Tuesday, ten to seven

It's ten to seven on a Tuesday evening and the office is nearly empty. The cleaner is doing the far end. You're at your desk with a cold half cup of tea, and you've just finished rewording the second paragraph of a report that was already fine.

You manage the planning team at a housing association. There are eight of you. Your contract says thirty-seven and a half hours a week, and you stopped noticing that number years ago. You're in by eight most mornings and you leave around seven. After dinner, at about quarter past nine, you open the laptop at the kitchen table just to clear a few emails, and close it at twenty to eleven. On Sunday afternoons you do two or three hours to get ahead of the week. It comes to about fifty-five hours, though you've never added it up.

Think about what you did between five o'clock and now. You reread the report and changed some wording. You answered fourteen emails, which produced nine replies, six of which you also answered. You tidied a spreadsheet that only you look at. You started on next month's rota, got stuck, and decided to come back to it in the morning. None of it was urgent. If a fire alarm had cleared the building at five, tomorrow would look exactly the same.

Your daughter Ellie is nine, and she swims on Thursdays. The galas start at half past five. You've been to one this year. Your partner Sam goes, and sends you a video, and you watch it at your desk.

There's a man on your team called Tom who leaves at quarter past five every day. His work is good and it's always on time. You've never said so, but somewhere in your mind you've marked him down as not quite committed. Last year your own manager, Helen, said to you in passing, "You're always here. I don't know how you do it." You've thought about that remark more often than you'd admit. It felt like being seen.

You're tired most of the time, in a way that's become normal. You've had a cold three times this winter. On holiday last summer it took you until the second Wednesday to stop checking your phone, and you flew home on the Saturday. You've told yourself that it'll ease off after the restructure, as you told yourself it would ease off after the audit, and the merger before that.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The contract is the number of hours you're paid for. The hours are what you work, counting the laptop in the evening and the Sunday afternoon. The late hours are the ones beyond about fifty a week, or the last couple of hours of a long day, where this book argues the returns are poorest. Drift is the way work spreads out to fill whatever time you give it. The commitment story is the belief that your hours are the measure of how much you care. The stop is a fixed time at which you finish, and it's what this book builds towards.

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

Nobody decided it. The hours rose for a reason that made sense at the time, and they stayed up after the reason had gone.

The boundary is soft. You don't have a finishing time. You stop when you're too tired to go on, or when something at home forces it.

The extra time fills with low-value work. The last hours of the day go to email, rewording, tidying and jobs that could wait.

The day's work follows you home. Even when the laptop is shut, you're turning the job over in your head.

And it feels like virtue. Of all the habits in this series, this is the one people are proudest of, which makes it one of the hardest to look at squarely.

Try one thing before reading on. For one ordinary week, write down when you start and stop work each day, including evenings and the weekend. Add it up. Then, for two of the evenings, write a line about what you did in the last two hours. Most people who try this find the total is higher than they thought, and that the last two hours are hard to describe.