How to work enough and not too much

August 28, 2023 11:17 PM

I work in a do gooder industry and have a high level of responsibility and almost no supervision. In my field, it is common for people to talk about how busy/overwhelmed they are all the time. I am not well suited to overwork (I do a good job and meet my responsibilities but loathe staying up late working or being exhausted all the time). However, I think the lack of supervision makes me paranoid sometimes. Like a fear I will suddenly be asked to "show my receipts." I tend to track what I am working on and for how long in case I am asked. My problem is figuring out what a reasonable amount of time/output is for a given day so I can do that amount and stop. If you have dealt with this internalized capitalist overlord and came up with a system to keep it at bay, please explain. How much work do you expect of yourself in a given day? If you exist in the greyworld of "unlimited PTO" how much do you actually take?
posted by anonymous to Work & Money (11 answers total)

Hello fellow do-gooder! Unlimited PTO is, I think, similar to my "yearly hours". I am expected to work 40x52 hours per year, minus my actual X weeks of holidays plus public holidays.
I simply track my hours roughly, with the aim of landing on an average of 8 per day. I am not available to colleagues or clients outside of business hours unless previously arranged or such a genuine emergency that colleagues call my private phone (never happened).

I also have colleagues who like to be very performative about how much they have to do, how overworked they are, but rarely seemed to be doing any actual work, so ignore them, sigh and agree non-committally, it's part of the game. Often in do-gooders roles one ends up tired through behaving unprofessionally and not having an appropriate relationship and boundaries to their client. This is of course role dependant but you sound like you know your place. Good boundaries towards clients, colleagues and employers make for sustainable do-gooders compared to bursts of above and beyond amazing news and then crashing out.

I do however work outside those hours if it suits me. When I am feeling worried about showing my receipts, great term, I will use my calendar to mark what hours I did what for a week or something just to be able to use as an example.
posted by Iteki at 11:59 PM on August 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

Dealt with this on a few occasions, and also lost ground here and there with a need to freshen up.

Three things:

- Reconcile that the value of your work != number if hours you work. Lack of boundaries either robs you in the short term (exhaustion) or robs you in the long term (burnout), sometimes irrecoverably
- Ruthlessly time block and stick to it, with your working hours block reflecting whatever sweet spot you land on that gets-it-done but doesn't wipe you out
- I vaguely remember research that there's about ~4 good high-energy hours in a day and the rest is chaff. I tend to aim for the first-4 of the day being the stuff that counts, the back half being admin and meetings

I still work too much (~50-60 something hours a week), but this keeps me from bumping 80's and I've got no hesitation in defending it to the rest of the 80-hours-club.
posted by muppetkarma at 3:11 AM on August 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

Work your contracted hours and then stop. If your contract doesn’t specify working hours, then a reasonable default for a full time role is eight hours per day / forty hours per week.

Stop when your hours are up, and show your organisation that they need to hire more people to complete the remaining work. If you regularly work more than your contracted hours, then you’re swindling someone else out of a job.
posted by Puppy McSock at 3:31 AM on August 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

We have unlimited PTO and I aim to take a full week off every quarter. We close the week between Christmas and New Year, which I count for 4th quarter. That's actually giving myself less vacation time than my most generous job (25 vacation + 12 sick), but we are remote and extremely flexible with how folks use their time from day to day, so I'm less stressed overall and need fewer long weekends or errand days to keep up with my life.

(And to answer your first question, I'm on the clock for 40 hours unless I have a deadline - and even then I only end up working "overtime" because of my own procrastination issues. I only have one colleague who spends a lot of time talking about how busy he is, and everyone knows he's full of shit. Our organization is very fortunate to be properly staffed for the work.)
posted by Sweetie Darling at 4:09 AM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's important to keep a list of the things you've accomplished so you can use them in reviews, moments of self-promotion, but generally in situations like this your supervisors themselves don't really want to worry about how you're spending your time. It takes a lot of work to keep a close eye on direct reports. They just want you to get the results they need to impress *their* supervisors or meet their goals. If you're doing the things you are tasked with and regularly accomplishing goals, you're probably fine. Nobody is going to do a surprise investigation of whether you're getting anything done unless you're falling short of "deliverables".

