I can’t work the hours I did in 2020 again yet struggling to see how to avoid it

I think people in many white collar jobs highly underestimate their ability to set boundaries and make their work/life balance healthier. (Not sure if OP's job is white collar, but her Twitter bio suggests it is.)

The excuse I always hear is that if they don't work that hard, they'll get fired and replaced with someone who does. I'm sure that's true for some jobs, but a) it's likely very few of them, and b) why would you want to work for/with people who have so little respect for you and your health in the first place?

Sure, promotions might come less often and raises might be smaller, but that's a trade off you can consciously make: more money, or better health and family/friend relationships. And you also set an example for your peers: if they start complaining about their health or about burnout, you can show them that it's a problem that can be solved. And the more that people do this, the more people will realize it's possible and the right thing to do.

And yes, there are some who live paycheck to paycheck, hold multiple jobs, will take any job they can get, and don't have much choice. I'm not talking about people like that... though that is another conversation that should be had more often; no one should have to be stuck in a situation like that, but so many are! And yes, there's unfortunately sexism and racism involved; I expect women and POC will get looked upon less favorably if they set stronger boundaries than white men will. But I don't see that as an argument to destroy your health.

For those who didn't know this off-hand, as I didn't, "VCSE" in this context appears to stand for "voluntary community social enterprise," which appears to be UK-speak for, roughly, the non-profit sector.

When accepting work, if you do not provide backpressure, you'll keep getting more and more work.

Saying no has nothing to do with unprofessionalism, it has to do with the fact that there are finite number of hours in a day and there is a limit to what a person can do. That limit can be different for each person, but it will always be there.

If you get blamed or shamed for not being able to do more work, just insist. There is no shame in this.

Also, working more does not necessarily translate into career progression. And if your job security depends on working an insane amount of hours, unless you are being compensated properly and understand the long-term health implications of what you are doing, just look for another job.

What happens if you get a RSI injury such as carpal tunnel syndrome? or some other kind of health issue? If it's bad enough, that's it, your ability to work is over. If they already do not care about your work/life balance and your health, their reaction will surely be "hey, the typing machine on desk #3 broke, please get a new one".

It is fine to be professional, but don't drink the Kool-Aid, look after your health and your best interest. If you want to be able to work until retirement, you need a sustainable lifestyle.

Also remember that one day you will change jobs, and when you do it is likely you won't see your close friends at work anymore. But nevertheless you will have to live with the implications of neglecting your family and friends, or looking in the mirror one day and realizing you are old and you wasted your youth making other people rich for no reason.

Transitioning everyone to remote work during COVID has only amplified these problems. Boundary-setting feels much easier when people are physically switching contexts between home and work.

Obviously, people with physical offices still put in work from home, but it feels much easier to time-box activities when there is a clear distinction between hours spent at work and hours spent at home.

With full remote, the physical boundaries between work and home disappear. It no longer feels safe to tell someone you'll follow up on something when you're back in the office tomorrow morning, because now technically you're always in your office.

I dealt with this problem a lot with high achievers on remote teams (pre-COVID). Certain personality types will always aim to please, never pass up an opportunity to shine, and have trouble saying no to requests. Combine those personality traits with a high-achiever mentality and you have a recipe for disaster.

This was especially problematic in new university graduates who had spent the first two decades of their lives getting straight As on arbitrary, time-limited school work. Drop them into open-ended work environments where the project scope and duration is a moving target and they struggle to pace themselves. Their old techniques of powering through work at 100% effort until it's done are no longer sustainable in the face of a never-ending supply of additional work.

Managers should, of course, be aware of these situations and work to intervene. However, employees also need to take some share of the responsibility for closing feedback loops with their managers. Some people are so afraid of disappointing anyone or appearing weak that they'll deliberately hide any signs that they're struggling or overworked. It's critically important that both managers and employees work together to keep feedback loops open and honest. As a manager I wish I could read everyone's minds and adjust accordingly, but it's extremely difficult when employees are actively working to hide these things from their employers. Side note: It's so much easier to manager people who were formerly managers themselves because they're so much better at communicating these things, having seen both sides of the table.

Something I've had a long and hard time learning is that others treat my time approximately as valuable as I do. When I'm always an instant message away, responding to any problem, allowing interruptions, and not setting boundaries, I'm signaling that my time isn't as valuable. So others treat it that way, and I become overworked.

If instead most of my interactions with people are on important matters, then they see my time as important. Setting boundaries and saying no to more trivial requests generally increases the respect people show.

I think many people who overwork themselves really overestimate how much managers and others care. I hear stories of software devs doing like 12 hour days. But why? You're likely salaried for a 7.5-8 hour day. When your salaried work is over you don't need to work longer, log out/go home/ignore anything work related. It's really not that hard. If someone is trying to contact you and you aren't on-call or aren't required to listen, then kindly tell them that you're not at work. Emails are easily ignored too. Did someone send you a ticket at 5pm with the message "Can you take a quick look at this?". That's tomorrow mornings problem, not todays. The outcome of whatever work you do for that will not produce anything meaningful until the next day anyway, because most people finished work, so why bother?

Do you feel pressured from needing to work longer to meet expectations set by other people in the same role? Don't be. If your manager or anyone else in charge has a problem with your productivity then the first thing they're going to do is ask you about it. What things are forcing you to work these extra hours? Is it deadlines? A backlog of work? Did they overestimate your skill level? Talk about it. It might turn out that you actually are in over your head, but you're in the job and you're making the company money. Not every manager is evil and most are accommodating. You might be able to get training/help, perhaps a lower salary and therefore lower expectations/responsibilities. Yeah it might suck to lose some money, but you know what sucks to lose more? Your health.

