Take Your Paid Time Off!

When I started working for my big corporation employer a decade ago, I was fairly naive. I had a conversation with my supervisor early on about the long hours I was putting in and I was told something like “don’t worry about it, there are slower times, and it’ll all work out.” What a load of crock! Learn from my mistakes and go in with your eyes open. Here’s my story.

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What I Got Right

I remember vividly my first workday for BigCorp. I was in my new apartment and had woken up extra early to shower and get ready to show up to work ready to go, right on time. And I remember debating with myself about if I should track my work time or not.

I was a salaried exempt employee, you see, and that meant that I would be paid no matter how many or how few hours I worked. In theory, I shouldn’t have had to worry about my work hours. That day, by chance, I ran across the HoursTracker app in the App store. I decided to give it a try to track my hours.

One of the best work-life balance decisions I ever made was to track my hours as if I were an hourly employee. Just for myself. Not something to share with my supervisor. Because you see, I’m a recovering people pleaser and I find it hard to say “no.” In my naivety about BigCorp culture, I at least knew that I tended to people please and that I needed to protect myself.

If I’m not the first to show up and the last to leave, I feel a sense of guilt. By tracking my hours, I wanted to provide to myself a quantitative metric to assuage any ill-placed pangs of guilt or loyalty.

That decision to track my time is something that I have done every single hour that I’ve worked over the past decade. And that decision and tracking still pays dividend to help me stay sane, balanced, and work through my own mental hurdles and people pleasing tendencies.

My Mistake: saying “yes” to everything and stretching myself too far

In the early weeks of my working career, I made the mistake of taking to heart a random blog article I read that said that in the first six months of my career I should expect to put in 60-80 hours per week. Foolishly, that’s exactly what I did. In hindsight, that article was probably a bullshit filled opinion piece by a Fortune 500 CEO, just like the recent BS articles we see today about how everyone is clamoring to return to office to work now that the COVID pandemic is behind us. What crockery!

I had no problem working long hours and days during crunch time. But my mistake was two-fold:

1. I did not make recurring and ongoing overtime visible to my supervisor, and so they were not aware that there was a problem: that I was working at an unsustainable pace through sheer hours worked.
2. I waited too long after working long hours to “recuperate” and make my private timecard balance out.

Here’s the Key. Nobody remembers what you did for them six months after the fact. By that time, they’ve forgotten all those long hours and sacrificed weekends, and the hard grind. By that time, all other people care about is how you can help them solve their current problems. This path is an endless grind that led to burnout.

I do not see this as anything malicious by my supervisor at the time. It’s human nature, and we’re all susceptible to this mindset.

Rarely do others care or watch out for your own well-being. YOU are the one that must establish and protect your own boundaries.

Lessons Learned to Apply:

Learn from my mistakes, wherever you are on your career path.

1. Track work time. Tven if you are a salaried exempt employee. This tracking is for you and your own peace of mind. When talking to your supervisor, use this data to make rational feedback. Make sure you and your supervisor are on the same page about what you’re working on and how much time you are spending on that work. Your supervisor is not allowed to ask you for access to your personal timecard. If they were to request that, in the United States that could disqualify you from exempt status. Your employer doesn’t want that! They might have to treat you as an hourly employee and pay for all that overtime you’ve been giving away for free!
2. Manage Workload. There are certainly periods of time where crunch is required. A bit project that needs a few weekend days to get it over the finish line. That’s okay, but make sure you manage your workload over time. If you see that you’re consistently spending > 40 hours a week, it’s time to talk to your supervisor about what will drop off your plate to get you back to a sustainable work rate.
3. Don’t Wait to Take Comp Time. The biggest mistake I made was working long and hard extra hours for several months. This is too long a stretch of time. Six months later when I would try to pull back on hours to compensate, this would make office politics optics look bad because I would be out of office for weeks at a time, or perceived as a poor-performing because of my slower response times and unwillingness to continue saying “yes” to new requests on my time off.