I treat unlimited PTO as 4 weeks a year (20-25 business days). Unlimited is of course a bonkers notion. If it's really unlimited, I'll see you next year! I try to plan the time off for a time after something major has been moved forward so I don't have to worry about whether my presence is felt. But the thing to keep in mind is that in positions like this, where a lack of supervision is a possible option for management, it's very hard to replace people. So unless the org is suffering financially, the only thing that matters is whether you're delivering and having an impact on the orgs goals. The amount of time does not matter.
posted by dis_integration at 8:01 AM on August 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

How much work do you expect of yourself in a given day? Whatever I can get done before my end of day that day, which is usually 5pm. Sometimes this isn't satisfactory, so what I've been doing is say "this is what i'll get done today and I'll stop when I get done." I usually am pretty lazy about it unless I have real deadlines.

If you exist in the greyworld of "unlimited PTO" how much do you actually take? I used to live in this world, but I had a target number of hours to work, which meant 12% of the total hours at 40 hours a week could be vacation or holiday. That averaged to 3 weeks + the ten days of federal holidays. So i think 3 weeks minimum, 4+ weeks max (I would say take as many as you want but I have sense your workplace would look down on that). Take at least 2 of those weeks as one week off. Huge differenced in mental health.
posted by sandmanwv at 8:59 AM on August 29, 2023

This is all v helpful to me as I contemplate returning to FT v autonomous and self-scheduled ‘vocation’ job in education and absolutely *must not* for health reasons return to the unfeasibly long hours i put in before I became ill and had to stop work & then return only to reduced hours. If it’s ok to piggyback a question - any advice on how to deal with this when your contract has a notional 37.5 hours but also a clause which says sthg like ‘or however long is necessary to do the job’? I really struggle with giving myself permission to stop after the 37.5 or feeling that my position will be secure if I do so
posted by melisande at 9:34 AM on August 29, 2023

> your contract has a notional 37.5 hours but also a clause which says sthg like ‘or however long is necessary to do the job’

I take this to mean that 37.5 hours is a normal week’s work. You can plan to leave at 5pm & most of the time you’ll do so. But occasionally you’ll be close to finishing something & so maybe you stick around until 5.30 so that it’s done, just to help the work along. Or you have an important deadline that means you put in a big week and stay until 6.00 every night. But then you flex it back when the peak in workload is over, and go back to 37.5 hours of normality again - and hey why not take an hour for lunch instead of your normal 30mins, so the pendulum swings back in your favour & you can recharge.

If 37.5 hours isn’t enough time to get the work done in normal circumstances, then something’s structurally wrong. Overwork masks the problem instead of solving it.
posted by Puppy McSock at 10:49 AM on August 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

The work is never done, so you can take that to mean to complete the most current task. That is, don't walk out of a meeting at five, or leave a mail half written because it was bell-time. That's probably not what your boss means, but outside of a couple of crunch sessions per year they need to staff to cover the needs of the organisation. Chronic overtime is a symptom of a sick workplace.
posted by Iteki at 3:15 PM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I recently transitioned from salaried to self-employed and now I track my hours religiously (even on my flat-fee projects). For what it’s worth, I rarely can squeeze out more than five hours of highly productive work a day. An average day is closer to four hours. Apparently this is pretty normal by the findings of time studies, and most workers don’t even have more than 2-3 “productive” hours a day. So I would also really encourage you to not feel like you have to “prove” eight hours of productivity a day because the reality is that while someone might be in the office for eight hours, no one is producing eight consecutive hours of intense cognitive work every day.
posted by mostly vowels at 7:37 PM on August 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Here’s a pretty good blog post (disclaimer: from a productivity software company) breaking down various time use studies.
posted by mostly vowels at 7:46 PM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]