What the hours cost you

The last several chapters took the beliefs one at a time. This one adds up the bill. Some of it has been mentioned already, and I'll be brief about those parts.

You're paying in the work itself. On the evidence of chapters 3 to 5, the late hours add little output, produce more mistakes, and take the edge off the following morning. You'd do the same job at least as well in fewer hours, and probably better.

You're paying in health. Chapter 11 gave the figures on stroke, heart disease and depression, with their caveats. Nearer to hand are the things you've already noticed, such as the three colds this winter, the tiredness that has become normal, and the holiday that took ten days to begin.

You're paying in money, which people rarely work out. You're paid for thirty-seven and a half hours and you work fifty-five. Divide your salary by the hours you really work and you'll find your hourly rate is about a third lower than your contract says. You've been giving your employer seventeen and a half free hours a week. Over a year that's more than twenty working weeks. You wouldn't agree to a one-third pay cut if it were put to you in those terms.

You're paying in time with the people you live with. Count what the late hours displace. On a day when you leave at seven and open the laptop at quarter past nine, your time with Ellie is perhaps forty minutes, most of it spent getting her to bed. Your time with Sam is dinner. Across a year, the gap between that and an evening that starts at six is several hundred hours. At nine, a child wants you there for the gala, the walk to school, the long pointless conversation about which animal would win in a fight. By fourteen she won't, or not in the same way.

You're paying in everything else you used to be. Think about what you did, ten years ago, that you don't do now. There may have been a sport, an instrument, a group of friends you saw every month, a garden, a course you were going to take. Hardly anyone decides to give these up. They went one at a time in busy periods and didn't come back. What's left is a person who works and recovers from working. If the job went tomorrow, through no fault of yours, you'd have very little else to fall back on.

And you're paying in the quality of your time off. Even the hours you don't work are coloured by the ones you do. You're at the table, but you're thinking about the rota. You're tired in a way that makes everything feel like effort, so the free time goes on the sofa and the phone. People who work long hours often say they've no energy for anything else, and conclude that they couldn't use more free time if they had it. It's the hours that have taken the energy, though.

I should put the other side. You've had things from the hours too. You've had Helen's good opinion, a reputation for reliability, perhaps promotion, and the satisfaction of knowing you never let anything drop. Those are real. I'd ask you to weigh two things, though. You should consider how many of those you'd have had anyway, on the strength of your work. And you should ask whether you'd have chosen this trade, stated as plainly as I've just stated it, if anyone had offered it to you at the start.