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Escape the cycle of working overtime
A letter from editorial director Lisa Smosarski.

Overtime. One little word, so much emotional baggage. For the lucky few, overtime might trigger a spark of joy: a few more pounds on the payslip at the end of the month. But for most of us, it’s an unwanted burden, a thief of our free time, despite it becoming a normal expectation of the workplace. So expected, in fact, that a leaked memo from Google’s Sergey Brin last week revealed he believes “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”. That’s 20 more than the average contract.

A study by LiveCareer, published in January, revealed that 77% of workers take on extra duties weekly, and the TUC (Trades Union Congress) topped that last week with a study for Work Your Proper Hours day (a new day to me but one I intend to fully celebrate in the future) that revealed teachers take on the most overtime in the UK, with two in five working a whopping 26 hours extra a week – the equivalent of £15,000 in lost salary. It also reported that 3.8 million UK workers took on unpaid overtime last year.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not just our bank balances that suffer as a consequence; it’s also our health – 93% of employees who work additional hours on a regular basis report burning out.

Encouragingly, help is coming in the future in the form of the future Employment Rights Bill, but what do you do if you need to take action now? Here are four thought starters if you’re in a cycle of overtime you want to escape:

  • The legal working limit is 48 hours a week. If you are working over this or well over your contracted hours, it’s important to raise the matter with your manager or HR teams to see if there are ways to reduce or prioritise your workload.
  • Establish your boundaries. Often overtime is self-inflicted by our own sense of duty or business culture, especially when it comes to things like checking emails out of hours or on holiday or ‘catching up’ at home. Write down what boundaries you would like to create, and then do things like turn notifications off, pack work laptops or mobiles away or ask colleagues, housemates, partners or friends to remind you of the boundaries if you slip.
  • Consider implementing time management techniques into your working day to ensure you’re maximising the time you are working. You can find lots of great ideas from Team Stylist here.
  • Check your contract and what overtime is expected of you. Citizens Advice has some great information on what to look for in your contract and where your rights lie. 

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Give your mistakes an expiration date
Digital editor Ellen Scott shares insightful hacks to make work that little bit easier.

We all make mess-ups at work. It’s inevitable. I know this, and yet each time I make a bluff I immediately spiral into believing I am the worst person ever, and surely, I will be fired. I know I’m not alone in this; I’ve managed multiple women who hold themselves to a completely unreasonable standard of perfection, feeling awful each time their 100% success rate slips.

A tool to deal with the reactive rumination comes straight from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Many years back, I was advised by a therapist to create ‘scheduled worry time’: an allotted window for my all-consuming anxiety. The idea was that when anxiety arose, I could postpone it until scheduled worry time. Often, by the time scheduled worry time came around, the issue didn’t seem as bad. Or I’d had enough time to process it.

I’m now advising a similar approach to work mistakes. My belief is that each time you make a blunder, you give feeling rubbish about it a set expiration date (and time). Make that expiration date a tight turnaround; think raw fish rather than cheese. You’re then allowed to reflect on the mistake, learn from it and, let’s be real, beat yourself up for it, but there’s a time limit. Once that expiration date hits, you’re done. Consciously remind yourself that it’s no longer the moment to think about this mistake, and that now it’s time to move forward.  


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Image credits: The Stylist Group; Courtesy of Getty; Courtesy of Stylist; Courtesy of Adobe
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