That Extra Hour At Work Is Worth… Nothing! (The Genius Formula Is Revealed!)

In the previous blog, we discussed the global problem of working late hours. We acknowledged that parents feel guilty for not spending enough quality time with their kids and that kids hate it when their parents come home late. We wondered why we choose to stay at work late and miss out on our kids when we have some control over our working hours and won’t lose our jobs if we leave on time. We concluded that people work late in order to earn more money, because they feel happy at work, or to advance their career ambitions.

However, my genius formula proves that all these reasons are nonsense. For the vast majority of people, that extra hour of work in the evening is worth… nothing. Working late hours won’t get you to where you want to go. In this blog, which will change your life forever, I’ll explore the variables of the formula and the reasons why you should go home earlier. So brace yourself. 

My Genius Formula, reduced (see below for details):

The Monetary Value of a Single Hour is Nothing

Working late for money is easy to explain. If working long hours of overtime is your only way to pay the bills, fine. If that’s not the case, then working overtime just earns you more money in the pursuit of happiness. It adds a few bucks towards your quality of life. But does it really? How much money does one hour get you? If you’re a salaried worker then overtime could account for nothing or very little financially. Even if you got a few bucks more, after paying your taxes on this healthy earning, how much happiness can you buy with this net amount? Not much, you say. Even less, I tell you.

The true value of that extra hour should also account for the tiny attribution of this hour to the discounted cost of consequential damages caused by repeatedly working late. Do you pay a babysitter so you and your spouse could stay at work? Do you buy gifts for your kids or spouse out of sheer guilt for working late? Working hard and late can also be stressful, thus damaging your mental and physical health, which comes at a cost too. The share of employees reaching the state of burnout – a total collapse caused by overwork and stress – is staggering. Even if you don’t pay a babysitter, don’t buy gifts of guilt, and you’re in perfect health – but still love your workplace more than you like it at home - there’s a fair chance you’ll end up paying for your divorce, your divorce lawyers, for psychologists for you and your kids, and perhaps for booze to soften your misery. Sure, there’s a very small chance of that happening, and the attribution of a single hour is tiny, but there’s a ton of potential costs if it ends up happening to you. So account for these costs too please.

Is It Happiness At Work That Keeps You There At Night? Hmmm, No.

I love my work. I’ve loved most of my jobs, including ones where I’ve earned little and worked extremely hard and late. It’s important that we love what we do or find something else to do that we love. I truly believe it.

However, for the sake of my genius formula, we have to put aside our general love for our work, and account only for our happiness at work DURING that extra hour.

If you feel joy during that hour, punch it in. Are you extremely productive in that last hour of work? Great, results matter. Ah, naughty you, so you like the respect you’re getting for working late when your colleagues bid you farewell as they leave the office, seeing you still consumed in creating value for the company... I’m not judging you – put that good feeling in the mix too. You’ve gotten yourself a nice little jar of happiness right there.

Now it’s time to calculate the ‘cost’ side so we can discover the net value of your happiness during that extra hour. Do you feel miserable working late? Some people do, you’re not alone. Do you feel drained or exhausted when you leave work? Many people do, affecting their productivity and the quality of their work during this time. Do you feel guilty for working late? As we’ve seen, surveys show that almost every parent does. And respect is tricky too – there’s a reason your colleagues are leaving and not staying to work with you, and maybe they don’t respect you for staying late like you think they do.

It could also be that you dread returning home after a long day at work – afraid of what’s coming to you from your not-so-loving-at-the-moment wife or husband, who had to take care of the kids, drive them to and from after-school activities, cook dinner for them, scream to get them off the TV for dinner, give them showers, convince them to wear their PJs, read your toddler a bed-time story while your teenager is singing loudly at her room, tell them that they need to go to sleep because it’s a school day tomorrow, and meticulously execute other evening logistics, without your help (!) thank-you-very-much. Indeed, quality time with the kids is so much better when it’s shared.

Anyhow – misery, exhaustion, lack of productivity, guilt, fear, anxiety, no sex tonight. Account for all these costs of (no) happiness in your calculation.

 News Flash: You Don’t Advance Your Career Ambitions By Working Late!

