You'll Have Better Relationships at Work and at Home

By Minda Zetlin | Posted 6/15/23

When I wrote that my husband had asked me to make a little time every day to talk to him, a writer acquaintance of mine posted my column to social media and commented that she was shocked at the idea that I didn't have time to talk to my own spouse.

In fairness to me, he may have been exaggerating just a teeny bit. But you don't need to get to that point to know that being overworked and exhausted, especially if it goes on for a long time, is bad news for your relationships with your family members and friends, not to mention for your social life.

In 2009, a former palliative caregiver named Bronnie Ware published a blog post that's been read more than 8 million times, titled "Regrets of the Dying." She'd gotten in the habit of asking her patients if there were any things they wished they'd done differently. Nearly every male patient expressed a wish that he hadn't worked so hard, she wrote, and another frequent regret was that patients had failed to keep in touch with their friends over the years. So those of us who work long hours (including me) are officially on notice that we may someday come to regret not having prioritized relationships over work.

It may be less obvious to you that working long hours and overloading yourself is also bad for your relationships with your colleagues, your boss, and anyone who reports to you. Why? For one thing, an exhausted and overworked person is usually a grumpy one. You can try your hardest to be the nicest version of yourself, but if you're overtired, you're probably miserable, and if you're feeling miserable, you're probably making the people who interact with you unhappy. Moods, particularly bad ones, tend to be highly contagious.

There's an even bigger problem, though — overwork doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you work all weekend to meet an unreasonable deadline, you're setting the expectation that it's fine to give you more deadlines like it — that you'll willingly sacrifice the time you're supposed to have for rest, relaxation, socializing, and spending time with your family whenever your employer or customer wants you to.

You may think you're being a valuable employee, but in fact, the opposite is true because, as we've seen, working too many hours means depriving your customer or employer of your best work, your creativity, and the kinds of insights only a rested brain can produce. Worse, you're putting your coworkers in the unpleasant position of having to match your impossible work hours or risk looking like slackers by comparison. And if you have people reporting to you, overworking yourself may lead them to think you expect them to overwork themselves too.

I realize that in almost every job there are all-hands-on-deck moments, such as preparing for a big presentation or filling an unusual order, dealing with an unexpected crisis or a seasonal spike in demand, such as at holiday time. But in too many workplaces, these moments when you have to give your absolute all seem to arrive every month or even every week instead of once in a great while. Where is the dividing line between the reasonable expectation that people put in extra effort at a special crunch time and the unreasonable view that crunch time is a frequent or even ongoing state? I don't know. But I do know that an awful lot of employers are on the wrong side of it.

Career Self-Care

Minda Zetlin is the author of Career Self-Care: Simple Ways to Increase Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work. …