Why the hours grow

If the total came as a shock, you may be wondering what's wrong with you. I don't think anything is. Long hours are the natural result of several pressures that all push the same way, and it would be odd if you'd escaped them.

The first is the nature of the work. A bricklayer knows when the wall is built. If you work with information, people or plans, your work has no such edge. There's always another email, a report that could be better, a problem you could get ahead of. The job can't tell you that you've finished, because it's never finished. Something else has to tell you to go home, and if nothing does, you stay.

The second is that the work now comes with you. Twenty years ago most office work stayed in the office, because that's where the files and the computer were. Now it's in your pocket and on the kitchen table. Nothing physical stops you working at half past nine at night, so something else has to.

The third is staffing. Many organisations run with fewer people than the work needs, and the gap is filled by the willing. If you're conscientious and capable, extra work flows towards you, and your long hours become part of how the place operates. That's a real constraint, and chapter 17 comes back to it.

The fourth is that hours are visible and results often aren't. It's hard for a manager to judge the quality of a rota or a plan. It's easy to see who's at their desk at half past six. Helen's remark, "you're always here", was sincere praise for the one thing she could observe. Most workplaces praise presence in this way, often without meaning to, and people respond to praise.

Then there are reasons that belong to you, and they're respectable ones.

You want to do the job well. You mind about the tenants, the team and the work, and staying late feels like what caring looks like.

You want to be seen as reliable, and being the person who's always there is one kind of reliability.

You want to feel secure. If redundancies come, you'd like to be the one they can't do without.

You may enjoy it. For many people, work is where they feel most competent. The house is quieter after six and you get a clear run at things.

And sometimes work is simpler than home. A spreadsheet is more manageable than a nine-year-old who won't go to bed.

Underneath these are needs nobody should be ashamed of. You want to be good at what you do, to be valued for it, and to be safe. The question for the next several chapters is whether the late hours serve those needs. I'll argue that they serve them poorly, and that on the first one, doing the job well, they work against you.