People who have no ambitions don’t work late. They do as little as is expected of them to keep their jobs. If the law or their contract says their workday ends at 5pm, it does. People with ambitions who aren’t yet enlightened by my formula are the ones working late. These people – yes, I’m talking about you! - want to be appreciated, recognized, rewarded, promoted. You want to get more responsibilities, advance in your career, and make more money. Why? Because this is how you were raised and educated. Because you want to fulfill your potential. Because you want to provide more for your family. Because you think that it would make you happier. And you’re probably right! Ambition and drive do yield some of these good things in most cases. The only mistake you’re making is assuming that working late is a necessity to realize your career ambitions. Sometimes it’s the exact opposite – by working late you decrease your chances of promotion, appreciation and rewards. 

Many ambitious people think that they have to stay at work until they complete all of their tasks. They deem themselves responsible and accountable for doing so. However, usually it means that they’re not effective. They can’t differentiate the important tasks from the ones that can be forgotten, and they don’t get the important ones done early or quickly enough. Another common belief is that there’s such a thing as clearing your desk. If you’re done with your chores, new ones will magically appear. Your boss sees you can do more, so she’ll give you more, and for a good reason. Now don’t be lazy – not finishing chores on purpose the opposite of integrity and effectiveness, and your boss would be smart to sack you if that’s the course you’re taking.

Other ambitious people think that face time at crazy hours makes their superiors appreciate them more. They make sure they leave after their boss does. They share stories over lunch about the strange things that happened as they were locking down the office last night. They hope and expect that their late work would translate, in time, to bonuses and promotions. But it won’t. I had coffee with the managing partner of the top law firm we use and he told me that many of his lawyers and clerks walk around the office intentionally when they see him working late. I asked him whether he’d promote them faster over others that go home early. The partner didn’t wait for a second before he answered me “not a single one.” For him, it’s a sign of inefficiency, waste, and lack of priorities. “If you have work to do, do it, don’t walk around.” He said. With the advancement of technology, face time is getting less important. Well-functioning organizations and managers measure results. If you deliver results, on par or beyond expectations, then it doesn’t really matter whether you achieved them at work or elsewhere, in a 12-hour work day or a 12-minute one. So if you finished your important tasks for the day, just go home, be with your family or get a hobby. Do whatever fills you up so you can get back to work tomorrow, energized.

Sophisticated and ambitious people think that by working hard and late they make themselves indispensable to the organization. They don’t account though for two things though: trucks and brains. If an indispensable employee gets run over by a truck in a horrific accident, the organization that employed him usually survives. As a management consultant at a world-leading firm, I was trained to find “Single Points of Failure” (or SPOFs), which were actually those highly valuable employees whose resignation or death could halt the entire system from working. The goal for finding them was not to reward them for their superior skills and efforts, but rather to unSPOF them by training or recruiting alternative contributors, or by changing the system so it’s not dependent on any individual who might get hit by a truck or poached by a competitor. Managers are the same: we don’t want to be dependent on a single indispensable employee who might hold us captive with the results he brings and blackmail us for financial and professional rewards.

Managers have brains too. If you managed somehow to position yourself as the indispensable employee who’s working hard as hell and producing value like crazy, I would be the stupidest manager ever to promote you and take you away from your job. It’s like taking your most productive milk cow and making her the barn’s manager. Who’s going to produce the milk now? If I make you a manager instead of the worker you are, I’d be responsible for decreasing the organization’s yield and hurting the business. But I’m not stupid so I won’t promote you for your hard work. Instead, I’ll cultivate the false hope that hard work for me is going to lead you to greatness. I might give you a bonus every now and then (in an amount that probably isn’t worth all the extra hours you’ve put in). You’re getting there, don’t worry. You’ll be promoted. Soon. When the time comes. When your turn comes. When the budget is approved. When the deal is signed. When hell breaks loose and Lucifer himself hangs me upside down and orders me to promote you immediately or else he would fry my family jewels. That’s when. Back to work now.

So don’t kid yourself. Promotions and bonuses are not granted for working late. They’re given for a myriad of OTHER reasons: business need, professional fit, personal affinity, corporate power games, luck and looks. So get on with the program and invest in the things that do have some chance to get you the honey. 

