What's The Value of Your Life When You Work Overtime?

Dec 24, 2024

Even if you do not pay attention to human behaviour, you must have noticed that your colleagues fall into two types of categories when our 9-to-5 obligations are over; those who would have checked out of the office an hour before, as if they were about to go on a low-cost flight and record stories for the “be real moment”. Unsurprisingly they would be out of the door before you had time to finish the ritualistic “Have a good one, see you tomorr..”.

By contrast, you have those who would stay later than what the company lease should allow.

Although I still have a propensity to check out late, my condition has improved over the years. And, one solution I came up with was the “stay late box”. A very nice and easy thing to implement.

Basically, if you stay late, you are requested to add a couple of quid in the box, in other words, you are paying to work more and have less free time. At the end of the month, the usual late leavers would get together and offer the tax, sorry, ‘collected’ money to the one who managed to leave on time the most. Voilà.

While this non-official HR-friendly process had some success, with hindsight I am questioning the reasons why some employees are doing their best to make their lives less enjoyable.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our time has been split into three slots (eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for free time. And since the last third is wolfed down by time lost in transport, groceries, and cleaning, is it fair to call this an equal split?

But don’t get me wrong, working late can also be caused by greedy companies overloading their employees or companies that have poor or no processes to streamline unnecessary work. Is AI the solution? Who knows?

Based on recent research by the OECD, which analyses how people across the world spend their time, we can see that paid work, housework, leisure, eating, and sleeping take 80–90% of all the 1,440 minutes we have in a day in our lives.

Interestingly or not, some of the cliches about Spanish, Italians, and Greeks are exemplified by those countries spending the most time eating and drinking.

While there are many factors (demographic, cultural, educational and economic) that can influence how people across the world spend their time, I am still wondering why some of us would do unpaid overtime whilst it is well known that time is money!

So is the solution to implement a worldwide ‘Stay Late Tax’ to reverse our non-capitalist pride sense?

From a capitalist point of view, the more you work, the more money you accumulate and therefore the happier you will be. From this perspective, employees have to exchange their time for pay, placing this trade as a means and a condition for happiness and self-realisation.

From a socialist point of view, however, the perspective is the exact opposite. Achieving self-realisation is possible through leisure, free time, and life's simple pleasures. In this perspective, work steals our time; the more time we spend working to earn money, the less time we have to enjoy our lives.

However, it would be ludicrous to assume that one will stay longer at work simply based on their political inclinations. However, it does beg a bigger question that I would develop in a future article: “Do we have the right to be lazy?”

Obviously, this article will be highly influenced by Paul Lafargue, a famous Cuban-born French political writer, and economist, who was one of the first to explore this topic and put some provoking thoughts that illustrate how our relationship with work can be enmeshed.

“...In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with ever-increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!”.

“Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.”

After some reading to untangle what seems to be a desire to work for free, I remembered what one previous Manager said about his ability to leave on time while bragging about his understanding of Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”.

In other words, the time we dedicate to a task will stretch endlessly because we subconsciously adjust our efforts to fit the time we think we can dispose of.

Although, at the time, I thought it was just a way to push us to adopt the “quick win doctrine” at all costs. I realise today how wise his words were.

But another question came to mind: Can we objectively understand what time is? And do we all have the same ability to define and experience time uniformly? Poets, philosophers, psychologists, economists, and artists have tried to define it, but nothing seems so subjective as the meaning of time.

“The past is history, the future is a mystery and the present is a gift – that's why they call it the present.” Bil Keane

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst." William Penn

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important” Steven Covey
"It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" Henry David Thoreau

"We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past to stop its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us. Blaise Pascal

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces... Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at most time’s carcass”. Karl Marx

“Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can't afford to lose”.Thomas Edison

“Time is not something which exists of itself, or which inheres in things as an objective determination, and it does not therefore remain when abstraction is made of all subjective conditions." Immanuel Kant
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As I re-read Kant's quote, I wondered how he could come up with such a far-fetched, and somewhat useful (at least, when you’re trying to be vague about your age at work), perspective on time. And, if my understanding of this quote is right, could it mean that time is everything but objective? And if so, is it even possible that time does not exist?

His book “Critique of Pure Reason” has been classified as one of the most influential and complicated books of philosophy. And, yes, if you want to read it you will need a lot of patience, or a very good preceptor like I do.

This book is revolutionary because it does not focus on “how” we can understand the invisible world (metaphysics) or moral questions (ethics), which was how philosophy was envisaged and developed. Instead, he is questioning why we cannot answer them! As a result, he started interrogating our abilities to know, how knowledge is made possible to us, and what are the limits of human understanding.

When talking about knowledge, we need to distinguish between empirical and pure knowledge. The former comes from experience, like learning how if you play with fire, you’ll get burned. Pure knowledge, on the other hand, is built into our minds through reason and logic and is applied universally like mathematics (2+2 = 4).

This got me thinking about how GenZ and future generations will be building true knowledge that combines real experience (being behind a screen does not count I am afraid) if all their training and mentoring is done online.

Interestingly, LinkedIn research shows that GenZ, who are used to fast-moving technology and immediate gratification, feel like time is scarce! Therefore, they would prefer a fully self-directed and independent approach to learning, which is not what L&D and HR leaders tend to prioritise.

Let’s go back to the Philo part, shall we?

From Kant’s perspective, the sensitive world does not appear to us as it is; the world appears as our senses and ability to understand it, which is quite a revolution.

For Kant, it seems clear that we can only know things as they appear to us (phenomena), and never as they truly are in themselves (noumena). To make it simpler, our minds play an active role in shaping reality and do not necessarily describe it accurately.

As a result, it becomes impossible for us, based on the “set-up” of our brain, to imagine a world without time and space, or to imagine if there was time and space before the Big Bang, simply because we have never experienced life without time and space. Imagining a life without it is “technically” impossible.

You might need to re-read this paragraph.

Okay, if we can’t objectively experience time, does this mean that some of us are doomed to stay late just because we have no notion of time?

In a previous article “Yes, you can sit with us”, we explored how well-structured onboarding is essential, as it not only gives new hires the feeling they are welcome but also that they have a place within the company and a specific team. Knowing you have your place in a company, and that you have been expected gives a sense of belonging, and this is extremely powerful from a retention point of view.

In our personal lives, it would be our parents and other members of our family who will be the ones to welcome us into this world. And, from the moment of our conception, we are “technically” expected; our unique place in our lineage has been reserved for us.

However, in a society that believes at its core that time is money, everything and everyone is replaceable, and that work time is more valuable than family time, can we wholeheartedly think that we have been expected in this society?

Think about that!

If it is the case could it be that some of us would have a higher proclivity to abort their free time to pay an imaginary debt to society that will give them the right to be part of our society?

Would it be ludicrous to believe that some late stayers may believe madly that they must be useful to be seen as valuable, respectable and, even loveable?

It might sound like a stretch to put time, work, and love in the same box, but suddenly an old African proverb “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth” came to mind, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many of employees tonight will desperately try to fill the hole in their heart with more repetitive tasks to the point of total exhaustion, just to prove they are worth it.

And if we are consumed individually by a feeling of not belonging should we collectively build a society where our time is used more wisely?

As for me, I decided to leave the office on time. As I started counting how many coins I had left in my Fred Perry bag to buy an outrageously creamy gelato, I realised that, if time is money, life, on the other hand, is priceless.

Ciao Amore. Ciao!

The Verdickt Therapy

What's The Value of Your Life When You Work Overtime?