Personal Time vs. Company Time

Is it too much to ask to be able to value your personal time off from work (that is, any time that you are not working) ? I find more and more that people think it is ‘bad team spirit’ to complain about having to work 17 hours a day and not get a full day off the next day.

I mean, I don’t have a problem with working hard and making sure our work is done right. I also don’t have a problem with working extra hours a few times each month, which is currently far less than what I needed to endure in my ‘start-up’ days. However, why is it such a bad thing to value the time I spend with my family ?

As a side note, my current job and management are really good. Everyone in my team is a good person and fun to be around with. But what I’m really trying to get at is that I want to be able to complain about having to work 22 hours in two days without having to look like a bastard. :)

Anyone with similar stories ?

1 Comment

  1. George Schlossnagle said,

    April 7, 2003 @ 12:07 am

    I agree completely. I’ve worked (and left) jobs where 12-14 hours a day was the norm and people were expected to work Saturdays for months on end.

    The strange thing is that I’m something of a workaholic. Over the past 5 years, I’ve probably averaged 12 hours of work a day on weekdays, and 6-8 on weeked-days. That’s just who I am. Yet I’ve tried to never ask an employee to work that hard, and it always sat wrong with me when I was asked to work the hours I was already working on my own. Workaholism is my personal problem, and I don’t want my employeer making it worse.

    Interestingly, now that I’m running my own company, my brother and I have tried very hard to make sure our employees are worked very fairly. This works well for about half of our employees, but the rest take advantage of our 8 hour work days by coming in late, taking long lunches and leaving on time. So they are ruining it for the bunch. Perhaps we need to go to 10 hour days just to get the work we’re paying people for.

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