could do the things in a smarter way. So you just keep working hard.
But if you stop to think, and start to work smart, suddenly you don’t have to work that hard anymore.
August 9th, 2007 at 6:35 am
I so totally feel this post. I have always been the kind of person who leaves on time. BUt that cost me a better performance appraisal this past yr. all my other friends who worked overtime got a 10% or more annual increment and i only got 5%. reason being i was not “proactive” enuff. of course thts just translation to you dont work overtime.
so i left the stupid company. btw, it was an IT orgarnisation of a very established international bank. nuff said.
August 10th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Try working in Tokyo! It is totally normal to work till 8-11pm every day even when nothing special is going on. Basically you have no life on weekdays. And at my company they dock you half an hours pay if you clock in 1 minute late in the morning!
August 10th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Wow. I’ve heard that Japan is bad regarding overtime work, but that’s even worse than I thought… :/
How do you guys survive that kind of work load without completely burning out?
August 20th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Nine words you never hear from people on their death bed:
“I wish I had spent more time at work”.
August 21st, 2007 at 7:04 am
Well said, SJF! :)
November 23rd, 2007 at 1:11 am
I’ve come to the conclusion recently to no longer do extra work for the company I work for. I still do a LOT of extra work and I spend many nights in coding, writing, planning, etc, however, its for me and my projects - not an employer’s.
I think its important to build a healthy work-ethic but being the bitch of your employer is a mugs game. I’ve done it and never has it got me anywhere.
Working extra for myself though has done me wonders.
November 25th, 2007 at 12:45 am
Good point, Doug. As you can see from this blog, I have a pretty similar mindset as you on this topic: I find the work I do for my own project useful and fun, so I do it without counting hours.
But there lies a risk: if we spend too much time working on our own projects, that time can also be time away from our families. And that in turn is not something we should be doing too much.
That’s why I think it’s even more important not to work overtime for someone else: If you work overtime, you have less time to divide between your own projects (working extra for yourself) and the people around you. :)
November 27th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I teach English in Kyoto, and every day I meet guys who work 16 hour days as a regular thing. Their overtime is usually unpaid, and expected by both bosses and colleagues. Many of them hate it, but feel it’s impossible to say no. In Japanese there’s a even a word for death from overwork - karoshi. The government makes noises about the problem every now and then, but does nothing concrete to address the problem. This is one thing about Japanese society that really sucks!
November 28th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
That sounds really bad… I’ve heard that there is this kind of a culture of “hard work” in Japan, but I have never met anyone working in Japan before.
So, why do you think this is happening? And have people really died of overwork in Japan?