Surviving in the jungle of work can be a daunting task. With everyone putting in more and more hours all the time, feeling like you have to rack up 90 hours a week can seem natural. But how many people out there practice voluntary overtime with no compensation?

A number of new entrants (we’re looking at you, grads) can feel like the only way to get noticed is to out-work their colleagues and accept no extra money to top it off.

As this author puts it, when he was doing this very same thing, he and his co-workers just wanted to stand out. But is voluntary overtime, day in and day out, the right way to go about doing it? Jay Morrissey says No. He witnessed people staying in the office until 7 or 8PM, trying to make themselves look better for the senior managers heading home. But it took one instance of expectations to put this practice into perspective.

His friend was a good worker, putting in an extra 3 hours every day at the office for months — unpaid. But one day his daughter was about to have a party, so he packed up to leave around 6PM. When a boss walked by, he shot him a nasty look of disapproval saying: “We all have somewhere else we’d like to be. But if you need to go, go.”

The problem, as Jay asserts, was with expectations. His boss had expected him to put in extra, unpaid hours every day. So when he tried to take off at a normal hour, it seems out of the ordinary. Appearances are everything, after all.

Is unpaid, voluntary overtime necessary to succeed? Maybe in some cases like law firms. Those kind of hourly professions count when billing is at stake. But not all jobs require overtime, because the next day will bring work back to your desk anyway! Of course, you could always start a business to become your own boss if the clock-punching thing starts to wear down.

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