Firing people is pretty expensive and a last resort for a company, you're almost never at risk of being fired. So long as you're not punching people in the face when you meet them and you're doing your work at an acceptable level then you're most likely okay. The people that get fired are those who are really really shitty and do nothing. Any reasonable worker will have domain knowledge and other skills that are invaluable and will take a long time for new hires to pick up.

Any company which effectively forces you to over work, even after discussing it, is not worth working for. Software devs are lucky in that the market is full of jobs. Other people might not be so lucky, but in that scenario the first thing you should be doing is gradually reducing hours and looking for a another job.

Over workers of this nature are the source of their own problems. I pity them, but at the same time the power to fix their problems lie entirely within themselves. She is (almost certainly) not in an instance where she needs to work 80hrs/week in order to make enough money to feed her family.

Pick a random day in the past year - I'd love to hear her argument as to why the work she did on say July 13th was so important and time sensitive that it couldn't have been delayed 12 hours so she could spend a little time with her family.

My own experience is that startup employers really do have unrealistic/over-optimistic expectations of what's actually required to achieve a certain result. Anything worth doing in the startup world hasn't been done before, so it's usually not possible to invent it on a schedule.

People who will throw something together are heroes, but very often the result is complete crap that has enormous costs if it gets adopted as a standard. I'm being only slightly facetious asking, how much has humanity been set back due to the fact that less than two weeks was spent inventing Javascript? Maybe they should have spent an extra week or two on it and saved millions of person-years down the road [ h/t the recent repost of https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... ]

At the same time, my own psychological makeup made me vulnerable to trying to meet those unrealistic expectations, and that's on me. It took decades to really figure out what's going on, and ultimately it's a matter of acceptance rather than actionable change, although change is possible. With so much of our capabilities and challenges being unconscious, I continue to marvel at the miracle that anything gets done at all.

This is definitely a top-down solution. Our CIO mandated “no meetings Fridays” before COVID-19 and it became a blessing when everyone started working from home. It reminded people that our coworkers are people. Don’t expect them to drop everything for our employer. Or for our work needs. We can all responsibly manage workloads.

The author of this piece lists CEO as a title. Sadly, if she wants to reduce the workload and expectation of her staff, she’ll need to lead by example. I wholly expect her to be able to do so, and it will only make her employees happier.

I have enough privilege that I don’t need to work 2 jobs so for me, time and health are two finite resources that I will never trade for. Even the wealthiest trillionaire can only buy so much of either.

This is why I will never work in the US. I need the benefits (and to be able to pay for them, even in retirement, which gets complicated if you have cancer or a rare disease, both of which are common) more than I need the actual income. It’s sad but true.

I could also lose them in a split second if I became too ill to keep up the hectic long hours.

I am fortunate to be a dual US|EU citizen, but if I was not, I would try to become a citizen of (Republic of) Ireland, which is part of the EU, so you are also conferred EU citizenship in addition to being an Irish citizen. This gives you the right to live/work/retire in over 30 countries, including all of the EU and EEA countries. Additionally, if you have citizenship from the Republic of Ireland, you are allowed to live/work/retire in the UK, due to a longstanding common agreement. If you are of Irish descent and are a direct blood relative (even great-great-great grandparent) of someone born in Ireland, you can become an Irish citizen in 3 years of living there if you provide the birth records. Also, if you are under 30(?) Americans can get a 1 year working holiday visa. Tech workers can get a job easily through the Irish skills shortage list.

During the summer I looked at my commit activity on our github and it was a solid green since March when the lockdown began in the UK. There was nothing else to do and the went on until perhaps mid November. I've been on holidays since mid December and I had no idea how mentally fatigued I was until I stopped working.

There's no way next year will be as frantic. And to be fair to our HR team, they did regularly warn people to take time off and not burn out.

I've been pondering the same. It's called "working from home", but it often feels like "sleeping at the office".

My work/life balance depends (or depended) on physical boundaries: Being at home gave some distance, then traveling gave me some more. In 2020, it's been difficult to separate work from non-work.

I've also been working in a non-profit organization that's seen so much more work since COVID hit.

These last 9 months have been awful and have me seriously considering looking for another job. Everything is suddenly urgent and high-impact, being on-call until late every night with real (potentially deadly) consequences if you mess up.

Change job, dear Akiko

After decades of experience, I figured out my steady-state output is maximized with 6 hour days.

I need at least 2-4 work hours a day without someone yapping at me so I can figure out what to type into the computer next. My best work is done while biking or jogging.

I’ve also found that most people working >> 8 hours produce substandard work during deadlines. Their crunch time usually delays product launches.

Shut the computer off at 5pm. It's pretty simple.

I've also stopped accepting the 8 AM meeting requests that get fired off at 3 AM same-day from the subcontinent. It takes some resetting of expectations, but it's a far healthier and more professional set of ground rules.

If you don’t stand up for yourself and set boundaries, you will be 100% be taken advantage of. The world is full of people who doesn’t care about your short or long term wellbeing. Stop living in a fantasy world and work hard to see the world as it really is.

What annoying self-pity. Both the hero (I work for a non-profit), and victim (but that field is deeply gendered, classed & 'racialised').

CEO of National Survivor User Network (mental health survivors ) not having good mental health techniques? Ironic by Alanis Morissette

Take some time off!

A job is just another income stream, hopefully one of the many one can hope to build during their life. Why kill yourself everyday over it?

Edit: Downvotes? In a forum supposedly filled with “entrepreneurial” minded individuals? Whatever... at least explain yourselves.

I had to google was VCSE was. Incase anyone didn't know its Voluntary Community and Social enterprise. For some reason I can understand this sentiment coming from someone in tech or some other highly competitive industry... but a non-profit?