What they cost everyone else

It's natural to think of your hours as your own business. It's your evening, given up by your own choice, and the only person paying is you. But other people pay too, in two places.

The first is your team. You're their manager, and managers set norms whether they mean to or not. When you send an email at half past ten at night, you may be thinking only of clearing your own list. The person who receives it learns what time their manager works, and wonders whether a reply is expected. When you're at your desk at seven every evening, the person who'd like to leave at half past five has to walk past you to do it. You've never asked anyone to stay late and you'd be dismayed to think you were pressuring them. But people take their cue from what the boss does, whatever the boss says. Some of your team are almost certainly working longer than they need to because of you. And Tom, who has the confidence not to, pays a small price in your estimation every day, for doing his job well in the time he's paid for.

If you believe the argument of chapters 3 and 4, this matters for the work as well as the people. A team that copies your hours is a team working in the flat part of the curve, tired, making more mistakes. If you lead by example into long hours, the work gets worse.

The second place is home. Sam has been running the evenings alone for six years. That means the dinners, the homework, the galas, and the low-level daily work of knowing what a nine-year-old needs for school tomorrow. Whatever you've agreed between you, the hours have made the agreement for you. Even when you're there, Sam and Ellie get what's left after work has had the best of you, which by seven o'clock is a tired person with half a mind still on the rota.

They also absorb the unpredictability. "I'll be home by half six" followed by a text at quarter past saying you'll be another hour is a small thing each time. But when it's repeated across years, the people at home learn to stop counting on you. They plan as though you won't be there, and they're pleasantly surprised when you are. They're not punishing you by doing that. They've adapted sensibly to the way you've behaved. It means that even if you come home early one night, the evening has been arranged without you in it.

Children also learn what's normal from what they see. Ellie is learning, from you, what a working adult's life looks like. She's learning that work comes first, that tiredness is the normal condition of grown-ups, and that the laptop at the kitchen table matters more than whatever she wanted to show you. You wouldn't say any of those things to her, but she'll learn them from how you live.

I don't mean any of this as an accusation. You've been working these hours partly for them, to keep the job secure and the mortgage paid. But it's worth asking them what they'd choose. Most families, if asked, would trade a good deal of security for a parent and partner who was home at six and properly there.