Working long hours without getting paid is a thing of the past. Company loyalty has diminished over the past years. The new generation of workers now are more focused on living a good life instead of spending time at work.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this mentality towards work. It will be up to each individual what to consider relative to his personal goal. (I am using the pronoun for male as a general pronoun for everyone and this does not mean anything. Just to make it simple.)
Advantages of working long hours
Let’s get straight to the point. Here are the advantages of working long hours:
More time to complete a task. Let us all admit it. Work will never stop. It will always come. Some would be easy and can be completed in five minutes and some will take hours, even days, to complete. When a deadline is looming, the 8 hours a day to work would not be enough. We’ll need more time. And where do we get it? We just put in more hours in a day. Instead of 8, we do 12 or even 16 hours just to complete it. This gives us more time to complete it and beat that deadline.
Extending hours in the office (Don’t be confused. By “in the office” I also mean those working from home.) provides us the time we need to finish out deliverables. Instead of watching on our mobile phones, chatting with co-workers, or scrolling through social media, we can use those hours to work. A good use of time to complete a task.
Exposure or presence at work. To be noticed at work, people need to feel your presence. The people who decide who gets promoted need to have a good impression of those who are supposed to be next in line. One of the ways to do this is by putting in more hours at work. The more hours you are working, the more presence and viability you create. Thus, people notices you over others.
Being known by people who make decisions is a crucial step in climbing up the corporate ladder. Truthfully, it is not just about performance seen on a scorecard. The numbers help but the subjective input of people about you helps your case to be promoted. Extending long hours creates that familiarity of you. It makes other people remember you when the time comes for performance reviews and promotion decisions.
Growth in skills and knowledge. The time you spend working enables you to learn more. With more hours, you get to fail a lot of times and learn from it. You get to hone your skills and apply them the next time creating a better output. This I would say is the best advantage you’ll ever get in working long hours. By spending more time, you get to experience more, and in effect, gain knowledge in the process through the best teacher, experience.
Leveling up your skills and knowing more about the job you do can take you places. No one climbs up the corporate ladder with just a basic set of skills. (Of course, being a suck-up is a different story. There is no real and true worth in there.) No one can be a manager if one is still doing the same thing and knows the same thing when he started. A good grasp and more knowledge are required to be even considered as someone with potential. Thus, by spending more time honing your skills can be beneficial in the long-run.
Disadvantages of working long hours
We are all aware of this but for let’s just list it down for those who are just starting out their careers.
Negative impact on health. Working long hours uses our minds and bodies more than it is capable of handling. This gives us stress that eventually gets to us. We get sick. We get very tired. We get overwhelmed and at some point, we just want to quit. By spending more hours, we overuse our biological makeup and it takes a toll.
If you really want (or need) to work long hours, have regular breaks. A pause at every regular and consistent interval, like every hour for 15 or 30 minutes, will help the mind and body reset. The break gives the mind and body to recuperate. It is just like working out. To build muscles, rest every other day is recommended to give the muscles enough time to heal and repair the muscles that were destroyed during workout.
More mistakes that result in rework. Just get it over with. That is the feeling we get when we are working for so long and are feeling tired. Especially when everyone is about to end their day, or the deadline is fast approaching, we want to get the work done as soon as possible. With us being tired, we get into a state where we want to just to finish it. This results in mistakes which eventually lead to rework, or at least a mediocre work.
If you really need to spend more time at work, one thing to do to avoid mistakes is to do focus work. What usually happens when we work more than what is expected is that we are juggling multiple tasks at the same time, or simply put multi-tasking. If we use those extended hours for one task only and focus on it, we avoid mistakes and produce more than a mediocre results.
Lost time for family, friends, and self. When we use our time for one thing, we can not use the same time for another. Spending more time at work just means we lose time with our family, friends, and ourselves. We may say that regardless of whether we work long hours, we still are able to attend special occasions, school events, and annual celebrations however, this does not help in the long run. Not to mention that most of us are on our phones answering emails and chats while we are supposed to use that time for non-work related activities.
We may say that quality is more important than quantity. Okay. If that is the case then make sure you are present during the time you are spending with your loved ones. Put away that phone. Talk to them. Play with your kids. If you really need to work long hours, then focus on having quality time with them. Be present in mind and body. Don’t be elsewhere.
Summary
It is a choice. No one should say which one is better. It is a matter of what is more important for us and which one we put in more time. If we are really aiming to pursue and progress in our careers then working long hours would help (not the only way but definitely helps). If we are good with where we are in our careers and want to spend more (quantity not quality) time with our loved ones, then we use our time with them.
We just need to keep that in mind. We all get lost in the hustle and bustle of work that we tend to forget other aspects of our lives. By keeping what is important to us at the center of our lives, we can use our time when it matters the most (for us).
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