Oh, and by the way, when you’re calculating – take into account that the senior role you’re craving might not pay as much as you expected or be as fun as you imagined. Just saying.

Opportunity Cost: What You’re Missing Out On During That Extra Hour

As you go through that last hour of work at the office, you’re usually consumed with what you’re doing and what you’re feeling. However, in order to properly measure the true value of that time, you need to also account for the opportunity cost – what could you have done and what could you have felt if you would have spent that hour otherwise, elsewhere.

So as you consider the thrill of writing yet another email or catching up on that tall pile of papers accumulating on your desk, also consider what you’re missing out on during that very same hour.

How much happiness does an hour with your kids worth? You could be talking, playing, goofing around, laughing, snuggling. If you don’t have kids, life outside the office can also be enjoyable – I vaguely recall. An hour with your wife or girlfriend, doing whatever it is people do before they have kids. An hour with your friends - joking, poking, drinking, clubbing. An hour with your pet: enjoying… pethood. And OMG, here’s one that you should take seriously – an hour with yourself, also known as “Me Time” – is so important for your mental health and happiness (says my wife when she wants me out of her way).  So many things to enjoy, so little time. “This is your life, not a dress rehearsal!” the cheesy slogan reminds us. “We work to live, not live to work!” comes his BFF-slogan to fortify the message. Following slogans might be the best way to navigate through life, so listen carefully when they call. 

What really nails it in my genius formula is the concept of “discounted happiness.” Any minted MBA (or mobster) would tell you that money today is worth more than money tomorrow. With a few caveats, the same goes for happiness. An hour of fun with your loved ones today is more gratifying, certain and sustainable for a healthy life than the promise for some momentary happiness from a future uncertain event like a promotion or a bonus. Moreover, the happiness from these events will come as well, if you do a good job and invest in what it takes. So you don’t really have to choose – you can enjoy yourself today AND in the future. 

You might be surprised, but enterprises know it all too. Happy employees are more engaged and more loyal to the company. A father that gets criticized for leaving work early to pick his kids from daycare or a mother that agonizes over missing her kids’ bed-time for 3 days in a row due to her work are more likely to end up hating their workplace. And guess what, many people have options. When these frustrated parents quit, their employer have to spend significant amounts to recruit and train adequate replacements. Therefore, more and more companies are treating “employee wellness” as a strategic imperative. Wellness for young professionals might mean perks and fun activities on campus, and for older employees with families wellness is about getting home to play with their kids and not having to answer emails on the weekend. When employers measure their employees on results, not face time, and let them organize their work around their lives and priorities – everybody benefits: the employer, the employee and the employee’s family too.

How Is Your Life Going To Be Different Tomorrow?

So Nothing plus Nothing plus Nothing minus a Lot of Nothing is equal to Nothing. We’ve run through the formula, and proven in so many words (literally, sorry, scientific proof requires documentation) that the value of that extra hour at work is pretty much nothing. Here’s the formula in a wallpaper format that you can decorate your PC with or print for the office cork board.

The real question is what are you going to do with this awesome knowledge you just gained. You can improve your life as early as today. How, you ask?

• If you’re an employee, go for results, not working late hours and giving face time. Manage expectations with your boss and invest in the things that have more likelihood to help you reach your career goals. Go home to your kids, have fun with your friends, enjoy your hobbies, and make sure that you have a life after work. One hour at a time.
• If you’re a manager, go for results too. Communicate to your employees what you expect from them and, as long as they deliver, care less about the “where” and “when” of how they delivered or over-delivered. If you’re a really cool boss, communicate to your team that you care about their wellness and that you actually want them to go home at reasonable hours, to spend time with their family and friends, to be happy, and to come back to work charged and happier tomorrow.
• It takes a critical mass to define what’s socially acceptable and becomes the new norm at work. So bring on the revolution – if you got this far down the blog and found it useful, share it with your friends, your colleagues, your bosses. Talk about it, say what you think. The world could be a happier, more productive place if you do. 

Thanks for reading and enjoy life! 

PS> Almost forgot. If you’re a mommy or a daddy, try our app – O’Daddy – available on the App Store and Google Play. It has a lot to offer, for example, a cool feature that reminds you to go home and play with your kids. ;-)